Critical Context

What, where, when, how, and why did eighteenth-century readers read? In recent years, the desire to reconstruct reading experiences of the past – an objective which James Raven calls ‘the most significant and challenging dimension of the history of books’ – has generated numerous methodological approaches across the field of eighteenth-century studies. Some scholars suggest that reading practices can be understood with reference to the ‘manners of reading’ outlined within instructional literature.Footnote ² Others interrogate material traces of reader interaction with extant textual artefacts to offer clues as to how they were used.Footnote ³ Most agree that accounts of individuals’ private reading practices gleaned from diaries, letters, and other manuscript sources remain crucial.Footnote ⁴ Some collaborative digital projects harness the capabilities of crowdsourcing, web-crawling or text-mining to code, model, and analyse such accounts in new ways,Footnote ⁵ while others draw on the archives of eighteenth-century libraries or booksellers to develop data-driven visualisations of local, regional, and national reading habits.Footnote ⁶

The ‘transformative capacity’ of reading is notoriously difficult to gauge.Footnote ⁷ For the most part, scholars still endeavour to do so by examining ‘private and critical’ contemporary reader responses drawn from letters and diaries.Footnote ⁸ Such an approach, however, raises questions around not only representativeness but also reliability. As Katie Halsey notes, life writing is an opaque, slippery, and complex genre.Footnote ⁹ When self-reporting ways in which a text has transformed them or others, writers may pursue multiple agendas – flattery, spite, or self-promotion, for example – which compromise the reliability of their accounts. As I show in the coming pages, a young man attempting to promote his own intellectual gifts may well declare that he is ‘not in general fond of Novels’, but other sources – especially the poetry he composed – may tell a different story.

One way to circumvent the problem of opaque or misleading reader testimony is to combine several disciplinary methodologies and use them to hold one another to account: an approach I term ‘3D reading’. This Element attempts to model such a process. I argue that by constructing a rich multidimensional case study of one unusual reader’s relationship with one extraordinary text, we can gain an enhanced sense of the forms which readerly transformation may have taken. Deidre Shauna Lynch has recently shown how, during this period, ‘literary reading became subject to new expectations of affective obligation and dilemmas of affective entanglement’.Footnote ¹⁰ This Element follows Lynch and others in centring the affective dimensions of eighteenth-century reading experiences, but dives deeper into one case study than traditional forms of academic publication will generally permit. The space allowed by the unique form of the Element (or ‘minigraph’) allows me to tell my story from a number of archival and theoretical angles.

My reader of choice is the young man who would later in life be known as the Rev. Charles Burney D.D.: schoolmaster, author, critic, clergyman, bibliomaniac, and notorious thief. Throughout his sixty years, Charles Burney demonstrated an intense acquisitive relationship with material texts, both elite and ephemeral, in manuscript and in print. More accurately termed logomania than bibliomania since it was not restricted to codices, his condition found one expression in the best-known event of Charles’s life: his teenage expulsion from the University of Cambridge in 1778 for stealing ninety-two rare books from the University Library, after which he was exiled to King’s College Aberdeen to finish his studies and live down his disgrace. The second achievement for which he is commonly known is the vast personal library purchased after his death in 1817 for the British Museum, part of which, as Gale Cengage’s Burney Collection of Newspapers, now underpins an enormous amount of scholarly research into the history, literature, and culture of early modern Britain and America.

Despite his intriguing profile and important legacy, Charles Burney has largely been neglected by book historians and literary scholars alike. The only notable exceptions are two biographical articles by Ralph Walker written half a century ago, and multiple brief references scattered throughout biographies and collected correspondence of other, more famous, members of the Burney family.Footnote ¹¹ In the last few years, however, Charles has begun to attract attention in his own right as a figure with much to contribute to various fields. In particular, his habits as a reader and collector have begun to receive sharp sideways glances, with Katie Lanning describing him as a ‘compelling figure to study in terms of popular culture theory’Footnote ¹² and Gillian Russell proposing that his ‘combin[ation of] the identities of book lover and ephemerile’ does not easily fit within the categories conventionally used to understand Romantic bibliomania.Footnote ¹³ An account of Charles’s unusual relationship with Evelina, which I have been gradually uncovering for the last ten years, offers a timely opportunity to bring his practices as a reader and bibliophile to the forefront of literary-historical scholarship in the long eighteenth century.

The text that enables me to do so is the debut novel of Charles’s elder sister, Frances Burney. Evelina is a polyphonic epistolary fiction which combines elements of the sentimental romance, the comic picaresque, and the novel of manners. The plot follows a naïve young girl’s quest to establish her rightful parentage while navigating the pitfalls of fashionable London life. Frequently hailed as one of the most innovative and influential fictions of the long eighteenth century, it has in recent decades become a staple of university syllabi, popular with students as well as researchers. However, recent studies have mainly focused on the novel’s gender politics, authorial persona, and paratexts,Footnote ¹⁴ and its reception among contemporary readers has not been sufficiently interrogated. Scholars often characterise Evelina’s reception as a chorus of universal acclaim, either drawing unquestioningly on Burney’s own life writingFootnote ¹⁵ or repeating certain well-known compliments from other literary figures which are used as evidence of unqualified admiration.Footnote ¹⁶ Other records of reader response, which have potential to complicate and enrich this picture, remain largely unplumbed.

This Element aims to nuance our understanding of Evelina’s reception by describing Charles Burney’s relationship to Frances’s novel during the three years he spent in North East Scotland and positioning it within a broader range of reader responses within his Scottish circles and beyond. Charles’s numerous manuscript letters and poems from this period provide my starting point, since they provide an unusually full account of his treatment of Evelina, both in the extract already quoted and elsewhere. I also draw on the sonnet he ‘prefixed’ to his sister’s novel, which survives in two different versions, and on his other poems composed during this time. Furthermore, internal evidence from a 1779 third edition of Evelina held in the University of Aberdeen’s Special Collections – which I argue is actually one of the sets circulated by Charles – demonstrates how his tactile approach to the text fostered sociable relationships across genteel Scottish society. Finally, a unique copy of Conditions attached to the Catalogue of an Aberdeen circulating library provides vital information within which to contextualise Charles’s treatment of the set, while illustrative prints and frontispieces depicting a popular scene in Evelina offer a sense of the context within which he identified with the character of Mr Macartney.

The singular value of Charles Burney’s testimony is that, across all these sources, he stands in several distinct yet fluid relations to Evelina: prefixer, reader, and loaner. By synthesising such roles, we can mutually improve our understanding of Charles Burney’s reader profile, of Frances Burney’s authorial reception, and of the complexity of reading practices in late eighteenth-century Britain. The case of Evelina in Aberdeen helps us to rethink how books might be used as objects of circulation, inscription, and exchange; how they might disseminate knowledge and pleasure, generate affective attachment, and foster social networks. In offering these insights, this Element connects the fields of literary studies, biography, bibliography, and the history of the book.

Structure of the Element

This Element consists of five sections and an Afterword. Section 1 provides information about Charles’s early life, which helps the reader to understand the nuances of his usage of Evelina. Drawing on his unpublished manuscript letters and poems, I highlight his interest in theatrical culture and the tension between his scholarly and creative ambitions. I also examine his adolescent relationship with Frances, emphasising an embryonic literary rivalry, which I locate within the well-documented desire among Burney siblings to please the family patriarch, Dr Charles Burney (1726–1814). Following his arrival in Aberdeen, I sketch the contours of Charles’s social circles and activities over the three years he spent in Scotland. I draw particular attention to Charles’s self-presentation as a young man of letters and his attempts to position himself as a suppliant for patronage, to women as well as men. Particularly important is his habit of circulating his own original manuscript poetry alongside (or within) printed texts selected to bear witness to his literary taste.

Section 2 reconstructs Charles’s documented encounters with his sister’s novel between 1777 and 1781. Noting his crucial role in helping Frances to preserve her anonymity with Lowndes in 1777, I build up a picture of his interactions with three separate sets of the published novel, which I call the Shinfield Evelina, the Aberdeen Evelina, and the Banff Evelina. Charles’s engagement with the text is marked by three key features. First, he is an energetic participant in prescribed and informal loan economies. He draws on both the resources of local circulating libraries and personal favours to obtain sets of Evelina, before sub-lending them to other parties. Second, he displays an interactive style of engagement with the text in ‘prefixing’ a poem of his own composition and using marginalia to reference personal jokes. Finally, he shows a tendency to inhabit, perform, and project characters from the diegesis created by Frances, and to encourage similar responses in fellow readers.

Section 3 analyses the sonnet addressed to ‘the Female Reader’, which Charles reports ‘prefix[ing]’ to the Aberdeen Evelina. I evaluate Charles’s sonnet as verse inscription, showing that it establishes a set of belletristic parameters within which ‘the female reader’ might respond to the novel and promotes the poet’s own literary gifts alongside the novelist’s.Footnote ²¹ I then consider it as a prefatory piece of paratext, which enables Charles to join his sister (the author) and his father (the dedicatee of the prefatory Ode) on the page.Footnote ²² This section, then, adds a further characteristic to Charles’s reader profile: the tendency to superimpose his desired identity as belletrist over Frances’s own as novelist.

Section 4 argues that Charles identified strongly with the character of the poor Scottish poet Mr Macartney, and that he ‘performed’ Macartney through his poetic and sociable practice. Here, I read Charles’s manuscript poetry alongside the verses attributed to Macartney within Evelina. Charles’s ‘Verse Letter to FJHW’, composed as he read Evelina for the first time, replicates the core tropes of Macartney’s ‘unfinished verses, beginning ‘O LIFE!’. Similarly, his odes to Nancy Gordon, Rachel Willox, and Jessy Willox, composed just as he was lending Evelina to these young women, bear marked similarities to Macartney’s verses dropped in the pump room. Charles’s correspondence suggests that he positioned himself as a gallant suppliant to the Willox sisters just as Macartney does to Evelina, and that he placed his relationship towards them along similar axes of brother/lover. Briefly, I also contextualise Charles’s identified performances by considering other contemporary reader responses to Frances Burney’s fiction from readers, including Queen Charlotte (1744–1818), Hannah More (1745–1833), Maria Edgeworth (1768–1849), and Jane Austen (1775–1817). Across this set of responses, I highlight consistent anxiety about the prospect of young female readers taking Frances Burney’s characters as models and developing unrealistic aspirations or undesirable behaviours as a result. Ironically, Charles’s identified performance of Macartney suggests that young men might have been more vulnerable to such a danger.

In the final section, Section 5, I consider Charles as a precarious agent within a loan economy centred around mass-produced print texts. I first examine him as a borrower, comparing his documented uses of the book to the prescriptive ‘Conditions’ of the library which may have lent it to him. I argue that the scale of Charles’s subletting practice should provoke us to reconsider how one loan may have spawned many readers, with significant implications for the scale of readership during this period and the impact of libraries on the reading nation.Footnote ²³ Moreover, I compare his tactile engagement with the Aberdeen and Banff Evelinas to his mutilation of the stolen Cambridge books a few years earlier, asking what such acts of defacement might suggest about how different libraries exerted various forms of proprietorship over their holdings.Footnote ²⁴ I then consider him as a lender of the text, who uses it to solicit patronage and express amatory aspiration. In a case study tracking the affective character of Charles’s sub-loans to the sisters Rachel and Jessy Willox, I evaluate his attempt to create a reading community in which demonstrations of his literary prowess alongside his sister’s would be repaid by amatory and material advantage. More broadly, I suggest that, within scholarship around gift exchange, material culture, and the history of emotions, the loan as concept and practice deserves greater attention. In Charles Burney’s cycle of lending and reclaiming his sister’s novel, one can access a sense of his insecurity in sociable, literary, and economic spheres, and see how he attempted to exploit opportunities offered by print and manuscript cultures to bolster his own footing.Footnote ²⁵

The Afterword synthesises my findings, concludes the narrative of Charles’s time in Scotland, and provides a brief overview of the rest of his life. I highlight his ambivalent role in his famous sister’s literary career; he promoted and embellished her fictional and dramatic productions to the extent that, from the 1790s, she consistently referred to him as ‘her dear Agent’.Footnote ²⁶ I draw attention to the many surviving sources which might shed light on his life and works, including his approximately 2,500 unpublished letters and poems, and his vast collections in the British Library. I frame him as a fascinating figure for whom textuality and sociability were paradigmatically linked, whose singular ‘Mad Rage for Possessing a Library’ (as Frances termed it) has the potential to help us rewrite the history of Romantic bibliomania.Footnote ²⁷ Finally, I reflect on the methodologies used to piece together the story of Evelina in Scotland, highlighting the thriving interdisciplinary field of Burney Studies as a site where such methodologies can work together to great effect.

1.1 Charterhouse

Charles entered Charterhouse School on 15 February 1768 at the age of ten and departed on 10 April 1777 aged nineteen.Footnote ³⁶ He boarded during term time but returned home to London during the holidays. In September 1768, Frances notes in her journal, ‘My sweet [baby] Charles is come home – he is well, hearty, & full of spirits, mirth & good-humour. My Aunt Nanny who went lately to see him at the Charter House, was assured there that he was the sweetest temper’d Boy in the school.’Footnote ³⁷

It is around this time that Charles’s own archive begins. A handful of letters and poems survive from his time at Charterhouse – mostly addressed to Frances, to whom he was apparently close. Some of these describe Charles’s studies and academic progress, foreshadowing the scholarly application that would eventually make him one of the leading classicists of the early Romantic period. Aged eleven, he informs Frances that ‘all our Form are fagging at turner very hard’.Footnote ³⁸Aged twelve, he copies out a Greek alphabet for her – ‘I am sure you will be Charmed with it … there is a great number of odd letter’s but you are so well aquainted with the Language that I need not tell you that’ [sic] – and spells her name in Greek characters, apologising for the lack of a letter corresponding to ‘F’.Footnote ³⁹ But elsewhere he hints that such application might not come entirely naturally. He does ‘fag hard in search of further knowledge’ but there is a good reason for such diligent application: ‘Berdmore is really very strict, / And will sharp punishment inflict, / Of idleness – & therefore I / Wholly to Greek my mind apply.’Footnote ⁴⁰

In fact, the teenage Charles evidently had a range of interests, the most apparent of which is his poetic inclination. He often composes light verse to entertain – or tease – friends and family. In a poem dated 3 May 1774, Frances is accused of ‘flirting about town’, while a braggart school friend is advised:

Frances Burney could evidently give as good as she got, since one of Charles’s letters indicates that his nose had recently been a subject of ribaldry: ‘Indeed Madam I don’t like your severe Sarcasm upon my Poor Nose [… which] to be sure has little of the Redish Cast.’Footnote ⁴² Despite such badinage, he clearly missed his family immensely when at school. He eagerly enquires after various members, declares that he ‘long[s] to … come home’, and on one occasion remarks plaintively, ‘I thought you had almost forgot Carlo Dolci.’Footnote ⁴³ When he did return for the holidays he deployed his poetic knack for the amusement of his siblings, as in an ‘Occasional Prologue’ to Goldsmith’s The Good Natur’d Man, intended to be delivered following a domestic performance by the Burney children.Footnote ⁴⁴ His passion for theatre is evident in several of these items – for example, a long verse-letter in which he enviously imagines Frances visiting theatres and concerts in London and enjoying performances by Garrick and Jane Barsanti.Footnote ⁴⁵

1.2 Cambridge

Charles departed Charterhouse on 10 April 1777, bound for Caius College at the University of Cambridge.Footnote ⁴⁶ He had been studying there for only a few months when his theft was discovered in late October, and he was promptly expelled.Footnote ⁴⁷ The principal contemporary account of the crime, written by the antiquary William Cole, describes Charles as a ‘very studious & industrious’ student. ‘Insomuch, that he was admitted into the Public [University] Library, tho’ an Undergraduate’ and ‘regularly came every Day & stayed till the Doors were closed’. A certain ‘Marshall the Schole Keeper’ began to observe that ‘a great Number [of books] had been taken away, chiefly classical Books of Elzevir Editions’.

Dr Burney did indeed ‘sensibly feel the Stroke’. As Walker notes, he was incensed at his son’s crime and considered disowning him. For the present, there was no possibility of Charles returning to the family home. He was sent to the village of Shinfield in Berkshire, where he would remain until gossip died down and a decision could be made about his future.

1.3 Shinfield

Although Charles lived in Shinfield for almost a year, Walker provides little information about his life there, blaming the paltry archive. He remarks only that Charles ‘felt decidedly superior to the rustic circle in which he found himself’, citing his poetical satire on ‘such features of Shinfield life as the preaching of the little Welsh curate, the jangling of the Church bell, and the inharmonious singing of the village choir’.Footnote ⁴⁹ This summary does not do full justice to Charles’s carefully curated archive of verse dating from 1778. Numerous affectionate poems dedicated to members of Shinfield society survive, which cumulatively show him flexing his sociable and literary muscles during this period, using verse to cement and commemorate key relationships.Footnote ⁵⁰

This verse also provides valuable biographical information. For example, it has long been a mystery to Burney scholars why Shinfield was chosen as the place for Charles’s exile, or who cared for him while he lived there.Footnote ⁵¹ The poetry suggests a probable answer. Upon his departure from Shinfield in 1778, Charles writes parting verses for four members of the Francis family: ‘Mr Francis’, ‘Master William Francis’, ‘Miss Polly Francis’, and ‘Master James Francis’.Footnote ⁵² It seems that the Master of Shinfield School around 1780 was one William Francis, a mathematician who appears as a correspondent in the pages of several literary and scientific periodicals.Footnote ⁵³ The Pedigree Register confirms his occupation and location in 1778, and the name of his eldest son.Footnote ⁵⁴ Given Francis’s pedagogical qualifications, Charles’s familiar relationship with his children, and a reference to Mrs Francis in one of his letters (see Section 2), I think it probable that following his Cambridge disgrace Charles was entrusted to the care of the Francis family.Footnote ⁵⁵ In any event, by the time he left Shinfield, he was reminiscing over happy days spent there swimming in the river and playing card games, sentimentally characterising the village as the home of ‘peace’, ‘endless loves’, and ‘social mirth’.Footnote ⁵⁶

During the Shinfield period, Charles’s poems and letters also record intensive engagement with news and periodical print culture, both local and metropolitan. Possibly imitating or encouraged by William Francis, he pens poetic answers to enigmas in the Gentleman’s Diary and Ladies’ Diary.Footnote ⁵⁷ He participates in a topical debate raging within the pages of the Reading Mercury (to which Francis also contributed poetry), versifying in defence of a surgeon called Cundall who promoted the controversial practice of inoculation.Footnote ⁵⁸ He also composes verses on recent London scandals, indicating that he had access to such gossip either via correspondence or the newspapers.Footnote ⁵⁹ Some of these poems, like those written at Charterhouse, are doggerel or light verse clearly designed to amuse. But Charles also begins to attempt, during the year 1779, a neoclassical poetic diction. His poetry starts to address topics such as friendship, virtue, and the callousness of fate, using a register characterised by archaism, epithet, abstraction, and periphrasis. These shifts in form and tone may demonstrate the growing influence of Charles’s classical knowledge on his poetic development, or a more serious outlook on life following the consequences of his theft. In Section 4, I argue that they are also influenced by the signature style(s) of Frances Burney’s poet Macartney in Evelina.

During the Shinfield period, Frances Burney is Charles’s only known correspondent. In a journal entry for 30 March 1778, she remarks, ‘I have just received a Letter from poor Charles, in which he informs me that he has subscribed to a Circulating Library at Reading – & then he adds, “I am to have Evelina to Day; the man told me that it was spoken very highly of.”’Footnote ⁶⁰ Unfortunately, none of Frances’s own correspondence to Charles from the period survives. However, two fragmentary letters from him to her, of which Walker was apparently unaware, do.Footnote ⁶¹ Although undated, they must have been written after Frances’s mention of the Reading circulating library at the end of March 1778, but before Charles left Shinfield in October. These two fragments are notable first because they contain Charles’s first recorded response to Evelina (see Section 2), and second because one of them suggests that during his time in Shinfield Charles was helping Frances to improve her Latin. He corrects her translation of a passage of Seneca, which she had apparently sent him in a previous letter.Footnote ⁶² It is tempting to read this letter, alongside Charles’s 1769 reference to Frances’s interest in Greek, as two points in a long-standing adolescent exchange about classical languages and literatures.

The implications of this possibility are twofold. The first concerns Frances Burney’s access to stereotypically masculine forms of knowledge. It is well-known that she briefly studied Latin in her late twenties – an accomplishment often deemed risky for a woman, since it might indicate a desire to transgress gendered spheres of learning and aspire to ‘bluestocking’ fame. However, this has usually been presented as an honour thrust upon her by Dr Johnson, which was only pursued for a short period before her father persuaded her to return to more traditionally feminine literary activities. Burney herself has been understood – based on her own letters to her sister Susan – as a reluctant scholar who feared the implications of being known to study the classics and lamented ‘devot[ing] so much Time to acquire something I shall always dread to have known’.Footnote ⁶³ But these previously unremarked letters between Charles and Frances suggest that she was willingly studying Latin a full year before Johnson offered to teach her, indicating that she was more eager than she would admit to acquire classical learning. The second implication concerns the routes by which Frances Burney accessed specialist knowledge and intellectual fulfilment during the early years of her literary career. The Streatham environment dominated by Johnson is often pinpointed as crucial in this respect. But it may be that in focusing so heavily on his influence, and that of Hester Thrale, we have neglected to see what was available to Frances within her family unit. Despite his disgrace and exile, her ‘sweet [baby] Charles’ – who of course had benefited from the first-class education she could never have had – was supporting her intellectual development just as actively as, and long before, Johnson.

However, it is important not to overstate Charles’s generosity in assuming a pedagogical relationship towards his celebrated sister, since it probably conveyed a form of gratification that was far from selfless. In the 1778 letter discussing Evelina and Seneca, it is striking how little space Charles devotes to celebrating Frances’s recent literary achievement (two lines) in comparison to correcting her faulty Latin (more than forty). In doing so, his tone is in places rather patronising, offering backhanded compliments such as ‘your emendations in general please me’ and scolding her for contracting verbs: ‘It cannot be confin’d: for fin does not spell fine – & so in the other Verbs of this sort.’ Overall, the tone and content of the letter subordinates Frances’s creative achievement to Charles’s own critical expertise. This was not the last time he would attempt to assert himself in such a manner.

By autumn of 1778, the next step in Charles’s career was determined: Dr Burney and his friends decided that the black sheep of the family should finish his education at King’s College, Aberdeen.Footnote ⁶⁴ ‘Let me shake off the rustic’, Charles declares in his final Shinfield poem, ‘& once more / The gayer joys of College life explore’.Footnote ⁶⁵ He made the long journey northward between October and the end of that year, and was settled in Aberdeen by the beginning of 1779.Footnote ⁶⁶

1.4 Aberdeen and Banff

Charles’s archive contains no material describing the journey from Shinfield to Aberdeen. Neither does it address his arrival in the city or his living quarters. However, plenty of information exists in the published memoirs of two of his contemporaries: the playwright George Colman (1762–1836), who attended King’s College between 1781 and 1783, and the abolitionist James Stephen (1758–1832), who attended Marischal College between 1775 and 1778.Footnote ⁶⁷ Both, like Charles, had previously been Londoners, and they offer scathing accounts of their new home: a town resembling ‘a long dreary village’ which was ‘very unsightly and mean to an eye accustomed to London’.Footnote ⁶⁸ Colman, who lived in the same building as Burney, is contemptuous about his ‘small sitting-room’ and second-hand furniture, but mollified by the fact that at least his quarters are the envy of his Scottish peers at King’s, ‘young barbarians, migrating from their mountains, to be half-civilised’.Footnote ⁶⁹ He is also dismissive of the College’s attempt to impose academic rigour, noting that during the short five-month term there was ‘no discipline at all’. Although he did not apparently dislike his tutors, he makes it clear that they did not exercise any authority over the students,Footnote ⁷⁰ and recalls learning by solitary study, borrowing books from the college library and poring over them in his rooms. He reports hearing from mutual friends that Charles Burney, during his time at King’s, had done likewise, shut away in his chambers ‘unaided by Scottish professors [and] secluding himself like a hermit’.Footnote ⁷¹

However, as Colman’s editor Richard Brinsley Peake notes, this characterisation of Charles as a studious ‘hermit’ should be taken with a pinch of salt.Footnote ⁷² In fact, if we turn to his extant letters and verses, which recommence from February 1779, it is clear that he enjoyed a lively social life in Aberdeen. Though he writes to Frances, in a vein of snobbery similar to Colman’s, that ‘in aspect, appearance, & dress, [his fellow students] look marvelously like plough boys’ [sic], he takes care to note ‘a few exceptions’ where ‘a natural good breeding, acquired by narrow observation, guided by a solid understanding, has been able to shake off highland rust’.Footnote ⁷³ As I show in Figure 1, such Aberdeen friends as James Gray (1761–94), Robert Burnside (1759–1826), Abercrombie Gordon (1758–1821), and Gilbert Gerard (1760–1815) provide some of the most extensive, vivid, and informative letters in Charles’s Scottish archive.Footnote ⁷⁴

Figure 1

Visualisation of Charles Burney’s correspondence network from January 1779 to August 1781.

Designed by Sophie Coulombeau and Rich Hardiman.

Recalling Colman’s observation that King’s tutors did not stand on ceremony with their students, it seems that Charles was also friendly with his tutors: James Dunbar (1742–98, Professor of Moral Philosophy), Thomas Gordon (1714–97, Professor of Philosophy), and Alexander Gerard (1728–95, Professor of Divinity). In summary, Charles was taking his place in a small community, where academic, social, and domestic spheres frequently overlapped. Charles befriended the sons of his tutors and flirted with their daughters. He was invited to their town houses during the term and stayed at their estates during the vacation. Through them he also met other members of Aberdeen gentry such as the Burnet and Willox families.

Rachel and Jessy Willox, whom I address in Section 5, merit a special mention. As well as in Charles’s own letters and poetry, we can find biographical information about them in the family memoir of the Dingwall Fordyce family (into which Rachel eventually married) and James Stephen’s Memoirs.Footnote ⁷⁵ Stephen, who knew the sisters personally, describes the Miss Willoxes as ‘the most celebrated beauties of the place … in whose education [their father, the Baillie of Aberdeen George Willox] had spared no cost, so that they were as much distinguished by their accomplishments as by their beauty’. He also notes their mother’s eagerness to ‘assist them in finding advantageous settlements in marriage … Every young man of fortune or good expectations in life found easy access to them under the parental roof’. Stephen characterises Rachel as ‘the finest and most graceful figure I ever saw’, with ‘the best complexion’, ‘a profusion of flaxen hair’, ‘large blue eyes [with] great expression and power’, and features expressing ‘dignity’. He describes Jessy as ‘also very handsome… [some] thought her more so than her Sister, tho’ much inferior to her in understanding’.Footnote ⁷⁶ Stephen’s descriptions accord closely with Charles’s own account of the sisters, which we find in a letter to Frances, highlighting the ‘agreeable … liveliness’ of ‘the lovely’ Jessy’s temper, while praising the ‘milder graces’ and ‘conscious dignity’ of Rachel’s. Interestingly, he uses Samuel Richardson’s novel Sir Charles Grandison (1754) to gloss them further: ‘Jessy is a Charlotte G, and Rachel, what Lady L, might have been before marriage – You remember Sir Cha. Grandison. Love would be the food of Rachel’s life, & the seasoning of Jessy’s!’Footnote ⁷⁷ Charlotte Grandison, of course, is presented in Richardson’s novel as ‘frank, easy and good-humoured’ with ‘a vein of raillery, that were she not polite, would give one too much apprehension for one’s ease’, whereas Lady L has ‘true female softness and delicacy’, with ‘so much sweetness and complacency, that you are not so much afraid of her as you are of her sister’.Footnote ⁷⁸

Throughout the early spring of 1779, Charles doles out his poetic compliments equally to several young ladies, but by May he had clearly become infatuated with ‘my adorable Jessy’. In the letter to Frances containing his account of Evelina’s reception, he praises Jessy’s ‘liveliness, sweetness & goodness’, making much of his ‘affection’ for her even though he considered his ‘unsettled state’ a prohibition to ‘speaking out’.Footnote ⁷⁹ He also writes a poem praising her ‘beauties’ and swearing that time will only ‘improve’ his passion.Footnote ⁸⁰ It is not clear whether his affection was returned. During 1779, his friends seem to have considered him ‘a settled man’, but he also laments Jessy’s occasional ‘coldness’ and expresses anxiety that she does not ‘burn with the same flame’ as he does.Footnote ⁸¹ Charles was also clearly friendly with Rachel, since he writes her a long poem to celebrate her ‘recovery from a dangerous illness’, and four of his poems address the two young women collectively. His intense interest in the sisters is evident until the late summer of 1780, when Jessy abruptly (and, for Charles, unexpectedly) married another suitor.Footnote ⁸²

Charles was not in Aberdeen when Jessy’s engagement took place, because – like many of his peers – he spent his long vacations travelling the north-east of Scotland. The trip he took in the summer of 1780 – upon which he took a set of Evelina with him – is particularly well-evidenced, since he kept a detailed travel journal, intended for his sisters.Footnote ⁸³ He spent significant time in Banffshire, for part of which he was the guest of James Duff, 2nd Earl of Fife (1729–1809), and became acquainted with Fife’s factor William Rose (1740–1807), Rose’s wife Mary (1757–1838), and the Banff minister Charles Cordiner (1746–94). As mentioned in Section 3, he developed a passionate crush on Mary Rose and left Evelina in her custody when he returned from Banff to Aberdeen in the autumn of 1780.

During Charles’s final year of study, his archive becomes sparser. A rare letter remarks, ‘the College is very full this year but it might as well be empty for me – as there is not one whom I ever speak to, or see in my rooms’. However, he was not bereft of entertainment: ‘the Players are in town’ and ‘I go every night; except when I am otherwise particularly engaged’.Footnote ⁸⁴ It is likely – though Charles does not mention it – that he was gambling heavily during this time, given the parlous state of his finances which emerged later in the year. His impending graduation, and the question mark remaining over his future, seem to have been weighing on his mind, since he asks several friends whether they can help him obtain a curacy, without any success.Footnote ⁸⁵

Between September 1780 and January 1781, Charles became acquainted with James Ogilvy, Earl of Seafield and Findlater (1750–1811), an important figure in queer history. Though married, Findlater was well known to prefer men to women; he lived the last two decades of his life, and eventually shared a grave, with his partner Johann Fischer.Footnote ⁸⁶ The nature of the relationship between Findlater and Charles during the early 1780s is unclear, but surviving correspondence between them suggests a certain intimacy. In January 1781, in a letter which he warns Charles is ‘not meant for publication’, Findlater praises Charles’s ‘Attractions’ and describes the ‘Friendship’ between them as ‘founded by Reason & … fostered by Passion … When will you leave your Doctors & Diplomas to come to me?’ He also jokes about his wife’s dislike of Charles: she ‘hates whoever I am attached to, with a Uniformity that does Honour to her Perseverance, if not her Heart’.Footnote ⁸⁷ The correspondence indicates that Findlater offered Charles significant financial support during his final months in Aberdeen. In April 1781, he agrees to send Charles thirty guineas, which he hopes will ‘be sufficient for the Expense of the Menus Plaisirs of last Winter’.Footnote ⁸⁸

Findlater also seems to have offered to take Charles on an imminent trip to London, and en route to introduce him to the Archbishop of York with a view to easing his path to ordination. Charles apparently reported this prospect to his father with some excitement, but Dr Burney’s response sounds a note of caution and suggests that he was pretty alert to the nature of Findlater’s attachment to his son:

In the end, the trip never took place since Findlater withdrew his offer, citing his wife’s objections to Charles as a travelling companion.Footnote ⁹⁰ In April, the Findlaters set out for York and London, while Charles graduated in Aberdeen.Footnote ⁹¹

Immediately after graduation, Charles was supposed to return to his family, but instead he lingered in Scotland for almost three months. In letters to his sisters written over the early summer, he declares that he cannot tear himself away from a new love interest called Jane Abernethie, a cousin of Lord Fife’s: ‘The Abernethie has so engrossed my affections, of late, that I lived, breathed, saw, heard, for her alone.’Footnote ⁹² This rather abrupt attachment is not evidenced by any amatory poetry like that produced for Jessy Willox or Mary Rose. Neither does Jane Abernethie appear to have been keen on Charles, since, by his own admission, she had forbidden him from writing to her. Nonetheless, when the Abernethie family moved from Aberdeen to Banff for the summer, Charles apparently followed them. Betty Rizzo suggests, very credibly, that the attachment was pragmatic rather than heartfelt, and that Charles hoped to persuade the well-born Abernethie to elope with him so he could secure a settlement to pay off his debts.Footnote ⁹³ But such a plan, if it existed, appears to have come to nothing. The object of his intentions eventually took refuge with a remote aunt, and Charles finally began his overdue journey back to London. He arrived at St Martin’s Street in the last week of July 1781. Bizarrely, he had brought with him a dog called Chloe, which he claimed that Jane Abernethie had given him, and which promptly gave birth to puppies.Footnote ⁹⁴

1.5 A Common Theme: Prospects, Poetry, and Patronage

Despite his Cambridge disgrace, and its implication that Charles took a somewhat cavalier approach to the Commandments, Dr Burney had nonetheless afterwards decided that he should complete his expensive education and pursue a career in the Anglican Church. As William Jacob notes, the office of clergyman was one of the three main professions pursued by intellectually gifted young men of the ‘middling sort’: it had a well-established practical framework for career advancement which could, if combined with a talent for generating patronage, take one to significant career heights.Footnote ⁹⁵ Impeccably respectable, and with significant opportunities for academic honours and learned publication, it segued nicely with Dr Burney’s aspirations for his most academically precocious child. Practically speaking, ordination candidates were expected to be fluent in Latin and Greek as well as to have sound theological understanding. Although there is evidence of regional variation, it is safe to say that most were university graduates.Footnote ⁹⁶

The primary purpose of the theology degree Charles was undertaking at Aberdeen was, therefore, to complete the education that had been cut short at Cambridge. The second, but hardly less important, objective was to establish and maintain an excellent character in the eyes of his tutors and other influential people. Dr Burney was explicit on this point when he wrote to his son in February 1781. Charles’s priorities should be to ‘pursue your Studies with diligence’ and to ‘quit the place with credit & propriety’. These two objectives would feed towards the next steps of obtaining a curacy (a training post, also sometimes called a ‘title’), securing strong character references, and preparing for the ‘important business’ of ordination.Footnote ⁹⁷

Charles himself, however, was ambivalent about the path his father had prescribed for him. Correspondence from his friend Robert Burnside, already ordained, indicates that Charles had expressed ‘tremors’ about ordination, occasioning some gentle reproval: “If you remember, I asked you the last time I enjoyed the pleasure of your conversation what was your opinion concerning … the ends which a man of sense, of honesty, & worth ought to have in view in entering upon the ministerial function, &c. You replied you had not thought about these matters. Excuse me, if I think that the present time seems to me to be a very proper one for you to investigate these points”.Footnote ⁹⁸ Percival Stockdale, also ordained, writes a little more stiffly: ‘I hope you will now employ yourself strenuously on this study, and look on your Profession as the noblest of all human professions, not-withstanding the superficial Ridicule; XXX ^and the despicable contempt of your most despicable contemporaries.’Footnote ⁹⁹

With such ambivalence about Charles’s own prospects in mind, I want to consider the relationship between form and purpose in his poetic output during his Scottish years. I noted in my discussion of the Charterhouse and Shinfield poetry that Charles often dedicates his verses to individuals, either to mark a particular occasion or to praise the dedicatee. His Scottish poetry continues this tendency, but combines it with a tendency to lament the poet’s hard lot in life and promote his own literary gifts. His ‘Ode Addressed to Alexander Burnet of Seaton House’, for example, implores the fourth Laird of Kemnay and recently retired diplomat (1735–1802) to ‘extend [his] fond esteem’ to ‘cheer the Bard’, who contemplates an uncertain future. At risk of having his ‘Bark … tost’ by ‘storms’, Charles is positioned as a humble suppliant for Burnet’s favour, with only poetic gifts to offer in return. If they were only equal to the excellence of their subject, he grovels, they might ‘with a fire immortal glow’, and ‘flourish … with deathless garlands drest’. Similarly, in Charles’s fragmentary ode addressed to Fife, he positions himself as the ‘Bard’ and ‘laurel’d Poet’ offering his patron a ‘deathless song’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ His poetic address to James Beattie (1735–1803) unfolds along similar lines, declaring a desire to ‘court thy smile’ by ‘sing[ing Beattie’s] praise’.Footnote ¹⁰¹

The recurrent suppliant poetic positioning suggests that these verses can be read as emphatic, if indistinct, solicitations for patronage. Scholars of eighteenth-century patronage have long recognised the crucial role performed by poetry in soliciting and securing support from patrons. Moreover, in recent decades, they have broadened their understanding of the forms that literary patronage might take beyond the relatively narrow confines of hard cash or lucrative posts.Footnote ¹⁰² A more expansive set of categories – hospitality, material gifts, approbation, endorsements, advice, and introductions (to spaces or individuals) – is now recognised as crucial to the ways in which authors burnished their reputations and built earning power.Footnote ¹⁰³ Charles might have been soliciting any of these forms of patronage when he set out using his poetry to ‘widen the circle of his acquaintance’.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ We have seen one example, in his correspondence with Findlater, of the tangible benefits that he hoped to obtain from friendships with eminent men. Such endeavours stood upon the foundation of flattery and self-promotion evidenced by his verse.

Crucially, however, the dedicatees are oddly placed to help Charles further the aims that Dr Burney had instructed him to pursue. Of the twelve people for whom epistolary poetry survives, five are marriageable young ladies and two are older women (see Figure 1). Of the remaining five, Fife is a politician (who only had Episcopalian livings in his gift, and whom Dr Burney did not consider likely to offer meaningful patronage);Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Alexander Burnet is a former diplomat, James Beattie is a poet and an essayist, and Simon Macdonald is an ensign in the navy.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ The only clergyman to whom Charles dedicates poetry, Percival Stockdale, was notoriously bad at the job, and poorly placed to help Charles develop a career in the Church.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ There is no evidence that Charles dedicated poetry to any of his tutors, or to senior clergy who might be able to help him find a title. The poems are just as poorly targeted in terms of composition as circulation, since they are overwhelmingly occasional, secular, and vernacular. The odd Latin epigraph aside, they make little attempt to showcase Charles’s classical or theological learning.

Charles’s verses dedicated to women require separate consideration, since they reproduce the suppliant positioning of those addressed to Beattie, Fife, and Burnet, but with a gendered twist. He begs the Willox sisters, for example, to treat him as a pet, who might ‘[a]ttend your toilets – set your caps – / Or rest, thrice happy, in your laps. / Make me your monkey, squirrel, cat – Your dog or bird – no matter what; Only your favourite let me be’.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ They also centre the poet’s literary gifts, but with the addition of a striking material dimension. When writing to women, Charles often sends his verses as an accompaniment to a gift – usually a book or poem, though he also occasionally sends edibles – which is referenced in the poem’s title. In the verses, he reflects on the transformative effect that consuming the gift might have on the recipient’s moral and emotional development, and offers guidance as to the form it should take. Such a stance significantly complicates the dynamic of solicitation.

Take, for example, the ‘Ode, sent to the Miss Gordons, with The Goodnatur’d Man, A Comedy, by Dr Goldsmith’. Charles uses these verses to raise the topic of critical taste:

While this poem is ostensibly deferential to the young ladies’ critical opinions, Charles also uses it to draw attention to his own literary gifts. His mention of himself, the ‘Poet’, is linked metrically with Goldsmith’s ‘Bard’, thereby establishing a connection with the famous playwright which is also reflected in the double gift of the published play and the manuscript poem. The verses also imply that both ‘Bard’ and ‘Poet’ have had experience of ‘Critics impotent and vain’ – the poet’s frustration is exercised not only on Goldsmith’s behalf but also, it seems, on his own.

Then there is ‘Sonnet Addressed to Miss Rachel and Miss Jessy Willox, Prefaced to the Epistles from Euphrasia to Castalio; and from Edwin to Angelina’.Footnote ¹¹⁰ In this poem, Charles declares his certainty that if they peruse his own poetic portrayals of ‘A Lovers’ sorrows, and a Lady’s sighs’, Rachel and Jessy’s ‘gentle hearts’ cannot remain ‘unmoved’. ‘Then fear not’, he instructs them, ‘if a rising sigh displays / Your worth of mind, and tenderness of heart’. The reader then experiences an abrupt transition to the poet’s contemplation of his own prospective literary fame:

Again, in ‘Ode sent with the Memoirs of Miss Sidney Biddulph to the Miss Willoxes’, there is similar certainty that Frances Sheridan’s narrative cannot fail to ‘impart’ the protagonist’s sufferings to ‘the generous heart’. But even as this poem is initially framed as addressing Rachel and Jessy’s responses to the text, it is really Charles’s own literary sensibility that he wants to display. ‘For heavenly transports bless his mind, Who lives – the friend of human kind: Whose soul Compassion’s law has taught, And with the noblest feelings fraught’Footnote ¹¹¹ [italics mine].

In a sensitive study of Elizabeth Montagu’s reading networks, Markman Ellis contends that disseminating books as gifts is ‘an important signal in the economy of patronage and sycophancy’.Footnote ¹¹² These brief examples demonstrate how Charles sent decidedly mixed signals, uneasily blending the position of bardic sycophancy with a tone of authoritative critical instruction. Having established Charles’s general circulatory practice in this respect, in the next section I turn to the specific printed text that he embellished with manuscript poetry most frequently – and strikingly – to burnish his social standing. This, of course, is Evelina. Such practice emerged from a specific set of circumstances in which alienation, insecurity, and ambition all met in Charles Burney’s poetic output. To understand why this was, we need to turn to his sister’s novel.

2.1 The Shinfield Evelina

Charles read Evelina for the first time during the spring of 1778.Footnote ¹¹⁵ His correspondence with Frances indicates that he tried to borrow a set from a circulating library in Reading, but ultimately ended up reading one that she sent to him from London.Footnote ¹¹⁶ As briefly noted in Section 1, two different fragments from Charles to Frances dating from this period survive, both of which mention his early response to Evelina. In the first, he notes at the head of the page, ‘I have read Evelina, & like it vastely [sic] much’, before proceeding to correct her translation of Seneca. At the foot, he adds a postscript: ‘This [the letter] shall accompany Evelina, which the Parson is reading.’Footnote ¹¹⁷ The second fragment is more detailed:

In Section 1, I noted that the form of the Seneca letter works to subordinate Frances’s creative achievement to Charles’s critical expertise. This second fragment, I think, effectively does the same thing. While his overall tone is complimentary, Charles also offers ‘criticisms’ of the ‘faults’ he detects, particularly in the prefatory Ode. His airy aside that he is ‘not fond of novels in general’ also serves as a backhanded compliment, reminding Frances of the lowbrow form she has chosen even as he condescends to place her with its acknowledged masters.

It is easy to imagine that Charles may have had mixed feelings about his sister’s literary success, and that he might have found it galling to compare their situations. Drawing on Hester Thrale’s sharp observation about the Burney siblings – ‘their Esteem & fondness for the Dr. seems to inspire them all with a Desire not to disgrace him; & so every individual of [the family] must write and read & be literary’ – Margaret Doody has argued convincingly that throughout their lives the Burney children remained desperate to please their father through literary achievements and honours.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Other biographers have speculated that Dr Burney’s enthusiasm for promoting Frances’s celebrity at this time stemmed partly from embarrassment at the spectacular fall from grace of his budding scholar.Footnote ¹²⁰ Charles’s own career prospects looked extremely uncertain during 1778, when, as he wrote to his school friend Francis Wollaston, he was ‘Forced to relinquish every fondest hope / My time in vile obscurity to waste’.Footnote ¹²¹ The brevity of his recognition of Frances’s achievement, and the high-handed tone he takes to ‘correct’ her prose, might therefore credibly be attributed to envy, stemming from a feeling of comparative inferiority. If so, it indicates an early propensity in Charles to see his sister’s literary success as related, or at least relatable, to his own intellectual prowess, and to deploy a gendered belletristic persona in an attempt to reassert himself.

Tellingly, Charles also declares in this fragment, after describing Mrs Francis ‘launching out in the praise of the unknown Writer’, that he is ‘not at all smoaky – so it went off very well’. At this time, the slang word ‘smoaky’ could signify bad temper, shrewdness, suspicion, ridicule, or jealousy.Footnote ¹²² Charles probably means that he did not act suspiciously when lending the book to Mrs Francis, thus preserving the secret of Frances’s authorship. But the multiple valences of the word, coupled with his assiduous corrections, suggest that he may have felt envy or chagrin alongside other, more positive fraternal emotions.

I want to draw three more observations out of these fragments as evidence of Charles’s readerly practice. First, his usage of the term ‘vastely much’ indicates a casual yet striking mimicry. Where words are underlined and deliberately misspelled in Burney family correspondence, there is always the possibility that the misspelling is an in-joke, part of the elaborate family dialect (a mixture of slang, pet names, mimicry, and code) that makes their letters such a challenge to edit.Footnote ¹²³ On this occasion, ‘vastely’ is an echo of the distinctive lexicon of the indefatigable Madame Duval, a character in Evelina who makes liberal use of that term: possibly with the spelling altered to imply a strong French accent.Footnote ¹²⁴ Duval was one of the characters most loved and imitated by the novel’s early readers, and Charles’s letter hints that, like other readers, he couldn’t resist the temptation to ‘perform’ his sister’s memorable antagonist.

Second, we find a hint of identification (rather than performance) in Charles’s remark that ‘the horror & remorse, which must almost necessarily attend such a meeting is very admirably described’. In singling out the confrontation scene between Sir John Belmont and Evelina, Charles largely focuses on Mrs Francis’s sentimental response, but also adds his own assessment of its veracity. Usage of the emphatic ‘must’, immediately qualified by the self-conscious ‘almost necessarily’, hints at first-hand knowledge of such strong emotions, raising the possibility that he may have been thinking of a confrontation with his own father following his disgrace. Although reversing the generational positions, Charles appears to be reading his life, affectively speaking, into Frances’s work.

Other striking aspects of Charles’s treatment of the Shinfield Evelina are his interest in who else is reading the book and his commitment to extending its readership. In the first fragment, Charles refers to ‘the Parson’ (perhaps the Rev. Mr. Jane, who Charles satirised in his poetry as ‘the little Welsh curate’) reading Evelina, while in the second, he describes Mrs Francis’s response. This indicates that Charles was alert to the novel’s readership within Shinfield and suggests that he was actively subletting his own borrowed copy before returning it to his sister (‘This shall accompany Evelina’). This would be consonant with his later documented practice in Scotland.

Finally – though Charles does not mention it in these fragments – we should note that his first reading of Evelina acted as a stimulant to poetic composition. As I show in Section 3, the all-important sonnet that he reports ‘prefixing’ to Evelina and lending around Aberdeen was first composed in Shinfield. Its first title was not ‘The Female Reader’ but ‘Sonnet Written in a Blank Leaf of Evelina’, and its likely first recipient was Frances Burney herself.

2.2 The Aberdeen Evelina

In the spring of 1779, Charles announced to Frances that ‘Evelina is in Aberdeen’.Footnote ¹²⁵ Having returned the Shinfield Evelina to its author, once settled in Aberdeen, he again turned to ‘a Circulating Library’ to obtain his own set – this time successfully. Charles does not name the library, but there were two in operation in Aberdeen at this time: John Boyle’s and Alexander Angus’s.Footnote ¹²⁶ While to my knowledge no catalogue survives for Boyle’s, there are several for Angus’s, the ‘showiest shop in town’ and ‘favourite rendezvous of many of the respectable citizens of Aberdeen’, which was based at the Narrow Wynd.Footnote ¹²⁷ One catalogue is dated 1779 and features an entry for Evelina: Or, the History of a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World, priced at nine shillings.Footnote ¹²⁸

Charles’s account of his lending practice is quoted in my Introduction and will be interrogated in Section 5, but we are now in a better position to extract a few key features. In Aberdeen, he establishes a lending network on a broader scale than his Shinfield circle, and when gathering responses, he is particularly interested in which characters draw readers’ admiration. Advertising his sister’s authorship is a key component of his promotional practice: ‘They are all in raptures with it – & all longing to see you … [Gordon] says, he is sure that Miss Burney’s pen would have made a great deal of it.’Footnote ¹²⁹ Consonant with the fact that Frances Burney’s authorship was now common knowledge, this differs from his practice in Shinfield, where he kept the authorship a secret from Mrs Francis. Finally, one of his compliments – ‘Every body is surprised at the Performance’ – is, like his comment about not being fond of novels, decidedly backhanded, especially when followed by a boast about his own ‘prefixed’ poem, which ‘likewise had its admirers’. These concluding lines recall the interplay of various dynamics in Charles’s response to the Shinfield Evelina, and hint at a feature of his circulatory practice addressed in the next section: his desire to not only share space with his sister on the page but also superimpose his literary identity alongside or over hers.

The Willoxes, Gordons, and Gerards are not the only members of Charles’s Aberdeen circle to whom he promotes the novel and its author. Letters from his tutor James Dunbar and friend Percival Stockdale also indicate that they had read or discussed the novel with Charles. Both men write from London, where he has encouraged them to pay a visit to his family, and both refer to the flesh-and-blood Frances Burney herself, when they encounter her, as ‘Evelina’.Footnote ¹³⁰ This conflation of the author with the heroine indicates that Charles not only promoted his sister’s novel but also encouraged prospective readers to identify her with her protagonist.

2.3 The Banff Evelina

When Charles went on a walking tour around North East Scotland in the summer of 1780, he took a set of Evelina with him. Staying at the home of his friend James Likly, he notes, ‘read[ing] Evelina to the Misses [Likly’s sisters], neither of whom have charms to promote flirtation’.Footnote ¹³¹ He left his set in Banff, in the custody of the more desirable Mary Rose, when he returned to Aberdeen in the autumn of 1780, and did not recover it until spring 1781 (if at all).Footnote ¹³² The novel was clearly on his mind as he travelled, since he uses it to characterise the people he meets along the way. A Mrs Admiral Gordon is ‘a little in the Mrs Beaumont style, all for the nobility’; this is a reference to the ‘Court Calendar bigot’ Mrs Beaumont in Evelina.Footnote ¹³³

It is unlikely that the set Charles took to Banff in the summer of 1780 was the same one circulated in Aberdeen in the spring of 1779.Footnote ¹³⁴ Instead, I think it likely that it was a third copy, which Charles again obtained directly from Frances Burney in London. My evidence for this is contained in two separate letters. As already mentioned, when Charles’s tutor James Dunbar travelled to London in the spring of 1779, Charles arranged for him to pay the Burney family a visit. ‘You have long ere this, I take it for granted, seen Mr Dunbar,’ he writes to Frances. ‘… Pray will you give into his care the set of Evelina’.Footnote ¹³⁵ Furthermore, in a letter of 24 May 1779, Dunbar reports back to Charles, ‘I am just come from dining at Dr. Burney’s, where I have met w^h the utmost Civility – I shall remember your commission about Evelina, more interesting surely from having seen the Original’.Footnote ¹³⁶ The implication is clear: in 1779 Charles had asked Dunbar to bring him a set of Evelina that was currently in the possession of his family, and so it was probably this family set that he took to Banff in 1780.

2.4 The SC Set: Markings and ‘Moor Fowls’

In the University of Aberdeen’s Special Collections, there is a battered three-volume set of the 1779 third edition of Evelina.Footnote ¹³⁷ Its early provenance, bibliographically speaking, is a mystery. Supralibros, pressmarks, and bookplates indicate only the ownership of King’s College and of the University of Aberdeen (formed after King’s and Marischal combined in 1860).Footnote ¹³⁸ The Library’s manuscript catalogues provide only the barest information, indicating that the set entered the King’s collection before 1848.Footnote ¹³⁹ In short, there is no concrete bibliographical evidence that this is not one of Charles Burney’s Evelinas: but there is also no evidence that it is. However, idiosyncratic marginal annotation within the first and third volumes suggest strongly that this is the very set which Charles took with him to Banff.

2.4.1 Markings

The most notable thing about the volumes is how roughly they have been treated. On the title page of the first volume, we find heavy ink smudges in two separate places, while on the facing verso there is light pitted residue, roughly positioned in a mirror image to the heaviest smudging (see Figure 2). More smudges and blots, both brown and black, occur frequently throughout the three volumes. There are numerous grease stains, probably often deposits left by human fingers. Pages are occasionally rumpled or folded over, while one leaf (pages 71–72 in the first volume) is badly mutilated, with three-quarters of the page ripped away on a diagonal. On page 46 of the second volume, there is an abrasion in the paper, the edges of which appear to be singed; perhaps a burn from a hastily extinguished cinder. A hole in the page occurs on page 85 of the second volume.

Figure 2

Title page and preceding verso.

Frances Burney, Evelina, or, the History of a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World (London: Lowndes, third edition, 1779), vol. 1, unpaginated. Aberdeen, University of Aberdeen, SB 82366 E1.

Not all markings are accidental. Doodles and underlines abound. There are also several annotations, made in both black ink and faded pencil. On page 94 of the first volume, alongside a debate between Madame Duval and Captain Mirvan about age and beauty, a brief marginal dialogue seems to have taken place between two readers (see Figure 3). The text under annotation is the Captain’s exclamation, rendered in this edition as ‘Moor fools they!’ ‘Moor’ is a printer’s error; in subsequent editions, the phrase would read, ‘More fools they!’ [Italics mine].

Figure 3

Marginalia concerning moor fowl.

Frances Burney, Evelina, or, the History of a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World (London: Lowndes, third edition, 1779), vol. 1, p. 94. Aberdeen, University of Aberdeen, SB 82366 E1.

It would not be unusual to find a reader hand-correcting such a typo; a tendency elegantly described by the Multigraph Collective as ‘testimony to an editorial mind-set fostered by print culture’.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Indeed, there are incidences of such corrections in this very set – for example, in the third volume, someone has corrected the antiquated usage ‘you was’ to the more modern ‘you were’. However, in the case of 1:94, a marginal annotator, writing in black ink, has responded chaotically rather than correctively. Instead of correcting the misspelling ‘moor’ to ‘more’, they have deliberately amended ‘fools’ to read ‘fowls’. The word ‘fowls’ is then written a second time in the margin, perhaps to avoid any misunderstanding. ‘More fools’ has become ‘Moor fowls’, in an intriguing instance of what the Multigraph Collective terms ‘disruption’, whereby a satirical reader ‘turn[s] the fallible, error-prone nature of printing to their advantage’.Footnote ¹⁴¹ A faint pencil hand, presumably later, has tried to correct the disruption, replacing ‘Moor fowls’ with ‘More fools’ and writing in the margin, ‘What a fool’. It is unclear whether this remark refers to the Captain, the subject of his utterance, or the disruptive annotator.

A black ink hand and a pencil hand – possibly, though not certainly, the same ones – meet once again on the final page of volume 3. If indeed the same annotators as those on 1:94, they are in closer accord with their satisfied responses to Evelina’s happy ending (see Figure 4). Beneath the printed ‘FINIS’, the pencil hand provides an approving verdict: ‘The most delightful novel I ever read.’ Meanwhile, the black ink hand attempts to provide the last word on the question of Evelina’s ambiguous surname (possibilities raised throughout the narrative include Anville, Villars, and Belmont). When the protagonist signs her final letter to Mr Villars ‘EVELINA’, the annotator takes advantage of the space afforded by the margin to add, ‘ORVILLE’. A decorative underlining flourish unites the print given name with the manuscript surname. The annotator, clearly just as alert as modern critics to the significance of naming within the plot, thereby uses the annotation to elevate Evelina’s conjugal identity as wife to Lord Orville above the other roles she has played throughout the narrative (daughter to Mr Villars or Sir John Belmont, brother to Macartney, granddaughter to Madame Duval, etc.). In doing so, they stake a claim to ‘insider knowledge … that qualifie[s] them as collaborators in the finalization of the book’.Footnote ¹⁴²

Figure 4

Marginalia concerning Evelina’s name.

Frances Burney, Evelina, or, the History of a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World (London: Lowndes, third edition, 1779), vol. 3, p. 263. Aberdeen, University of Aberdeen, SB 82366 E1.

There is one more annotation of significance. In my bibliographical assessment of the SC Evelina, I suggested that the set contains no ownership inscription – but there is one possible, peculiar exception. At the end of the third volume, on an advertisement for a miscellany called the ‘Theatrical Bouquet’ also published by Lowndes, a black ink hand has written at the top of the page, ‘Evelina Anville’ (See Figure 5).

The nature of this annotation is far from clear. However, given its positioning on the paratextual fringe of the volume – alongside an advertisement specifically raising the topic of theatrical performance – it is possibly intended as a joke ownership inscription. Katharina Rennhak has noted how paratexts can ‘swing wide open the door on the threshold between the extratextual and the textual … between authentic prefatorial figures on the one hand and fictive characters on the other’.Footnote ¹⁴³ In a similar metatextual act of play, the black ink annotator may be indicating that this set of the novel belongs, in some way, to the fictional heroine.Footnote ¹⁴⁴

Tempting though it may be, I cannot conclusively attribute the black ink hand of ‘moor fowl’, ‘Orville’, or ‘Evelina Anville’ to Charles Burney on purely palaeographic grounds. Although both the letters on 1:94 and those on 3:263 bear some resemblance to his cuneive hand in other documents, they also include certain deliberately stylised features which I have not encountered, such as the backward serifs and crossbars on the capital letters. These examples are too brief and too stylised to provide points of meaningful comparison with his hand in letters and poems of the same period. The annotation ‘Evelina Anville’, however, provides a much stronger likeness to Charles’s proven hand during the early 1780s. If we compare the word ‘Evelina’ in the SC set annotation (Figure 5) to Charles’s ‘Evelina’ in his miscellany (Figure 7), we can see that, while the annotator has a better pen and is taking more care to write neatly, the letters are formed in identical proportions and in almost precisely the same ways. Personally, therefore, I think it likely that Charles provided at least one of the black ink annotations, but on strictly palaeographic grounds I cannot be certain.

Figure 5

Annotation, ‘Evelina Anville’.

Frances Burney, Evelina, or, the History of a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World (London: Lowndes, third edition, 1779), vol. 3, advertisement, unpaginated. Aberdeen, University of Aberdeen, SB 82366 E1.

Happily, the annotations’ content provides a more compelling case for Charles’s identity as an annotator, which can only complement the tantalising palaeographic similarities. His desire to impose a reading of the text as a sentimental romance (see Sections 3–5) fits neatly with the annotator’s desire on 3:263 to stress Evelina’s conjugal identity in her final signoff. The fact that he had previously encouraged his friends to identify ‘Frances Burney’ with ‘Evelina Anville’ (see Section 2) reflects the logic of inscribing Frances’s book with Evelina’s name on the advertisement. But by far the strongest evidence of his involvement concerns the idiosyncratic nature of the ‘moor fowl’ annotation on 1:94, which, when read alongside Charles’s archive from the late summer of 1780, indicates that he or one of his Banff friends is the black ink hand, and that the SC copy and the Banff Evelina are one and the same. To explain the significance of this remark, it is necessary to turn to the moment in the plot of Evelina where the first annotator decides to intervene.

3.1 ‘Whoe’er Thou Art’: Universal Inscription

In evaluating the poem’s genre, we find ourselves on only slightly surer ground. It is superficially an instance of what Heather Jackson calls ‘a minor poetic genre, the verse inscription … a by-product of the exchange of books between friends and associates’.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ In certain respects – its recording of a personal response to the text and its encouragement of a related engagement in the subsequent reader – Charles’s sonnet fits neatly with Jackson’s definition. Like his verses on Sidney Biddulph or The Good Natur’d Man, the sonnet seeks to provide a set of affective parameters within which ‘the female reader’ should respond to the novel. Both versions are full of imperative instructions – to ‘expand thy mind’, ‘check not the offspring of a generous mind’, ‘grave the moral’, and ‘see’ the readings that the poet takes of the plot’s resolution. The poet presents Evelina, decisively, as a sentimental fiction. However, the sonnet does not record ‘circumstances of presentation’, which Jackson considers a core characteristic of the verse inscription. Neither does it work to ‘personalise’ the book, an objective which the Multigraph Collective considers its primary function.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ Charles’s inscription is, in fact, strikingly impersonal, both in its terms of address (‘whoe’er thou art’) and its infinitely portable positioning (attached – but, we must assume, only temporarily – to a library book which is neither fully the property of the inscriber nor destined to be fully the property of the reader).

At this point, we must remind ourselves that the first recipient of the poem, in 1778, was Frances Burney herself. Granted, the verse does not address her directly, unless we read a tenuous pun into the slightly odd verb ‘fann’d’.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ Charles’s intention was probably to have it circulated through the wider family and beyond. Nonetheless, in directing the sonnet through Frances’s hands, Charles implicitly subordinates her creative work to his own act of critical interpretation. In characterising Evelina as a sentimental fiction with a didactic ‘moral’, he closes off alternative readings (some of which he acknowledges himself, in the Shinfield fragments, with his comic mimicry of Duval and his comparison to Sterne and Fielding). In so doing, he imposes a reading of Frances Burney’s authorial character as well as the nature of her production. Moreover, if she is included within the compass of the sonnet’s readership, the final couplet reads as a remarkable attempt at gendered constraint. The ‘distinguished joys’ to which Charles’s sister may ‘aspire’ are not only the admiration of ‘the World’ (which may be either literary or moral) but also the love of a man like Lord Orville, and presumably the domestic role of wifehood that must follow. In the Harvard version, then, there is an attempt on Charles’s part to contain, even as he compliments, the scope of his sister’s achievement.

The amendments of April 1779, especially the new title, slightly alter the poem’s tenor. I discuss these amendments fully in Section 5, in which I evaluate Charles’s (lack of) success in using his inscription to construct a reading community in which his poetic offerings might generate amatory, and subsequently material, advantage. I now turn to consider the likely physical positioning of the lost sonnet in the Aberdeen Evelina.

3.2 The ‘Prefixed’ Poem as Paratext

What are the implications of the word ‘prefix’, with which Charles describes the physical positioning of his manuscript sonnet in relation to his sister’s printed text? What Abigail Williams gracefully calls the ‘unmatchable portability’ of verse inscription presents several possibilities.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ Charles might have written directly on a page or pastedown. Alternatively, he might have written on a loose sheet of paper, which he attached to the volume using an adhesive. Finally, he might have simply tucked such a sheet between two pages. The title of the Yale version indicates that the sonnet was ‘written in Evelina’ and the title of the Harvard version suggests that it was ‘written in a blank leaf of Evelina’, but unfortunately we cannot draw any solid inference from such claims, since, as Jackson notes, the poetic conceit that verses were inscribed in a book should not necessarily be taken literally.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ Neither is Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary much help in narrowing the options: he defines the verb ‘prefix’ as simply ‘to put before another thing’ with no remark as to the mode or permanency of the placing.Footnote ¹⁶¹

We must turn, then, to the layout of early editions of Evelina to ascertain where Charles’s poem might have been placed and how a reader might have experienced it. As it happens, Lowndes’s first three printings of Evelina are all very similar in their structural layout. There are three places where the sonnet might credibly have been placed so that it would satisfy Charles’s description, Johnson’s definition, and the implications of the various titles. The first possibility is the pastedown inside the front cover of the first volume, which was where Charles glued his bookplate in the books he stole in Cambridge (see Section 5, particularly Figures 13 and 14). The second is the blank verso preceding the title page of the first volume. In the Aberdeen edition, a set of unusual markings suggest that significant activity has taken place in this space (see Figure 2). The pitted residue suggests that something may have been pasted on this verso and then removed (see Figures 13 and 14 for similar markings in the Cambridge volumes), while the smears on the title page itself suggest the smudging of wet ink when the volume was peremptorily closed. (If this is indeed the Banff Evelina, and if we take the markings to mean that a loose sheet was pasted onto the flyleaf, then it would follow that Charles applied his prefixing practice to the Banff copy as well as the Aberdeen one.) The third possibility is that Charles’s sonnet was placed not on the pastedown or the blank verso facing the title page but on the following one: the reverse of the title page itself. In first, second, and third editions, this blank leaf faces Frances’s own dedicatory ode to her father, ‘To -------- ---------’ (see Figure 8). The fact that placing the poem after the title page would slightly less precisely fulfil Johnson’s definition of ‘put[ting] before’, combined with the lack of any similar traces of pasting or writing in the SC Evelina, makes this the least likely eventuality in my view.

Figure 8

Prefatory ode.

Frances Burney, Evelina, or, the History of a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World (London: Lowndes, third edition, 1779), vol. 1, unpaginated. Aberdeen, University of Aberdeen, SB 82366 E1.

Placement in any of these locations raises the possibility that, notwithstanding its manuscript character, a reader might experience Charles’s sonnet as a prefatory piece of paratext. Such a claim takes a disruptive approach to the long-standing formal definition of paratextuality, which presumes a degree of legitimation by the author.Footnote ¹⁶² However, this presumption seems to me unnecessarily constrictive. In privileging an authorial perspective over a reader-centred one, we risk dangerously overstating the author’s role in the publication process. In fact, as Svetlana Kochkina has shown, Frances Burney had negligible control over many paratextual aspects of her work: the title, attribution, illustrations, and advertisements were all entirely within the publisher’s remit. Indeed, in the case of foreign editions, some publishers saw nothing wrong with inserting newly commissioned prefaces, removing Burney’s own peritexts, or even truncating the text itself.Footnote ¹⁶³ Moreover, in permitting authorial sanction to define paratext, we lose the opportunity to fully illuminate effects of embellished texts whose contemporary readerships had a much greater familiarity with hybrid manuscript-print culture than our own. As Betty Schellenberg has shown, ‘media of script and print, [despite] their distinctive practices and priorities, were in close conversation’ in late eighteenth-century literary culture.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ The Multigraph Collective goes further, asserting that serious consideration of ‘manuscript-print hybrids’ is a core component of its headline enterprise to ‘restore … [print culture] to the media ecology in which it was historically embedded’.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ Since Charles evidently advertised his close relationship to the author of Evelina so openly, the effect on a reader of his sonnet’s placement at the beginning of her book might well be to establish him as a legitimated editorial presence. Such an act would contribute towards Charles’s effort to promote himself as an accomplished young poet and belletrist who was an active member of a celebrated literary dynasty. In Section 5, I consider more fully how Charles emphasised his kinship with Frances, occasionally against her wishes, to achieve this effect. The material juxtaposition of their literary endeavours, via his ‘prefixed’ sonnet, is an important part of this enterprise.

However, in positioning his poem directly or shortly before Frances’s ode, Charles is perhaps also doing something more instinctive – and less cynical – than advertising his celebrity connections or exploiting his sister’s achievement. Many scholars, following Margaret Doody’s example, have adopted a psychoanalytic approach to Frances Burney’s writings – and the prefatory ode that opens Evelina is a prime candidate for such an enterprise.Footnote ¹⁶⁶ If, with them, we read it as a vehicle within which Frances attempts to reconcile filial humility with authorly ambition, then there is something poignant about Charles’s cognate attempt, at a moment when he was ‘Torn from my Father, Brothers, Sisters, Friend’ (as he put it in one of his poems),Footnote ¹⁶⁷ to insert himself into the ode’s orbit alongside his father and sister. Evelina’s paratextual threshold provides a site upon which Charles attempts to reunite the family unit that his crime has rent asunder.

Charles’s ability to reunite himself with his family is enhanced by his choice of form. Though generally famed for their prose creations, all members of the Burney family were prolific poets, and this aspect of their creative practice is beginning to receive welcome attention.Footnote ¹⁶⁸ The composition of verse was one crucial way in which they expressed affection, marked occasions, and curated an archive for their own pleasure and that of posterity. This enterprise was spearheaded by Dr Burney himself, who wrote hundreds of occasional verses for family and friends during his lifetime. Frances’s decision to address her father in verse can be read as an acknowledgement of the importance of form in currying filial favour. Conscious of the risks of her fictional enterprise in the pages that follow, her deferential ode eases the transition towards her declaration of formal independence.

As we have seen, Charles defines himself primarily as a poet during his time in Aberdeen, at a time when a prosaic and scholarly self-fashioning would have made more sense for his future career. We might read his alienated versification, including his poetic occupation of blank space in Frances’s book, as a literary performance in partial emulation of both his father and his sister. In affective terms, this is a complex act, which includes a note of appropriation. In the astute words of the Multigraph Collective, ‘tipped-in materials threaten to disrupt or even swallow up the printed text, raising questions about its primacy’.Footnote ¹⁶⁹ In Shinfield in 1778, two of Charles’s earliest responses to Evelina had been a pedantic correction to the grammar of Frances’s ode and a sonnet attempting to control her reading of her own novel. In Aberdeen, we find him forcibly inserting his own literary production into her text – ‘a violent form of interactivity’, especially given the oft-drawn parallels, in contemporary and modern discussions of textuality, between print codex and corporeal body.Footnote ¹⁷⁰ His sonnet inscription expresses, in Jackson’s words, ‘the primary impulse of claiming the book as one’s own’.Footnote ¹⁷¹ A similar note of appropriation is evident in the contemporary letter to Frances, in which Charles cannot resist hinting that his circulated poetry receives similar acclaim to her prose: ‘That likewise had its admirers’.Footnote ¹⁷²

4.1 The ‘Poetical Turn’

A close reading of Charles’s manuscript poetry offers further evidence for this theory. As I noted in Section 1, early 1778 marks a distinct shift in Charles’s poetic practice as he transitions from writing comic light verse to earnest neoclassical odes. I think it likely that such a shift was a consequence of reading Evelina (which the correspondence suggests he was doing at that time) and emulating Macartney’s poetic style – which was, of course, really Frances’s own.

Macartney’s first poem is the doleful ‘fragment of an ode’ beginning ‘O LIFE!’ This ‘tortured outpouring of sensibility’, which scholars have compared to the works of Thomas Grey, Charles Cotton, and Abraham Cowley, hints at past and present sufferings, and reflects on the mutability of life, a ‘gilded, but a bitter pill / Of varied, great, and complicated ill!’Footnote ¹⁸⁴ Charles’s verse ‘Letter to F.J.H.W.’, addressed to his friend Francis Wollaston and dated 3 February 1778, takes a similarly gloomy tone to Macartney’s, bemoaning that in the ‘bowl of bliss … which Fate prepares / The bitter ever mingles with the sweet! / No certain happiness this life can bring! / We all must taste Misfortune’s nauseous Spring’. Where Macartney characterises life as a ‘lingering dream’, ‘flattering with Hope most fair’, Charles calls ‘flattering Hope’ an illusion, replaced by an ‘empty dream’. Macartney characterises life’s progress as pursued by ‘Mis’ry’, whereas Charles refers to himself as ‘to misery a prey’.Footnote ¹⁸⁵ Such insistent semantic echoes indicate a relationship between the two poems, although the precise nature of that relationship must remain uncertain.

Soon after reading Evelina, Charles also started, like Macartney, writing courtly poems to young ladies. These verses strongly resemble the second work by Macartney quoted within Frances’s narrative: the verses on Evelina dropped in the pump room.

Gallant verse is heavily conventional by nature, but Charles’s ‘Ode [addressed to Nancy Gordon]’ and ‘Ode addressed to Miss Rachel and Miss Jessy Willox’ display particularly strong similarities to this fragment. Like Macartney’s poem, both odes affect the conceit that the young ladies appear in a procession of beauties over whom they ultimately claim pre-eminence (the first lines, respectively, are ‘See Nancy comes, like Beauty’s queen’ and ‘They come! Adorn’d with every grace’).Footnote ¹⁸⁷ Both, like Macartney’s poem, showcase familiarity with classical tropes in their references to the Graces, and play heavily on the (somewhat didactic) tension between physical beauty and moral virtue. Both date to the spring of 1779: precisely the time when Charles was lending the novel to Jessy, Rachel, and Nancy in turn.

4.2 Sisters, lovers, and patrons

Many scholars have noted Macartney’s uneasy position in Frances Burney’s narrative, poised between the roles of prospective lover and brother. Such observations are far from new. The potential erotics of Macartney’s relationship to Evelina are clearly marked in visual depictions of the characters produced and circulated in the 1780s and 1790s, all of which depict the averted suicide attempt. The earliest (aside from an illustration by Burney’s cousin Edward Francisco, now lost) is an engraving by Nicolas Colibert, printed in London in 1786, in which Evelina accosts Macartney kneeling in his bedchamber (see Figure 9). As Burney’s narrative specifies, he has fallen to his knees and points a pair of pistols to his breast and throat. Evelina, having caught his arm, points to the heavens, presumably to reproach him for his sin. Macartney’s face is on a level with, and rather close to, Evelina’s exposed décolletage. While the only piece of furniture mentioned in Burney’s narrative is a table, Colibert has placed a rumpled bed prominently in the left side of the background. The casts of Macartney and Evelina’s faces are similar, marking them out as brother and sister: but the positioning of the figures and choice of furniture indicate an uneasy awareness of their physical proximity, heightened emotions, and liminal relationship.

Figure 9

Nicolas Colibert, ‘Evelina surprising Mr Macartney preparing to load his pistols’.

Stipple engraving (London: William Dickinson, 1786). London, British Museum, 1897,1117.222. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

Visual representations of the Evelina/Macartney relationship become more emphatically erotic if we allow ourselves to glance, momentarily, beyond British borders. As Antoinette Sol, Martha J. Koehler and Svetlana Kochkina have all shown, Burney’s early novels were popular in France, where they were often appropriated to culturally or politically radical usages. Where Sol and Koehler suggest that Evelina is an important thematic and stylistic model for Choderlos de Laclos’s scandalous novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses,Footnote ¹⁸⁸ Kochkina argues that illustrative frontispieces for French translations of Burney’s novel evolved, during the 1790s, to subtly signal adherence to revolutionary principles.Footnote ¹⁸⁹ This broad pattern of transgressive translation is evident in extant French images of Macartney’s suicide attempt. See, for example, an illustration (Figure 10) which opens the first volume of a 1795 edition published in Paris by Pierre-Sebastien Leprieur. Like Colibert, Leprieur’s illustrator has made Macartney’s bed a key feature of the scene. But they have also gone further in presenting Evelina lying prone on the floor, her eyes closed, and her arms thrown open invitingly. Macartney kneels over her, his own arms spread to mirror her positioning. The caption reads, ‘J’ai saisi son bras, et suis tombée moi-même, sans connaissance’, highlighting the moment, immediately after preventing Macartney from shooting himself, when Evelina faints – and presumably inviting the reader to speculate about what may have happened during her loss of consciousness. Another French edition published three years later by Jean-Baptiste Imbert replicates Leprieur’s interpretation of the scene almost exactly (see Figure 11). In this rendition, Evelina is clearly conscious, but her positioning is even more suggestive. The angle of her legs suggests an entanglement with Macartney’s own. She is gripping his wrist, and he is about to clasp hers in reciprocation, in a manner that reinforces physical contact between the two while the bed looms over them.

Figure 10

Illustrative frontispiece to 1795 French edition of Evelina.

Evelina, Roman: Nouvellement traduit et rédigé avec beaucoup de soin d’aprés l’Anglois de MISS BURNEY (Paris: Leprieur, l’an IV de la République franç.), vol. 1, unpaginated. Montreal, McGill University Library, Rare Books and Special Collections, OCTAVO-398.

Figure 11

Illustrative frontispiece to 1798 French edition of Evelina.

Evelina. ou, l’entrée d’une jeune personne dans le monde. Par Miss Burney, traduit de l’Anglais. (Paris: Imbert, 1798.), vol. 1, unpaginated. Montreal, McGill University Library, Rare Books and Special Collections, PR3316 A4 E814 1798b.

The contemporary erotic resonance of the Macartney–Evelina relationship can help to account for some of the more puzzling elements of Charles’s reader responses. If we accept that he started to identify as Macartney in Shinfield, sending his courtly sonnet to his sister would make far more sense as a performance of that identity. The following year, his insertion of his own poetic contribution into the body of her book would indicate another performance of this liminal fraternal-erotic role.

If Charles’s performance of Macartney induced him to treat his sister like a lover, the converse is also true, since his amorous approaches to young women in Aberdeen are oddly formatted as intense expressions of fraternal affection. In particular, his poems addressed to Rachel and Jessy Willox muddle amorous language with kinship terminology. He frequently addresses them as ‘the Sisters’Footnote ¹⁹⁰ and draws attention to the qualities they share with Frances and Susanna: ‘My own dear Fanny & Susan excepted, I must confess I never saw the two Girls, whom I doated upon with such ardent admiration.’Footnote ¹⁹¹ When he remarks their similarities to Richardson’s Charlotte Grandison and Lady L, he tellingly casts them as the hero’s sisters rather than his love interests. Such choices suggest that Charles not only positioned himself as a gallant suppliant for patronage to the Willox sisters in the same manner as Macartney does to Evelina but also implicitly placed his relationship towards them along similar axes of brother/lover.

Charles’s identified performance of Macartney can be characterised as an act of readerly poaching. In it, we can detect not only the process of textual ‘detach[ment]’ outlined by de Certeau but also a loss of grasp on ‘fictive securities of reality’.Footnote ¹⁹² Crucially, I believe that Charles is no isolated case in this respect, and that such activity took place within a broader culture of identified performance in response to Frances Burney’s fiction. Next, I briefly consider some other reader testimonies which hint at the ability of Frances Burney’s fiction to render the boundary between text and reality porous, and consider the implications for gendered models of reading in circulation at the time.

4.3 The Poaching Economy

At this moment in Jane Austen’s Persuasion, Anne Elliott finds herself inching towards the end of a row of auditors at a concert, hoping that such a position will give Frederick Wentworth easy access should he wish to strike up a conversation. Anne sheepishly contemplates the similarities between her own behaviour and that of Frances Burney’s character Miss Larolles, who, in her second novel Cecilia, ‘sat at the outside on purpose to speak to a person or two [the fop Mr Meadows], that I knew would be strolling about’.Footnote ¹⁹⁴ Making the patient, self-effacing Anne align herself with the scheming, coquettish Larolles is a superb stroke of comedy on Austen’s part, which coaxes the reader to acknowledge and appreciate this most reserved heroine’s surprising ability to laugh at herself. It also acts as a critical comment on Burney’s unique capacities as a novelist which is quite as complimentary as, though more subtle than, Austen’s more famous references to her work scattered throughout Northanger Abbey.Footnote ¹⁹⁵ The word ‘inimitable’ must be read ironically, since imitating Larolles is precisely what Anne finds herself doing. And she is far from alone. Anne Elliott’s fictional imitation and Charles Burney’s real identified performance take place within a broader poaching economy.

Reader identification has generated much insightful scholarship in eighteenth-century studies over recent decades. Frances Burney is often one of the key novelists employed in this enterprise, since she records dozens of cases, in her Journals and Letters, of readers identifying, feeling with, and fantasising about her creations. There has been a particularly rich seam of scholarship interrogating the relation between identification and performance in reader interactions with Burney’s characters. Patricia Michaelson, Francesca Saggini, Abigail Williams, and Jan Fergus have all exploited Burney family accounts of reading aloud – often Frances’ own novels or plays – suggesting that such sessions might have ‘imitated the rhetorical and performance conventions employed by actors on stage’ and ‘enabled alternative forms of engagement with fictional works in which the relationship between reader and character could be seen as a matter of performance rather than immersion’.Footnote ¹⁹⁶

My reading of Charles’s identified performance as Macartney strikes out from such scholarship in two ways. I exploit Charles’s poetic archive, rather than his prose life writing, as the main primary source, and embellish it with bibliographic analysis of the surviving traces of his bookish activity. Such 3D reading, as I indicate in my Introduction, can give us evidence of reader responses that to some extent short-circuit the problem of unreliability inherent in a self-conscious account of reading practice. Furthermore, I deploy a range of such traces made over an extended period – in this case, three years. Sustained echoes of a character’s manner, behaviour, and register suggest that Frances Burney’s characters provoke sustained performances: those which are not confined to closed reading sessions, but rather adopted as shapers of everyday textual and verbal behaviours, enabling the performer to blur the boundary between fiction and reality in their everyday life. In short, I am interested in real-life quixotes.

Contemporary anxieties about the tendency of eighteenth-century sentimental fiction to stimulate quixotism in young female readers have often been remarked.Footnote ¹⁹⁷ Frances Burney’s novels, however, have seldom been considered within the compass of such anxiety, partly because scholars have swallowed wholesale Burney’s own insistence, first pitched in her Address to the Critics preceding Evelina and frequently reiterated in her life writing, that her novels should be read within the masculine literary tradition of Richardson and Fielding rather than the female-profiled ‘romance’. However, ample evidence exists that they did generate such anxiety among a contemporary readership. Hannah More, in a little-known letter to her friend Mary Hamilton (1756–1816), reported the view of Queen Charlotte – which apparently dovetailed with her own – that Evelina and Cecilia were insufficiently pious to act as positive role models: ‘Miss Burney’s heroines wou’d certainly be much better women, and brighter patterns, if their pure morals were perfected by piety, and if in their distresses they looked for help where only it is to be found.’Footnote ¹⁹⁸ A young Maria Edgeworth had a different, but related, objection:

There is a certain irony to Edgeworth’s concern about young female readers identifying with unrealistic marital ambitions, since the only actual example I have found of an impressionable young ‘reader’ forming unrealistic conjugal aspirations after reading Evelina is that of Charles Burney himself. His dogged pursuit of the Willox sisters (and possibly later Jane Abernethie), via poetic performances suggesting intensive identification with Macartney, offers evidence of the effects of a masculine sensibility which, steeped in theatrical performance and literary tropes, could find it difficult to distinguish fiction from reality.

In one of the most important studies of eighteenth-century readership, Jan Fergus elegantly demonstrates how historical and literary methodologies can complement one another, using Evelina as a case study. Building on the discovery that eighteenth-century men actually borrowed more novels than women, Fergus implores scholars to ‘ask more insistently how men positioned themselves when they read novels, … [to] more closely examine what male fantasies are exercised and satisfied by these works … [to] look at so-called ‘women’s novels’ with an eye to how they construct men and male reading’.Footnote ²⁰⁰ Fergus’s perceptive but fleeting example is that of Frances Burney’s father, Dr Charles Burney, ‘reading himself into’ the paternalistic clergyman Mr Villars in Evelina when, according to his daughter Susan, he declares, ‘That man is ALWAYS right!’Footnote ²⁰¹

In recent years, we have had no shortage of studies dissecting the quixotic reader as a literary device.Footnote ²⁰² Conversely – unless we are content to make do with the old rumours about Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) triggering a spate of deaths by suicide – there is still a real paucity of scholarship exploring actual documented cases of over-identification. Fergus proposes that we look for quixotes not only in the pages of novels but also in manuscript life writing – and that we prioritise for analysis those ‘male fantasies’ that were inspired, fulfilled, or satirised by sentimental (often female-authored) fictions. The younger Charles Burney’s performance of Macartney offers a rare opportunity to do so, while adding to the body of scholarship showing that sentimental novels written by women were popular among, and exercised a powerful influence upon, male readers.Footnote ²⁰³ Illustrative frontispieces and prints, letters, and poetry deployed in this section illuminate some of the ‘male fantasies’ that Evelina exercised and satisfied. In the next and final section, I evaluate Charles’s (lack of) success in realising his aspirations.

5.1 ’The Custody of the Subscriber’: Borrowing Evelina

As noted in Section 2, I cannot be certain that Angus’s was the institution where Charles obtained the Aberdeen Evelina. However, as ‘the leading bookshop in the north-east of Scotland’ and ‘one of the most complete libraries of any type in the entire country’ which, we know, held Frances Burney’s Evelina in 1779, it has a decent chance of being his source.Footnote ²⁰⁸ In any case, the survival of a rare copy of its Conditions of membership (see Figure 12), fortuitously dated to the very year that Charles borrowed Evelina, gives a valuable instance of the general ethos of an Aberdeen circulating library at this time, which can fruitfully be mapped against Charles’s documented practice.

Figure 12

Alexander Angus’s Conditions.

Appendix to A New Catalogue of the Aberdeen Circulating Library, 1779, unpaginated. Aberdeen, University of Aberdeen, (SC) SBL 1779 NP 2.

Among other things, the Conditions provide valuable information about the implicit contract which Angus expected his subscribers to observe, including several behaviours which would incur a financial penalty.

It is difficult to judge how seriously such delinquencies were taken in practice. One must imagine that overdue loans, then as now, were a common phenomenon, and that only a small financial penalty was imposed for a small infraction.Footnote ²⁰⁹ The caveat ‘or such allowance made to the proprietors as they shall think reasonable’ suggests that there was also room for negotiation when it came to minor markings. With respect to deliberately unreturned books and unresponsive borrowers, however, circulating library proprietors could apparently take recovery quite seriously. Devendra Varma points to a newspaper advertisement placed in 1795 by one circulating library proprietor appealing for assistance in tracing unreturned books, and promising ‘an ample Reward … on conviction of the offenders’.Footnote ²¹⁰

Mindful of Charles’s recent experience in Cambridge, the damage that it had done to his personal prospects, and the importance of his ‘quitting [Aberdeen] with propriety and credit’, one might expect him to have been a model subscriber to any library he patronised there. Yet some of his habits still seem, to a modern eye, surprisingly delinquent in their disregard for the physical integrity of the borrowed book or the library’s exclusive authority over its consumption. Such traces of apparent delinquency offer an opportunity to reflect upon a relatively untouched topic: the ways in which library books of various sorts might have registered, with their users, as subject to fluid kinds of ownership, proprietorship, or, to appropriate Angus’s term, ‘custody’.

At this point, a comparison is useful. When Charles stole ninety-two books from the University Library in Cambridge in 1777, his manner of defacing and hoarding them indicates that he clearly understood their status as stolen property. William Cole reports that Charles ‘had taken the University Arms out of [the 35 books discovered in a dark corner of his room] & put his own in their place’. In 1962, J. C. T. Oates examined an identifiable eighty-four of the ninety-one volumes which Charles stole: ‘The title-pages of nearly all the eighty-four identifiable volumes have been mutilated (and subsequently repaired). Class-marks have been cut away with scissors or erased, and some title-pages have been removed entire. A bookplate has been removed from inside the front board of most of the volumes, but portions of it remain in X.6.36 and X.12.28.’Footnote ²¹¹

It seems that Charles’s was a two-stage practice of reassigning ownership. The first step was to eradicate traces of library provenance by cutting with a blade, applying friction to fade the marks, or removing tell-tale pages entire. The second step was to superimpose a symbol of his own ownership – usually by gluing his own ex-libris, or bookplate, on the pastedown inside the front cover (see Figures 13 and 14). Of course, when Charles’s theft was discovered and the books recovered, Cambridge librarians then tried to nullify the signs of ownership he had imposed. In two cases, they were not entirely successful; Figures 13 and 14 offer us rare evidence of Charles’s superimpository practice.

Figure 13

Remnants of Charles Burney’s superimposed bookplate in a stolen book (1).

Claudius Pulmanni, Ant. 1671, front pastedown, unpaginated. Cambridge, University of Cambridge, Royal Library, X.6.36. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library.

Figure 14

Remnants of Charles Burney’s superimposed bookplate in a stolen book (2).

Terentius, Lug. Bat., 1678. Front pastedown, unpaginated. Cambridge, University of Cambridge, Royal Library, X.12.28. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library.

In both cases, we can see that Charles pasted in a bookplate printed to a standardised design featuring a simple ornamental festoon overhanging the words ‘Charles Burney, Cambridge’. Presumably – and poignantly – these had been commissioned by a proud father or family friend as a celebration of the young scholar’s enrolment at the university. Charles’s determination to put his stamp of ownership on the books makes it unlikely that, as Walker supposes, he stole them with the deliberate intention of selling them to pay his debts.Footnote ²¹² As a recent study of eighteenth-century book theft suggests, the ability to effectively ‘launder’ stolen second-hand books would be only hampered by traceable ownership inscriptions of any kind.Footnote ²¹³ Instead, such activity indicates that he initially stole the books to keep, lending weight to Frances Burney’s account of the motivation behind his crime – ‘a Mad Rage for possessing a Library’.Footnote ²¹⁴

Brian Cummings and the Multigraph Collective have both recently considered the role of bladed implements in relation to early modern printed books. The Multigraph Collective reads scissors as instruments of utility necessary to open the volume to perusal, whereas Cummings examines defacement, especially in relation to religious iconography, as the manifestation of ‘historical anger’.Footnote ²¹⁵ Charles’s approach to cutting books, though on one level charged with a ‘Mad Rage’, is on another level eminently practical.Footnote ²¹⁶ It reflects the necessity of transferring them from one proprietorship (the University Library’s) to another (his own). Implicitly, therefore, the mere act of physically removing the books from the library did not mean that they entered his custody. To ‘possess’ them, it was necessary to engage in violent and covert activity which, by means of excision and superimposition, attempted to reassign them as property.

Charles’s documented treatments of the Aberdeen Evelina and the Banff Evelina are far more ambivalent. Unsurprisingly, given the mortifying consequences of his Cambridge transgression, we do not find evidence that he personally mutilated any of the volumes borrowed from Angus, or attached his own bookplate. However, he did, by his own admission, ‘prefix’ his sonnet to the novel, an enterprise which may well have involved paste or ink or both. Given Angus’s injunction against ‘damage’, was this really within the spirit of subscription? We may find a partial answer in the vagueness of both Angus’s and Charles’s wording. Angus’s reference in the Conditions to his patrons’ temporary ‘custody’ of the novel, his offer of the opportunity to redress the offence by simply purchasing the book at its catalogue price, and his flexibility around ‘reasonable … allowance’, all indicate an inherent lack of confidence in his own permanent proprietorship over the books that made up his library. Similarly, the indeterminate character of Charles’s verb ‘prefix’ might stand as a direct consequence of the liminal status of the book to which it was temporarily fastened. His act of temporary attachment reflects his status as a temporary ‘custodian’, to appropriate Angus’s term, of the Aberdeen Evelina. Asserting custodianship with his (possibly signed) poetic paratext, he navigates the terrain between possession and appropriation in a manner that leaves its mark, as I argue here, in the very poetry he chose to prefix.

Charles’s circulatory practice involves a similar tendency to ambivalent delinquency. We know from his declaration to Frances (‘Before I return it’) that he intended to return the book to Angus’s, as prescribed by the Conditions. But was it really within the spirit of the rules to deliberately sublet a book so that a dozen or more readers could enjoy it for the price of one subscription? Here we are in little-charted territory, since the legal and behavioural status of subletting a circulating library book during this period has never quite been pinned down. Based on the patchy available evidence, there seems to have been a significant degree of variation as to how circulating library proprietors addressed such behaviour. Paul Kaufman suggests that borrowers from Thomas Wood’s Shrewsbury circulating library were asked not to lend to non-subscribers.Footnote ²¹⁷ Fergus finds evidence that a small number of borrowers in the Midlands ‘declare’ that a book will be read by other readers as well as themselves. Charlotte Stewart-Murphy notes anecdotal evidence from George Cheyne that ‘each loan served a number of readers’.Footnote ²¹⁸ Varma quotes a 1797 pamphlet, The Use of Circulating Libraries Considered, which describes subletting as ‘ungenerous’ and declares that it ‘should, when known, be attended by the forfeit of the money paid for subscription’.Footnote ²¹⁹ Overall, subletting seems to have been resented by proprietors but, since it could not be effectively monitored, grudgingly tolerated. Angus’s silence on the practice, and the hints of weary resignation in the parenthetical ‘when known’ from the author of The Use of Circulating Libraries, seem to indicate as much.

Like proprietors, borrowers could also take a range of positions on the ethics of freeloading from a circulating library. If Frances Burney is to be believed, her brother was far from the only person who did this with Evelina. She reports an unnamed man reporting, ‘there’s no getting [Evelina …] the folks that hire it keep lending it from one to another in such a manner that it is never returned to the library. It’s very provoking’.Footnote ²²⁰ Similarly, in his study of the visits made by Charlotte Francis (Charles and Frances Burney’s niece, coincidentally) to a Brighton library in 1799, Stephen Colclough stresses the young woman’s outrage at some friends who show ‘meanness’ in using library resources without subscribing, thereby ‘transgress[ing] the social codes of a membership community’.Footnote ²²¹

Such activity, therefore, could be seen as ‘provoking’ or ‘mean’. Despite this, Charles Burney does not seem remotely ashamed of his self-reported subletting practice at a moment when he had more reason to watch his step than most. We must assume too, unless Charles was able to misrepresent the book as his own,Footnote ²²² that the eminently respectable citizens of Aberdeen who borrowed the book from him did not object too much to the practice of subletting either. Such participation acts as another hint that, during the period of the subscriber’s ‘custody’ of a library book, the circulating library’s proprietorship may have been felt to loosen or even be suspended altogether. Such hints, taken cumulatively, suggest that the university library and the commercial circulating library may have fostered very different senses of obligation in the same borrower, which in turn may have stimulated different treatments and behaviours of the borrowed books.

As Allan and Towsey both note, library records ‘can only inform our understanding of the reading nation to a limited extent’.Footnote ²²³ Personal accounts like Charles’s can help us to trace the footprint of borrowed books and to develop a sense – though, as both scholars stress, not a systematic one – of the impact of libraries on the reading nation.Footnote ²²⁴ Charles’s practice should provoke us to reconsider how one loan may have spawned many readers, which might, in turn, lead us to recalibrate the likely scale of readership compared to book production or library holdings.Footnote ²²⁵ Where Kaufman calculates readership in terms of library borrowings with no explicit consideration of the fact that sublettings might have occurred, St Clair and Stewart-Murphy try to factor in a rough one-to-four multiplier.Footnote ²²⁶ Yet we see Charles Burney, empowered by his one-shilling-and-six-pence-per-month ‘custody’ of Evelina and with his own poetic preface framing it to the world, subletting Angus’s set widely across households, to at least twelve readers and probably more. Such an example, though I make no claims for its representativeness, should inflect our sense of what circulating libraries made possible, both in terms of their demographic impact and their psychological weight.

5.2 ’All the Sweet Creatures’: Lending Evelina

Above, I suggest that the circulating library loan may have occupied a liminal proprietorial status in late eighteenth-century society, whereby it was perceived to enter the ‘custody’ of the borrower in such a way as to legitimate material and circulatory practices resembling those of an ‘owned’ volume. I now wish to nuance this argument by considering how such a status may have frustrated the ability of the borrower to undertake such practices. In previous sections, I have shown how Charles, deep in the throes of his identified performance of Macartney, attempted to use his sister’s book and his own poetry to create a reading community (to appropriate Stephen Colclough’s useful term) in which demonstrations of his literary prowess might be repaid by amatory and material advantage. I have also pinpointed his transmission of Evelina to his ‘two angels, the Miss Willox’s’ as a particularly acute nexus of his amatory and material desires. When Charles addresses Jessy and Rachel, he has one foot in an established culture of gift-giving as ‘an activity connecting patrons to their dependents’ and the other in a newer one whereby exchange ‘define[s] the intimate sphere’.Footnote ²²⁷ When we consider this loan within the context of Charles’s temporary custodianship of the novel and the restrictions it imposed upon him, we start to understand how his status within a loan economy frustrated his efforts.

The amatory gift – what Charles Haskell Hinnant calls an ‘erotically invested and investing performative’ – has come under increased scrutiny in recent years with the renewed popularity of Marcel Mauss’s anthropological work around gift exchange, the rise of material culture studies, and the ‘turn’ towards history of emotions. Sally Holloway provides a neat summary of the framing rationale. If ‘the exchange of gifts was a crucial form of language’, then it makes sense that exchanged objects ‘played a fundamental role in creating and affirming feelings of love’. Holloway draws on Sara Ahmed’s work on ‘objects of happiness’ to consider love tokens as ‘sticky’: ‘they garner positive value as they are exchanged’.Footnote ²²⁸

Books, of course, were one popular form of love token, which ‘allowed lovers to gauge one another’s reactions to particular texts and share their own reading preferences’, acting as indicators of their ‘education, disposition, and world view’. However, in a consumer marketplace where books were ‘by nature standardised, identical, and available for anyone to purchase for a set price’, individuating strategies were often employed: ‘Such objects held particular value if they had been adapted or modified by senders in some way, in order to render them unique.’Footnote ²²⁹ It is in this context that Andrew Piper has addressed personalised manuscript inscriptions included in Romantic miscellanies, arguing that they offered ‘a way of replacing the anonymous distribution of mass-produced objects with a model of intimate circulation … The discourse of friendship and the practice of gift-giving under which miscellanies were produced and circulated were intended to counteract precisely the anonymity of mass circulation’.Footnote ²³⁰

I have argued that Charles’s sonnet attempts to enforce a sentimental reading of the narrative that positions him as Macartney: poet, suppliant, brother, and lover. Given his declared romantic interest in Jessy Willox, in offering her the book with its carefully revised inscription (the reference to Orville removed, perhaps, so as not to dilute his performance of Macartney), he partially fulfils the terms of Holloway’s definition, ‘shar[ing] his own reading preferences’’ and ‘gaug[ing]’ Jessy’s. However, crucially, his dedication to the ‘Female Reader … whoe’er thou art’ is general rather than specific. The reason for this is both obvious and perplexing. Apparently oblivious to the imperative of the amatory gift to perform uniqueness, Charles did not intend that the book’s subletting journey would stop with Jessy, since he wished to circulate it as widely as possible. The book’s status as a loan is intrinsic to such logic, since, as Towsey points out, the act of borrowing ‘decisively shape[s] … reading of the books involved’.Footnote ²³¹ Charles was borrowing Evelina from Angus to a timescale that was strictly demarcated, with a financial penalty for overdue returns. In terms of cost–benefit analysis, there was an imperative to eke out as much social capital as possible through an efficient subletting system and an even more efficient, because impersonal, dedication. In other words, Charles’s indefinite language and indiscriminate practice are shaped by the temporary quality of his custodianship.

Such a strategy, of course, entirely misreads the defining quality of the amatory gift; it is supposed to be special. Perhaps unsurprisingly, therefore, Charles was unsuccessful in his attempt to create an amatory reading community. The sparse traces of Jessy Willox’s reader response suggest that she spurned Charles’s sentimental dictum with considerable spirit. By his own account, she neither weeps nor sighs over the narrative, nor ‘[en]graves the moral’ on her breast or heart. Instead, she resists Charles’s call to sensibility by reading the novel as a comic romp, praising the vulgar Branghtons, declaring the boorish Captain Mirvan her ‘favourite’, and ‘almost kill[ing] herself with laughing’.Footnote ²³² In the face of Charles’s gendered belletristic strictures, the violence of Jessy’s laughter has a defiant quality. So too does the one poem of her composition that survives. Addressed to Charles a few months after he lent her Evelina, it both acknowledges a recent gift of some fruit, and acts as a broader response to his many poems:

Amidst Charles’s stock epithets and generic compliments, Jessy’s energetic doggerel and irreverent banter are decidedly refreshing. She rejects the off-the-rack neoclassical terms imposed upon her, just as she rejects the reading of Evelina imposed by Charles’s sonnet. Shortly afterwards she would deal the ultimate rejection: accepting the proposals of another suitor, John Campbell, while Charles was out of the way in Banff.

Jessy Willox, then, was not the Evelina to Charles’s Macartney. Her older sister Rachel, however, who also borrowed the set, seems to have sympathised more with Charles’s sentimental approach (‘Miss Willox is very fond of [the character] Evelina’). Consequently, the correspondence suggests that Charles may have turned his attentions to Rachel over the later part of 1779 and early 1780. During this time, she, rather than Jessy, is the subject of Charles’s most ambitious attempt to position himself as the broker of privileged access to the author of Evelina: a promise that he could persuade his celebrated sister to write to Rachel and eventually to meet her.

Charles apparently first approached Frances with this odd request in the early autumn of 1779. In October, Frances tells their father, ‘I have written my long Letter to Charles, & taken what pains I could to show the imprudence of the request concerning a Commendatory Letter.’Footnote ²³⁴ Though she might reasonably refuse such a request simply on the grounds of not wanting to write an awkward note to someone she had never met, the reference to ‘imprudence’ indicates that she felt the act of writing the letter would in some way compromise either herself, or Charles, or both. However, Charles would not take no for an answer, and early the following year he tried to persuade Frances again. In an extant but badly mutilated letter, he laments that her refusal to write to Rachel ‘grieves him much’:

The scope of Charles’s request had apparently widened, by this time, from a ‘Commendatory Letter’ to a ‘literary correspondence’. It seems likely that Frances ignored him; in any case, we hear no more of the request after this date.

Alongside the loan of Evelina, Charles’s promise to ‘my Rachel’ can be read as another attempted amatory gift. Once again, his approach demonstrates a certain resourcefulness which, in place of financial credentials, offers celebrity connections and showcases literary pedigree. And, once again, his enterprise indicates only half an understanding of the conditions necessary for success. Just as he had with Jessy, Charles met with firm resistance from the woman whom he tried to fit to certain conceptual moulds to further his own ends. In this case, the resistance was that of his usually indulgent sister. Frances’s staunch refusal to write to Rachel at Charles’s request gives us a glimpse into how she may have viewed his other attempts to capitalise on her success.

The defining obligations of gift exchange, Marcel Mauss informs us, are to give, receive, and reciprocate.Footnote ²³⁶ A loan, however, creates the obligations to give, receive, and return: a crucial difference which, rather than taking the relationship between participants to new ground, moves it back to the starting position. It is certainly possible to envisage a context in which such a twice-gifting is actually conducive to courtship, enabling a palimpsestic emotional connection and re-connection over time, and fostering a reciprocity that the gift cannot achieve. Indeed, I have hinted that the annotation about moor fowl in the SC set of Evelina – which, we should remember, originally belonged to the Burney family rather than a library – may indicate precisely such a context. But Charles does not achieve this with his circulating library copy of Evelina. The temporary nature of the borrower’s custody results in a frenetic rate of sublending, a temporary form of inscription, and a framing rhetoric of universality and indefiniteness which casts him as a deficient agent in the process of textual exchange.

There are, no doubt, many reasons for Charles Burney’s failure to create his intended reading community. He was apparently just as clumsy a reader of women as he was of fiction, and it is likely that neither Jessy nor Rachel Willox took him seriously as a suitor. But it is important to note that Charles was operating within a loan economy dictated by his material circumstances as least as much as by his personal qualities. The book is not his own to give, merely an object that is temporarily in his ‘custody’. It can be lent but it must also be reclaimed, a fact which is directly related to Charles’s own financial precarity. Such a status in turn inflects his ability to mark the book effectively with his sonnet, or to convincingly address the ‘sweet Creatures’ whom he sought to target. He is hamstrung by his reliance on impersonal modes of circulation, address, and praise. In his cycle of lending and reclaiming his sister’s novel, one can access a sense of his precarity in scholarly, sociable, familial, literary, and sexual spheres, and of the ways in which he attempted to exploit opportunities offered by print and manuscript cultures to bolster his own footing.