Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (9 page)

It was with his fifth novel,
Man as he is
(1792) that Bage hit his stride. An aristocratic rake’s progress, it coheres better than any of its predecessors and tells a better
story. Its titular sequel,
Hermsprong; or, Man as he is not
(1796), is by general agreement Bage’s masterwork. The narrative opens in sprightly fashion. The narrator, Gregory Glen, is a by-blow of the local squire and proclaims the fact with satirical glee: ‘Alas! I am the son of nobody. I was, indeed, begotten by my valiant father, Gregory Grooby, Esq. upon the body of my chaste mother, Ellen Glen.’ Like other radicals Bage regarded the bastardy laws of England as barbaric. Glen’s main business is to introduce the hero, Hermsprong. He has been brought up, Rousseauistically, by American Indians and lives, comfortably, in France. He is thus the child of two revolutions. He causes consternation in the hidebound circles of English high society (none the less winning himself a noble bride), to whom his ideas are as outlandish as his name – which is universally and comically mispronounced (e.g. ‘Hermsprog’).

Jacobins loved the novel and it was still possible, if increasingly unpopular, to be starry-eyed about revolutions. William Godwin went out of his way to meet Bage and reported finding the sixty-seven-year-old author of
Hermsprong
‘delightful’ and ‘youthful in all his carriage’. As the century closed, however, with war against France, idealism faded. Bage’s last pronouncement on world affairs, in June 1799, is terminally gloomy:

Everything looks black and malignant upon me. Men clamouring for wages which I cannot give – women threatening to pull down my mill – rags raised by freight and insurance – excise-officers depriving me of paper! Say, if thou can’st, whether these gentlemen of the excise-office can seize paper after it has left the maker’s possession? – after it has been marked? – stamped? – signed with the officer’s name? – excise duty paid? – Do they these things? – Am I to hang myself?

There was no need. He died a year later.

I believe it is difficult for those who publish their own memoirs to escape the imputation of vanity … it is also their misfortune, that what is uncommon is rarely, if ever, believed.
Equiano

Equiano, later known as Gustavus Vassa, was born around 1745 in what is now the Igbo (‘Essaka’, as he calls it) region of Nigeria. It was then a part of the Abyssinian Empire. Equiano’s father was, he records, a village elder. He was also a slave-owner but, his son hastens to add, a very
humane
slave-owner. By his own account, Equiano was brought up in a condition of rural simplicity, with numerous siblings. The environment was Edenic: a world away from the invasions, wars and revolutions which were upheaving Europe, the Indian subcontinent, and North America during the second half of the eighteenth century. Equiano’s childhood environment was a place, as he describes (in his stilted high Augustan prose):

where nature is prodigal of her favours, our wants are few and easily supplied; of course we have few manufactures. They consist for the most part of calicoes, earthern ware, ornaments, and instruments of war and husbandry. But these make no part of our commerce, the principal articles of which, as I have observed, are provisions. In such a state money is of little use.

He stresses the village’s high standards of virtue, cleanliness, abstemiousness and moral decency, contradicting the image of savagery that one finds, for example, in
Robinson Crusoe
. There is nothing in Equiano’s account of his Igbo/Essaka upbringing to contradict the slogan on the abolitionist medal: ‘Am I not a man and a brother?’ Equiano’s account in fact makes the Igbo even nobler than the whites who presume to ask that question.

Aged around eleven years, Equiano lost his African paradise. He was kidnapped while playing innocently with his sister, and carried off to slavery. Initially, like his father’s slaves, his masters were African, but then he was sold on to the traders at the coast. Here he first came into contact with white people. It inspires one of the more vivid sections in the narrative. They strike him as monsters, as he is thrown into the cargo vessel which will carry him away to the New World. These pale devils, with their ‘red faces and loose hair’ must be cannibals, he assumes: they will eat him. He faints with shock, horror, fear and despair – and, as he disgustedly recalls, the stench (‘the salutation to my nostrils’).

The description of the middle passage is the most affecting, and horrifying (and the most ‘interesting’) in Equiano’s later published
Interesting Narrative
. His later career, vivid as it is on the page, can be briefly summarised. Sold on a number of
times, he was transported to Barbados, where he was judged too physically slight for field labour in the sugar plantations. He eventually found himself in the colony of Virginia, where he was bought by a Royal Navy officer, renamed Gustavus Vassa, and – as a personal valet – humanely treated.

Equiano endeared himself by loyal service both to his master and, as a sailor on board ship, to the Crown – in acknowledgement of which, in England, he was, while still a teenager, sent to school to learn how to read and write. Equiano also became a devout Christian, persuading his master to let him be baptised, in 1759 – so that he might go to heaven with the white folk. He might be free up there, but not, for a few years yet, down here. Poor ‘Gustavus’ was sold on again. He was now a valuable property – a literate, numerate, well-spoken slave. As such he was eventually bought by a Quaker merchant in Philadelphia and put to work as an inventory clerk, on a tiny salary. Equiano eventually saved up the £40 required to buy his freedom.

After manumission, he prudently took up residence in England and went into trade himself for a few years (including ‘black gold’, or slaves) before allying himself with the British abolitionist movement, whose figurehead he became. He gave heart-rending speeches, preached, and married an Englishwoman. In 1789, with the help of noble patrons, he published
The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African.
The last phase of Equiano’s life was, evidently, happy, but is largely unrecorded. There were two daughters from his marriage; his wife died in 1796 and he followed her a year later, aged (probably) fifty-two. It is not known where he was buried – although he left a sizeable amount to his daughters.

Equiano’s interesting narrative was widely circulated in the abolition movement, as eyewitness evidence of the realities of slavery. It was everywhere taken to be autobiography: gospel truth. Equiano was ‘the black Ben Franklin’. And so it was accepted for centuries. But a few years ago, scholars – notably Vincent Carretta – found convincing evidence (specifically a baptismal certificate and a ship’s muster roll) that Equiano had been born in South Carolina. He was American.

This, if true (and it seems, currently, incontrovertible), means that the most vivid African and slave ship sections of the book – its heart – must be invention, fictional. It does not mean, of course, that the narrative is any less interesting, any more than Lord Jim’s experiences in the Indian Ocean are less interesting than Joseph Conrad’s in the same waters. But it does mean that what we have is not a memoir but a novel. One can compromise, and label it the first docunovel in English literature – or (given the South Carolina birthplace), American literature.

‘And what are you reading, Miss—?’ ‘Oh! It is only a novel!’ replies the young lady; while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame. ‘It is only
Cecilia,
or
Camilla,
or
Belinda’;
or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language.’
Jane Austen’s defence of her craft, via Fanny Burney, in
Northanger Abbey

Frances (Fanny) Burney was born in King’s Lynn, the third of six children of the parish organist. Of humble Scottish extraction, her father dropped the shameful prefix to his birth name, MacBurney. Her mother had French blood, and could claim slightly higher breeding, if, with it, a taint of Catholic incense. Fanny’s father, Charles, was – as his later career proved – much more than a provincial instrumentalist. He could claim at the time of his death to be the country’s major musicologist (although the term would have struck him as barbarous). His career was crowned with the award of an honorary doctorate from Oxford in 1769.

Her father was by far the most important figure in his daughter’s long life. Her first published novel,
Evelina
, opens with a filial ode of devotion to ‘Dr Burney’:

Oh Author of my being! – far more dear

To me than light, than nourishment, or rest,

Hygeia’s blessings, Rapture’s burning tear,

Or the life blood that mantles in my breast!

In the decades after her popularity as a novelist had passed, she dedicated herself to her father’s biography.
Memoirs of Dr Burney
was released to a world that had forgotten both of them in 1832. To him, to herself, and to her contemporaries (including, even Dr Johnson) she was ‘Fanny’ (‘Fannikin’ to close family friends). Under protest from feminist critics ‘Frances’ is nowadays preferred. She joins Elizabeth Gaskell and Mary Arnold Ward as one of the posthumously rechristened.

In 1760 the family moved to Soho, London, the bustling artistic heart of London where Burney made his way as a music teacher. His skill, learning and ingratiating manner made him welcome in drawing rooms as a guest and performer. There was never much money, but – given the age’s Hanoverian passion for
Hausmusik
– his genius fostered an unusual social mobility. The Burneys’ rise in the world is marked by progressively more fashionable London addresses. A summit in the family fortunes was reached with membership of Samuel Johnson and Hester Thrale’s circle,
in the Great Cham’s last years. Burney’s ‘Streatham Journal’ (1779–83), containing what Virginia Woolf calls her ‘gnat-eyed’ observations of the Thrale household, offers a snapshot of Johnson’s domestic character – much less ‘Johnsonian’ than the Boswellian portraiture. He had a particular tenderness for his little ‘Evelina’, as he was pleased, jokingly, to call her.

Exhausted by child-bearing, Frances’s mother had died in 1762. The sisters in the family were largely self-educated and after the loss of their mother they were drawn into a close-knit nucleus, exchanging letters, sharing journals, keeping diaries. We know more about Burney’s milieu than about any other writer of the period. Frances began ‘scribbling’ for her own and her sisters’ entertainment very early. She did not inherit (as did her sisters Hetty and Susanna) her father’s musical ability and was slightly the less favoured for it. They were sent to Paris to be finished and her brother went to Cambridge, while she was kept at home. But by way of compensation there was plenty of raw material for a future novelist. As Burney’s biographer Kate Chisholm notes: ‘The novels that Fanny was later to write are sometimes accused of being too full of dramatic incident to be credible, but within the family there were three elopements, innumerable affairs, disappearing children, and a possibly incestuous relationship.’ Her brother Charles was one of the most successful bibliophile-kleptomaniacs in English literary history (his memorial is the magnificent Burney collection of early newspapers, now in the British Library) and he advised her on literary matters.

On her father’s remarrying, in 1767, a woman whom the girls considered unsuitably crass (the widow of a prosperous King’s Lynn wine merchant) Fanny burned her already sizeable
oeuvre
in a ‘grand firework of destruction’. At the same time she began keeping a journal which survives as one of her most interesting compositions. It opens with an apostrophe to ‘Miss Nobody’, in which she promises to record ‘my every thought’. One thinks more than one writes and Burney’s private memorials, some twenty printed volumes, massively outweigh her four novels (long as they are) and eight surviving plays. Only one of the latter was ever performed,
Edwy and Elgiva
, and it closed after one night. Her most interesting drama,
The Witlings
, a satire on bluestockings, was suppressed by order of her father and her other ‘daddy’, the man of letters and friend of the family, Samuel Crisp.

Fanny’s sisters married and mis-married at the appropriate young age; Frances did not. In Jane Austen’s cruelly complected universe, an unmarried maiden’s ‘bloom’ is passed by the age of twenty-five (Anne Elliot is on the very brink of fading). Bloomless she might be but by her mid-twenties Fanny Burney was flourishing as a writer. In 1778, aged twenty-six, she published her first voluminous novel,
Evelina
. Epistolary in form and sub-Richardsonian in tone, it was subtitled ‘A Young Lady’s
Entrance into the World’ – that ‘world’ being the
monde
, not the Hogarthian street scenes she must have seen from her Soho windows as a child.