Imperial Sensibilities, Colonial Ambivalence: Edmund Burke and Frances Burney

Differing markedly in their approach to social and political theater, Frances Burney and Edmund Burke nonetheless shared a hyperbolic approach to what we might call the economy of imagination. In a 1782 letter celebrating Burney's new novel Cecilia, Burke balanced his praise of the novel with a mild complaint of narrative excess: "Justly as your characters are drawn, perhaps they are too numerous. But I beg pardon; I fear it is quite in vain to preach economy to those who are come young to excessive and sudden opulence."¹ Burney returned both the compliment and the complaint in her informal review of Burke's performance at the Warren Hastings impeachment. In one of Burney's many conversations with William Windham, Burke's two admirers discussed his public performance: "'How finely,' [Burney] cried, 'he has spoken! with what fulness of intelligence, and what fervour!'" Windham "agreed, with delighted concurrence." "'Yet,—so much!—so long!' I added. 'True!' cried he, ingenuously, yet concerned. 'What pity he can never stop!'"²

Aesthetic economies connect with commercial economies in the political theater of sensibility: as Burke's management of the Hastings impeachment attempted to put an end to the corrupt commercial relations of the East India Company, his legal theatrics worked to stage the political demands of disinterested benevolence, the importance of acting not according to economic self-interest, but according to universal moral claims. Yet Burney's Cecilia had already confronted the sentimental demands of universally benevolent action—and demonstrated the impossibility of meeting those demands: "A strong sense of DUTY, a fervent desire to ACT RIGHT, were the ruling characteristics of her mind: her affluence she therefore considered as a debt contracted with the poor: and her independence, as a tie upon her liberality to pay it with interest."³ As Catherine Gallagher has noted in her reading of the novel, "Disinterested benevolence actually exacts a usoriously high level of interest." After all, Cecilia, the heiress, ends up mad in a pawn-shop, marketed in public newspapers.⁴ While she eventually recovers sanity, respectability, and some of her lost wealth, Cecilia's sacrifices remain far greater than her rewards. Critics disliked this sentimental economic imbalance: the English Review, for instance, remarked that "had a flaw in the Dean's will enabled Miss Beverley to enter again into possession of her estate, perhaps the conclusion would have left a more pleasing impression on the mind."⁵ Burke, meeting Burney socially, remarked that he "wished the conclusion either more happy or more miserable; 'for in a work of imagination,' said he, 'there is no medium.'" Though at the time she "was not easy enough to answer him," Burney had much to say "in defence of following life and nature as much in the conclusion as in the progress of a tale; and when is life and nature completely happy or miserable?" (D, 2:473). In a letter to Samuel Crisp, Burney had already defended her choice: "I must frankly confess I shall think I have rather written a farce than a serious history, if the whole is to end, like the hack Italian operas, with a jolly chorus that makes all parties good and all parties happy!" (D, 1:425).

The aesthetic differences between Burney and Burke, articulated by Burney partly in relation to theater, played themselves out politically on the borders of the Hastings impeachment. Preeminent statesman of the Romantic period, Burke was also one of the most flamboyantly theatrical members of parliament—and perhaps the best informed on English India. Appealing to the public through an imagined national sensibility, Burke presented East Indian corruption alternately through the hyperbole and descriptive overlay of romance and through the economic and moral complexities associated with sentiment. Burke's performance at the impeachment first attempted to invoke national agency through the interplay of suffering and systems; over the course of six years, it subsided into a semi-private exhibition of outrage and uneasy...