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  • Monkey Business:Lord Orville and the Limits of Politeness in Frances Burney’s Evelina
  • Patricia L. Hamilton (bio)

In a journal entry in the spring of 1774, Frances Burney rendered her judgment of the newly published volume of letters that Philip Dormer Stanhope, fourth Earl of Chesterfield, had written over a period of thirty years to his illegitimate son, Philip Stanhope, starting in 1738, when the boy was six years old. Burney observed that the letters are "extremely well written" and contain "some excellent hints for Education," but they tend towards making Chesterfield's son "wholly unprincipled" by "inculcating immorality; countenancing all Gentlemanlike vices; advising deceit, and exhorting to Inconstancy."1 Although Lord Chesterfield's Letters to His Son was reviewed positively in the London Magazine and some of his advice excerpted in conduct manuals such as The Polite Preceptor (1776),2 Burney's verdict echoed the volume's generally negative reception. Complaints about the moral tenor of the work can be found both in private correspondence and in the public forum.3 Particularly [End Page 415] objectionable was Chesterfield's intimation that young Stanhope could acquire polish by engaging in a discreet liaison with an upper-class French woman.

In this context, it would be easy to dismiss Burney's response to Letters to His Son as an echo of popular sentiment, epitomized by Samuel Johnson's famous quip that the work "teaches the morals of a whore, and the manners of a dancing master."4 Yet the fact that Burney read Chesterfield's Letters and debated the merits of his advice with her family and friends reveals that in the period preceding the publication of her first novel, Evelina (1778), she was engaged in thinking about what constitutes male virtue (The Early Journals, 2:49, 62–63). Indeed, she had been doing so apparently as far back as November 1768, when her journal records a conversation she had with Alexander Seton, a suitor of her older sister, Hetty. Burney represents herself as surprised and a little put out at Seton's opinion that Samuel Richardson's Sir Charles Grandison is too perfect a character to have ever existed in real life: "It quite hurts me," she replied to him, "to hear anybody declare a really & thoroughly good man never Lived. It is so much to the disgrace of mankind" (The Early Journals, 1:47). Seemingly, her response to mankind's disgrace was to fashion her own paragon of masculine behaviour, Lord Orville. She could barely suppress her delight at her cousin Richard's response to her fictional creation when, not knowing Burney was the author of Evelina , he praised Lord Orville's "extraordinary" politeness and confessed to studying Orville's character "every Day of his life," intending, Burney inferred, "to make him his model, as far as his situation would allow" (The Early Journals, 3:7, 10, 9).

Twentieth-century critics, by contrast, have faulted Lord Orville for being "notoriously wooden," "sexually uninteresting," and "too good to be true."5 If measured strictly against the high spirits of Fielding's Tom Jones or the energy of Richardson's Lovelace, Orville might [End Page 416] at first glance seem characterized by a Grandisonian reserve. But, despite Burney's unquestionable debt to Richardson, it would be a mistake to see Orville as little more than an unimaginative knock-off of Sir Charles Grandison.6 I would argue that Burney's treatment of Lord Orville is more subtle and complex than most critics over the past forty years have allowed—with the exception, perhaps, of Kristina Straub in her landmark feminist reading of Burney's early novels. Straub's probing analysis of Lord Orville's passivity during the old women's race highlights his role in a larger ideological nexus concerned with power and powerlessness in the novel.7

While Straub's interrogation of Burney's male paragon displays the virtues of a close analysis of the text, recent work by social historians on the rise of politeness in the early eighteenth century can enrich our understanding of Lord Orville by refocusing our attention on the novel's context. Specifically, issues of gender and power in Evelina come into sharper focus...

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