Frances Burney's Evelina: Mirvan and Mezzotint

Frances Burney's Evelina: Mirvan and MezzotintJohn Hart In the spring of 1779, the year following the publication of Evelina, Robert Sayer, Map and Printseiler, brought out a humorous mezzotint, "An English Jack-Tar Giving Monsieur a Drubbing" (figure I),1 in which a sailor and a gloating ship's boy get the better of a fashionable gentleman . The print captures the battle in progress—the Frenchman's hat knocked off, wig in disarray, and sword broken at his feet. The tar cocks his stout oak staff for a finishing blow. While the print postdates Frances Burney's novel, it recalls images in related droll and satiric mezzotints from earlier in the 1770s that are in turn echoed in incidents involving Captain Mirvan, and suggests the milieu of the sea-officer's rough humour. Beyond that, the prints reveal social tensions also evident in Evelina, and in selected instances may offer sources for specific episodes. This paper surveys those images in the mezzotints from the 1770s which are relevant to a reading of Evelina, especially the figures of "monsieur," the "macaroni," and the "monkey." In this social context Mirvan can be read as a character responsive to concerns specific to the 1770s, rather than as the flawed caricature that critics have defined . The aim is to test the extent to which the topicality that underlies Burney's portrayal lends complexity to his character. Burney's Captain Mirvan drew protests from the outset. Despite the nod to Smollett in the preface, Burney's characterization of a "surly, 1 Reproduced by permission of The Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division; all other illustrations are from the collection of the Hon. CA. Lennox-Boyd, Burford, Oxfordshire. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 7, Number 1, October 1994 52 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION Figure 1 MIRVAN AND MEZZOTINT 53 vulgar, and disagreeable"2 sea captain ran counter to the image ofthejolly jack-tar that was more typical of the period. The first published notice in the Monthly Review, though generally admiring, ended with a rebuke: "From this commendation, however, we must except the character of a son of Neptune, whose manners are rather those of a rough, uneducated country 'Squire than those of a genuine sea-captain."3 In a similar vein, Burney's diary entry from 1780 catalogues adverse comments by seaofficers . Here Mrs Thrale responds to Lord Mulgrave's raillery that "Miss Burney ... is one of the greatest of our enemies!"—"a rub," Burney writes,"for my old offence, which he seems determined not to forget." "All the sea captains," said Mrs. Thrale, "fall upon Miss Burney: Captain Cotton, my cousin, was for ever plaguing her about her spite for the navy." This, however, was for the character of Captain Mirvan, which, in a comical and good-humoured way, Captain Cotton pretended highly to resent, and so, he told me, did all the captains in the navy. Augusta Byron, too, tells me that the Admiral, her father, very often speaks of Captain Mirvan, and though the book is very high in his favour, is not half pleased with die Captain's being such a brute.4 Earlier, twenty months after Evelina appeared, in a letter to Hester Maria Thrale, Samuel Johnson could already refer to that "old objection to the Captain's grossness."5 CN. Robinson's classic study on the British tar sustains the complaint into the early twentieth century: "an age ... which drew satisfaction from the 'Evelina' of Miss Burney, could hardly give us a real seaman in the pages of its novelists."6 Modern discussions of Evelina, while less inclined to dispute the justice of Burney's portrait , extend this tendency to read Mirvan as caricature and, accordingly, as one among several stereotypes upon which Burney and her naïve narrator rely. Recent feminist readings attribute more rhetorical control to Evelina's epistolary voice and ascribe cultural resonance to figures, such as the Branghtons, formerly considered caricatures. Mirvan, however , continues to be viewed as a caricature, although, at least within the 2 Frances Burney, Evelina; or The History ofa Young Lady's Entrance into the World, ed. Edward A. Bloom and Lillian D. Bloom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 38...