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133 four The Theater and the City Cecilia Z Z Z Let me counsel you to remember that a lady, whether so called from birth or only from fortune, should never degrade herself by being put on a level with writers and such sort of people. —Frances Burney, Cecilia Following the suppression of The Witlings, Charles Burney continued to caution his daughter against writing for the stage, encouraging her instead to return to novel writing: “For the stage, I w.d have you very careful, & very perfect—that is,as far as your own Efforts,& the best advice you can get,can make you. In the Novel Way, there is no danger.”¹ A few months after she received this letter, Burney was already complying with her father’s wishes, announcing in the fall of 1779 to Samuel Crisp and Hester Thrale that she had begun a new literary project—“in the Novel Way.” Burney spent two years working on the new novel, provisionally titled Albinia; it was finally published as Cecilia on 12 July 1782 to such acclaim that it remained the most outstanding literary phenomenon in England until the publication of Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho in 1794. According to Joyce Hemlow, the novel was “not a spontaneous but a forced production, written largely because Dr. Burney thought that the new author should seize and capitalize on the shining hour of her first success .”² Hemlow emphasizes how Charles imposed his will, and his tastes, on Frances as she strenuously wrote and revised, subjecting her to emotional pressure that affected the novel’s composition. My own view of her father’s impact on Cecilia, however, has less to do with its pressurized composition—his injunctions that she write both quickly and prudently, as Frances complained to Susanna—than with the novel’s transmodal quality. It was Charles Burney’s role in suppressing her first play that led Frances to channel her gift for playwriting into the new novel. Backstage in the Novel 134 With Evelina, Burney had served her literary apprenticeship, exploring the theatrical dimensions of Georgian society under the double cover of anonymous authorship and the novel’s epistolary format. Cecilia, instead, was composed not in secret but under the watchful eyes of Samuel Crisp and Charles Burney. Frances’s confidence as an author is apparent, her use of third-person narrative allowing for a stronger authorial presence than in her first novel. She also benefited from the comments sent to her by Hester Thrale, who received the novel in installments and described her reactions in a sort of “reading to the moment” that became an integral part of the process of composition.³ In Cecilia, the heroine inhabits a world that extends well beyond the precincts of fashionable London. As in The Witlings, the cast of characters in Cecilia spans the spectrum from high to low, and Cecilia moves both among the wealthy of the West End and among the humble residents of the dense warrens in the city of London. Working with a broader canvas, and with an expanded set of contextual references compared with her first novel, Burney thus shifts from Evelina’s focus on theatricality to the more ambitious scale of diffuse, pervasive spectacularity.⁴ Heavily indebted to The Witlings, Cecilia takes up many of the play’s elements , transforming and adapting them to new ends. Burney toyed briefly with the idea of resurrecting The Witlings after Sheridan and Murphy urged her to do so in the winter of 1780. She considered thoroughly revising act 4 and planned to abolish the implausible financial resolution provided by Censor’s gift of £5,000 to the protagonists. She also would have removed all traces of “the unlucky resemblance” between Lady Smatter and Mrs. Montagu , “our female pride of literature” (DL, 1:316). But after Crisp’s polite reiteration of his disapproval of the comedy in late February (DL, 1:320–23), there is no further mention of The Witlings in Burney’s correspondence; the next journal entry after Crisp’s letter is dated 7 April 1780. At this time, Burney had been working on Cecilia for at least five months and it is certainly plausible that the early phases of the novel’s composition went hand in hand with Burney’s revision of her play. If this is the case, then the concluding passage—later deleted—of her introduction to Cecilia can be read as an ironic comment on the suppression of the comedy orchestrated by Dr. Burney and...

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