The Susan Burney Letters Project

The Letters and Letter-Journals

The letter-journals of 1779-80 are notable for their detailed comments on music and musicians, but also contain memorable accounts of important events of the day. Her description of the benefit concert of the castrato singer Gaspar Pacchierotti and part of her account of the Gordon riots are included here.

The letter journals of 1787-92 are largely concerned with Susan's family life with her husband and two small children at Mickleham, Surrey. They also contain descriptions of domestic music-making, visits to the house of the violinists Scheener and Salomon, and accounts of Susan's periodical visits to London and the concerts she attended there.

The letter-journals of 1795-1799 chronicle the unhappy final years of Susan's life, first in England, and later in rural Ireland, where she was obliged to move in October 1796 to join her husband and children at his estate in Belcotton, Co. Louth. An account of her sea journey to Ireland and an extract from a letter written from Belcotton are included here.

General description
There are around 330 holograph letters and letter-journals, amounting to an estimated 650,000 words, located at the New York Public Library (60%), the British Library (24%), and at Yale University (16%). Copies of twenty-seven letters are at the Robinson Library, Armagh.

The letters and letter-journals are in good condition. As can be seen from the letter-image Susan Burney's hand is readily legible and presents few problems of transcription. As with all the Burney papers, however, there are some passages that were later obliterated by Frances Burney. It is sometimes possible to reinstate them, as has been done with the letters of Charles and the letters and letter-journals of Frances Burney herself.

The letter-journals: general features
The letter-journals, which make up most of the resource, date from the periods 1779-80, 1787-92, and 1795-9. They are addressed to Susan's elder sister Frances, to whom she was exceptionally close. They are the counterparts of Frances Burney's own letter-journals, which were in their turn all addressed to Susan.

It was Susan's practice to write the letter-journals as diary entries, sending them to her sister in batches as convenient. Individual letter-journals cover periods from a few days to a few weeks, divided up into smaller sections each covering one or more days. A similar practice was adopted by Frances in her own letter-journals.

The length of the letter-journals varies a great deal, but they typically extend to ten, twenty, or thirty pages, and on occasion to as many as sixty pages and approximately 15,000 words.

The letter-journals of 1779-80
Susan wrote the letter-journals of 1779-80 as a woman of twenty-four and twenty-five, still living in the family home in St Martin's Street, London. Her sister Frances, following the success of her first novel Evelina, was spending a good deal of time away from home with Henry Thrale and his wife Hester at their country seat at Streatham Park, Surrey, where Samuel Johnson was a frequent house-guest.

The letter-journals of this period chronicle the comings and goings of musicians, men of letters, and artists to the house in St Martin's Street, Susan's frequent visits to the theatre and to concerts, and her invariably perceptive comments on music, performers, and performances.

These letter-journals have recently attracted a good deal of scholarly attention from musicologists and theatre historians. The authors of a recent study of Italian opera in London in the late eighteenth century described Susan as 'the best critic we have encountered, and by far the most important source on opera in the period'; adding that the letter-journals were 'almost totally unknown and unused by historians' (Curtis Price, Judith Milhous, and Robert D. Hume, Italian Opera in late Eighteenth-Century London: The King's Theatre, Haymarket, 1778-1791 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), p. 23). They continued:

Susan Burney ... supplies in unique and abundant detail much of what her father omitted to say about the London Italian opera, at least for the 1779-80 season. [Her letter-journals reveal] a witty and lucid writer, one with good Italian, a technical grasp of music, and an insatiable appetite for rehearsals and backstage gossip. She opens a window for us on the inside of the opera performance world unique for this period. Hers is a remarkably independent voice, sometimes out of tune with her father and her more famous sister Fanny, and always more articulate about the dramatic side of opera. She was an opera fanatic, but a highly critical one, and her obsessively detailed reportage of rehearsals, performances, and conversations with performers is like nothing else in the period.

One performer who features prominently is the castrato singer Gasparo Pacchierotti, who was the star attraction of the Italian opera company at the King's Theatre in the Haymarket. He was a frequent visitor at St Martin's Street, and Susan was evidently infatuated by him. Susan's account of Pacchierotti's benefit at the King's Theatre on 9 March 1780 forms the first extract. It forms part of a twelve-page letter-journal written between 8 and 17 March 1780.

The artistic events and personalities of the day are not the sole subjects of the 1779-80 letter-journals, and Susan Burney also describes some important public events. Her vivid eye-witness account of the Gordon Riots in June 1780, part of which forms the second extract, is justly celebrated. It forms the first part of her thirty-page letter-journal written between 8 and12 June 1780.

The letter-journals of 1787-1792
By 1787, when she started the next run of letter-journals, Susan was married to Molesworth Phillips and was living with him at Mickleham, near Dorking. Frances was at court at Windsor as Second Keeper of the Robes to Queen Charlotte, wife of George III, in a position that was at the same time arduous and tedious, and that largely cut her off from her family and friends.

By now Susan had two young children, Frances (Fanny) and Norbury, born in 1782 and 1785; a third child, William (Willy), would follow in 1791. Much of the content of the letter-journals of this period concerns domestic and family matters, in particular relating to the upbringing and health of the children. But Susan was not cut off from music at Mickleham, and there are many accounts of domestic music-making, including performances of pieces by such composers as Haydn, Pleyel, and Kozeluch. In addition there were visits from London musicians, including the violinists Scheener and Salomon in 1788 and 1789.

Susan also made extended visits to London, where she attended opera performances, and concerts at the Hanover Square Rooms and the Pantheon. Her letter-journals from this period are a particularly rich source of information on concert life in London, with detailed comment on such musicians as the violinists Giardini (now at the end of his career, and in sad decline) and Giornovichi, and her beloved Pacchierotti, on what turned out to be his last visit to London. Sadly, she appears not to have attended any of the concerts of Haydn's first London visit in 1791-2.

The letter-journals of 1795-1799
By the beginning of the final sequence of letter-journals, which continue almost up to the time of Susan's death, the Phillips's marriage had all but disintegrated. Meanwhile, in 1793 Frances had married the French émigré Alexandre d'Arblay and was living with him at Bookham, close to her sister and her old friends the Lockes.

In June 1795, worried about the deteriorating political situation in Ireland and the threat of French invasion, Phillips decided to give up the house at Mickleham and to live on his Irish estate at Belcotton, near Drogheda, Co Louth; he had already placed Norbury with a private tutor in Dublin. Susan was left behind to manage as best she could with the other two children, and lodged with her brothers James and Charles in turn. In the following summer Phillips returned to London, now insisting that Susan should accompany him back to Ireland and live with him at Belcotton. She did so very much against her will, in the knowledge that if she refused she would probably never see her children again. Sea- passage, the third extract, which forms part of a short letter to Frances, describes her voyage from Holyhead on 31 October 1796, and her safe arrival in Ireland.

The house at Belcotton was unfinished, cold, damp, and without amenities. Phillips was by this time openly conducting a love affair with Jane Brabazon, a neighbour and distant cousin, and Susan was left virtually abandoned. This was therefore a time of great unhappiness, and the isolation and the strain of the situation took its inevitable toll on Susan's health.

The letter- journals from this period chronicle this unhappy time, first in England, and then in Ireland. Those written after Susan's arrival in Ireland are inevitably largely concerned with domestic matters and the complications of her husband's affair with Jane Brabazon, with whom Susan surprisingly struck up a warm friendship. Events from the wider world also feature, notably the Irish Rebellion of 1798 and the French landings in Bantry Bay in November 1796 and at Killala, Co Mayo in August 1798.

The final extract, Belcotton, was written on 9 October 1798 and is the opening of a four-page letter to Frances. Here, Susan pours out her heart to her sister and gives full expression to her desire to see her father again.

In the autumn of 1799, Phillips finally agreed that Susan could return home. She left Belcotton with Fanny and Willy in early December, by now in very poor health. On arriving in Dublin she had to take to her bed, and was not able to continue her journey until the end of the month. After a crossing of the Irish sea she landed at Parkgate (the alternative port to Holyhead for crossings to and from Ireland, on the Dee estuary near Chester) at the end of December. Her brother Charles was despatched to meet her and bring her home to London, but it was too late. She died at Parkgate on 6 January 1800.

(page top)