BIB_ID
408066
Accession number
MA 35.28
Creator
Burney, Fanny, 1752-1840.
Display Date
1816 September 30.
Credit line
Purchased by Pierpont Morgan, 1905.
Description
1 item (4 pages, with address) ; 22.8 x 18.5 cm
Notes
Signed with initials.
Address panel with seal and postmarks: "Captain Burney, / James Street, / Westminster / 26 / London."
Address panel with seal and postmarks: "Captain Burney, / James Street, / Westminster / 26 / London."
Provenance
Purchased by Pierpont Morgan from the London dealer Quaritch in July 1905 as part of a collection of Burney's correspondence and fragments of manuscripts, bound in three volumes. Disbound in 1925.
Summary
Writing that she has been busy pulling together copies of "certificates & Brevets" for Monsieur d'Arblay so that he could collect his half-pay; telling James that he should write to d'Arblay directly with a question that had arisen in the course of preparing the last volume of his Chronological History of the Voyages and Discoveries in the South Sea; mentioning that James might be able to reach the geographer Jean-Nicholas Buache de la Neuville through d'Arblay's friend Jean-Florimond Boudon de Saint-Amans: "To find any body in Paris, (where the very rich only have houses to themselves,) without the street & number, is as difficult, & long, & laborious as to arrive, grade by grade, & Ear by Ear, to ask a question of the King of Borneo"; writing that she is currently supervising her son Alex, "who is at this moment doing some of the Work towards taking a degree that he was superior to attending to the first year he was at Cambridge [...] O la! it takes as long a time now a days to make a Boy a Man as to bake porcelain in one of your Phillippine Islands. Less than 50 years won't do for either"; discussing the health and well-being of various family members, including Esther, Sarah Harriet and Charles; referring to his work on the last volume of his Chronological History: "I am very glad your work advances fast enough to give you courage to write the word FINIS, though only in perspective. If we like the next last volume as well as we like the late last, & if other people are of our mind, we shall want you to write More Last Words, & More to the end of the Chapter"; questioning a fact in the book; apologizing for Alex not having yet paid back a neighbor of James's; sending her love to "dear Mrs. Burney, & to Martinus & Salina [Martin and Sarah]."
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