BIB_ID
408123
Accession number
MA 35.41
Creator
Burney, Fanny, 1752-1840.
Display Date
[1815 February].
Credit line
Purchased by Pierpont Morgan, 1905.
Description
1 item (4 pages, with address) ; 22.1 x 18.2 cm
Notes
Alexandre d'Arblay has added and signed a short letter to James on the third and fourth pages.
No date of writing is given and there are no postmarks. In The Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney, Hughes posits that this letter was written around, though before the actual date of, February 22, 1815. See the published correspondence, cited below, for additional information.
Address panel with part of a seal: "Capt. Burney, / James Street, / Westminster."
Also on the address panel is a note in the hand of James Burney: "pray direct & send off by post for Mrs. Broome."
No date of writing is given and there are no postmarks. In The Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney, Hughes posits that this letter was written around, though before the actual date of, February 22, 1815. See the published correspondence, cited below, for additional information.
Address panel with part of a seal: "Capt. Burney, / James Street, / Westminster."
Also on the address panel is a note in the hand of James Burney: "pray direct & send off by post for Mrs. Broome."
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
[FBA]: Saying that "[m]elancholy & affrighting accidents" (probably a reference to Monsieur d'Arblay being struck by a cart in Calais) have derailed her plans to go to Tours; mentioning that she has written Esther and Alex with the details and will not repeat them here; discussing her and husband's health: "Our relapses have been tiresome & painful, but have not robbed us of hope. Darby & Joan, like, therefore, we jog on, & only wish, Darby & Joan like, ultimately together to jog off"; asking about how his work on the buccaneers is going (James's History of the Buccaneers of America was the first part of the fourth volume of his Chronological History of the Voyages and Discoveries in the South Sea); asking after his family; commenting on the abolition of conscription in France and peacetime generally: "The World at large, however, is so tired of War, that the usual arts of peace will soon resume their reign, & find other employment for Mankind than that of cutting one another to pieces"; writing that she does not go out in society in Paris, so she cannot give him an account of "a Ball, an Opera or an assembly, or even the newest flourish of curling the hair, or dizening a coat"; adding that she hears that Paris is full of English people, spending money and offering "immense food for observation & raillery"; writing that, once she is better, she intends to go to a play called "Les Anglaises pour rire": "The title is so impertinent, that I dare not stay away, lest I should seem sore"; mentioning that she is sending this letter with Charlotte Turner, who is returning to England; [M.d'A]: asking to be remembered to James's family; writing "Do you danse in London as much as in Paris where I am said, the English give so many bals"; mentioning that he went to a ball given by the Princess de Beauvau and hopes to go to another at her house the next day.
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