Come with me into the graveyard, all human life is here

Month: May 2022

Fanny Burney

In the mid-1980s I lived in a flat in a Georgian conversion in Bath. In the flat above me lived a student of English literature. As I passed him in the hall one afternoon he glanced into the contents of my basket and exclaimed “Aha! You know.” I followed his gaze, but my greengrocery did not disclose any clues. In response to my blank look, he delved amongst the potatoes and carrots to extract a fat volume which he flourished. “You know about her,” he insisted stabbing his finger at my copy of Fanny Burney’s The Wanderer. The truth was that I was finding this massive tome tedious, and my knowledge of Fanny Burney was insufficient to allow me to engage with confidence in any discussion of her work with a specialist in English Literature. As I hesitated Robert enlightened me, “ She lived in your flat. You didn’t know?” I was surprised; there was no blue plaque on 23 Great Stanhope Street although there was one on 14 South Parade where Fanny had lodged with her friend Mrs. Thrale for three months in 1780.

Robert however was right: Fanny Burney lived for three years, from 1815 to 1818, in Great Stanhope Street with her husband General d’Arblay and their son Alexandre. D’Arblay, a French émigré, supporter of the constitutional monarchy, had fled France in 1792  forfeiting  his property. Fanny had already found fame  with her first two novels Evelina  and Cecilia which had earned the praise of Dr. Johnson and the admiration of Jane Austen. They met through Fanny’s sister when the emigres were living near her at Juniper Hall, and spent their first ten years together  in Surrey,  supported by the proceeds of  Fanny’s latest novel Camilla . In 1802 when an amnesty  removed  d’Arblay from the proscribed list of émigrés and permitted his return to France they hastened there  hoping to regain his property and his army pension,  but with the outbreak of  the Napoleonic Wars they became trapped. During their enforced residency Fanny completed The Wanderer. After the restoration of 1814 d’Arblay held a position in the King’s Guard and during  the Hundred Days that followed Napoleon’s escape from Elba he joined Louis XVIII but, wounded by a kick from a horse, he missed seeing action at Waterloo. The wound turned  gangrenous, and septicaemia developed. Discharged from the army d’Arblay returned to England  with Fanny who  hoped that the Bath waters would aid his recovery. As she wrote in her journal, they sought “cheap lodgings” in Bath, for The Wanderer had  not sold well, the readers who had embraced her earlier novels sharing my lack of enthusiasm for this one, and so they came to 23  Great Stanhope Street in “an unfashionable quarter of Bath.” Fanny’s diaries reveal that their drawing room  and her bedroom were on the first floor. On the second floor slept the general  (in what was now my bedroom) and their son  (in my sitting room.) A walk-in closet was a book room (my kitchen). Their landlady, Mrs. Brenan, occupied the ground floor and basement, cooking for them, cleaning, making fires, and emptying chamber pots. There was no sign of the fireplaces in my day: the rooms had been gutted. Happily there was no sign of the chamber pots either, for  the general’s bedroom had been partitioned to provide a bathroom.

The family remained in Great Stanhope Street until the general died, the Bath waters having failed to  alleviate his suppurating wound, jaundice, and limp.

I often fell asleep  conjuring up his sickly presence in what had once been his room, and that of his prolific and devoted wife busy writing below.

In search of their graves, I visited Saint Swithin’s  parish church. The church had been rebuilt on the site of an older foundation in 1775 to house its growing congregation in fashionable Bath. By 1800 it was the second largest parish in England after St. Pancras, London.

St. Swithin’s cemetery, the Lower Burial Ground, lay  across Walcot Street and down the hill from the church. Fanny buried the general there in May 1818 with a black marble headstone, which subsequently disappeared, and she had  a  memorial tablet expatiating on his virtues erected in the church.

In 1837  their son  was buried near his father, and in 1840 Fanny was placed in the same grave and another memorial tablet raised in the church. By 1906 however their gravestone was weathered and neglected, and Burney descendants replaced it with a new  tabletop  monument. In  1955 when part of the burial ground was  cleared for proposed redevelopment, the PCC moved Burney’s three-ton stone up the hill and over the road to a small enclosure beside the church, where it remains today, a lonely cenotaph separated by railings from the bustle of Walcot Street on one side and The Paragon on the other.

In 1987 remains from the cemetery, including those of Burney,  her husband and son, were exhumed and reinterred beside The Rockery  Garden in the municipal cemetery at Haycombe on the south side of Bath.

The Lower Burial Ground, its few remaining graves clustering round the mortuary chapel, remains undeveloped.

Fanny’s  memorial plaque in the church was destroyed when a new organ was installed against the wall in the twentieth century but in 2013 the Burney Society funded a new memorial reproducing the exact wording of the original from photographs.

Along with the general’s memorial  it is housed amongst a truly magnificent collection in the church for the general was not the only one for whom the Bath waters proved less than efficacious.

But Fanny’s spirit is not wandering  the church and its precincts nor  is she down in The Lower Burial Ground nor up in  Haycombe Cemetery: she is busy updating her journal, perhaps even plotting another novel, shorter this time, in her rooms at 23  Great Stanhope Street. I know, I lived with her.

From the Nile to Dowlish Wake and Mortlake

As a child my partner wanted to be an explorer, so I had no difficulty in persuading him to accompany me in search of Richard Burton and John Hanning  Speke who in the mid-nineteenth century set out to discover the source of the Nile.

“Ruffian Dick” was a flamboyant, handsome, adventurer and risk taker, a polyglot  fluent in twenty-nine languages including Hindustani, Marathi, Gujerati, Punjabi,  Arabic, and Persian, and with a taste for dressing up. Acting as Charles Napier’s intelligence agent in the army of the East India company in Sindh,  he developed the practice of passing himself off as a half Arab, half Persian trader. In 1852/3 disguised as Sheikh Abdullah, an itinerant  Afghan Sufi, a disguise which allegedly included having himself  circumcised, he went on hajj to Mecca although it is doubtful whether the disguise was necessary for he was not the first westerner to make the hajj and others since Burckhardt had travelled without disguise. Impressed by the linguistic skills of this experienced traveller the Royal Geographical Society funded his expedition to Somaliland in 1854-5. He was  joined on that expedition by John Hanning Speke.

Speke  too had led a colourful life: joining the East India Company’s army at seventeen, he had fought in the second Sikh war and travelled extensively in Tibet and the Himalayas.

When their camp  was attacked during the Somaliland expedition Speke received eleven spear wounds, two spears penetrating his thighs and staking him temporarily to the ground. Punching his attacker in the face he  escaped, running  three miles  barefoot and almost naked. Meanwhile a javelin  passed through both of Burton’s cheeks knocking out his back teeth and  he had to make his escape with it still transfixing his head.

This did not quench their thirst for adventure and two years later Speke joined Burton again on the first Nile expedition of 1856-1859, when they set off  from Zanzibar and  travelled inland from the east coast to Central Africa and the Great Lakes in search of the source of the Nile. Relations between the two men had however soured as Burton had  taken credit for specimens collected by Speke in Somalia  and had published parts of his diary  at the end of his own book First Footsteps in East Africa. After leaving Zanzibar both men were so ill with tropical diseases  and fevers that bearers had to carry them in hammocks for much of their journey. While Speke was sleeping  a beetle embedded itself in his  ear and when he tried to remove it with the point of his penknife, he made one side of his face infected with a festering, suppurating sore which became so swollen  that he was unable to eat and was deaf for months. He was  partially blinded  from trachoma and hardly able to see  when he and Burton became the first Europeans to reach Lake Tanganyika, which Burton considered  to be the source of the Nile. By this time Burton’s mouth was numb with ulcers and he was still too ill to walk. Speke  continued without him to Lake Ukerere; he had lost most of his surveying equipment but was convinced that Ukerewe, which he renamed Lake Victoria, was  the headwater of the Nile. He  returned to England before Burton and,  announcing that he had found the source of the White Nile,  embarked on a round of lectures. The RGS awarded him another expedition. Burton felt betrayed: they had, he claimed, agreed that they would announce their findings to the RGS  and give their first public lecture together. He further repudiated Speke’s claim and asserted that Lake Tanganyika was the source of the Nile. The rift between the two men deepened with a prolonged public quarrel, resentments, and jealousies.

In 1860 Speke, with instructions from the RGS to circumnavigate Lake Victoria, locate the origin of the Nile and trace it to Gondokono, set out with James Grant on the second Nile expedition. Together they waded through swamps, faced threats from elephant herds, and were detained by chiefs wary of slave traders, but at the end an ulcerated leg held Grant back and Speke reached the lake without him. He located a river flowing from  the north side over Mayinja, The Stones, which he renamed Ripon Falls. He re-joined Grant and the two proceeded down the crocodile and hippopotamus infested river, but  they could not follow  it all the way between Lake Victoria and Gondokono on account of local wars and the presence of slave raiding parties leading to travel restrictions imposed by local chieftains. They had to leave the river and travel overland. From Gondokono they travelled by ship to Khartoum  and from there Speke sent a telegram to the RGS:  “The Nile is Settled” . On return to England, he was acclaimed as a hero. Catherine Cavender’s booklet on sale in the  church of Dowlish Wake describes his welcome in  Somerset: “ Church bells rang out above the music of brass bands and  cheering …Roads (were) strewn with flowers and here and there arched over with banners of welcome… A band played See the Conquering Hero Comes… (There was) a bonfire and huge display of fireworks…Somerset blossomed for days with flags and bunting.”  Speke was lionised but Burton  argued that since Speke had not travelled its full length he could not be sure that the river leaving  Victoria Nyanza  was the same river as the White Nile flowing from Gondokono. There was a gap in Speke’s map of the river and Burton held to his own conviction that the source of the Nile lay in Lake Tanganyika.

In 1864 the RGS arranged a public meeting at the Mineral Water Hospital in Bath  where Burton and Speke were to debate and settle their dispute. Speke was staying with his cousin at Neston Park, near Corsham. The day before the debate they went shooting partridge and while climbing a wall Speke’s gun discharged, he  shot himself in the side and died fifteen minutes later. The inquest returned a verdict of accidental death,  but Burton spread the rumour that it was a suicide because Speke feared speaking in the debate. Popular feeling swung against Speke, and it was not until 1875 that  Henry Morton Stanley verified Speke’s claim when he travelled the length of the Nile from Lake Victoria to Gondokono.

Meanwhile Speke was buried in the family chapel in the church of St. Andrew, Dowlish Wake in Somerset. Murchison, the President of the RGS, Grant, and David Livingstone attended his funeral. The government granted his family the right to add a hippopotamus and a crocodile as supporters of  their shield; the flowing Nile, and the  motto Honor est a Nilo, His Fame is from the Nile,  to their coat of arms. Despite embellishment with hippopotamus, crocodile, and egret however the cold , white, wall memorial which rises above Speke’s dark sarcophagus remains too austere and bleak a monument to evoke the magic and mystery of the Nile.

A Nilo Praeclarus, From the Nile Renowned, Speke’s tomb and monument
embellished with a crocodile
and an egret

A  more colourful memorial is the stained-glass  window presented by Speke’s uncle  portraying an earlier discovery on  the Nile.

Burton lived on until 1890  working, surprisingly, in the diplomatic service, with postings in equatorial Guinea, Brazil, Damascus and finally Trieste. More in character, he translated The Thousand and One Nights,  The Kama Sutra, and The Perfumed Garden. At his death, his wife Isabel burned his diaries and journals and the translation of The Perfumed Garden and wrote a sanitised biography of her husband. She buried him in the graveyard of St. Mary Magdalen Roman Catholic church in Mortlake in a tomb which she designed herself, modelling it on a Bedouin tent which her husband had owned in Damascus. There,  in one of the most incongruous and flamboyant sepulchres in England, she later joined him.

A ladder leads up to a window in the back of the tomb and in the spirit of exploration I sent my partner up to investigate.

Alas, notwithstanding the sense of peering into a mutoscope it revealed no exotic, erotic scenes from Burton’s life or his translations,  just two  coffins and some dusty lamps and wreaths.

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