April - June 1780

“I shall now skip to our arrival at this beautiful city, which I really admire more than I did, if possible, when I first saw it. The houses are so elegant, the streets are so beautiful, the prospects so enchanting…we were told of lodgings upon the South Parade, whither in the afternoon we all hied, and Mr Thrale immediately hired a house at the left corner. It was most deliciously situated; we have meadows, hills, Prior Park, ‘the soft-flowing Avon’ – whatever nature has to offer, I think, always in our view. My room commands all these; and more luxury for the eye I cannot form a notion of.”

Fanny's room was at the side of the building overlooking the river, she writes of her time being taken up with “engagements, dress and work” (needlework), Church on Sundays – St. James’s for a while, then the Abbey to hear the Bishop of Peterborough.

Painting by John Charles Maggs in the 19th Century

Lodging here was the famous Blue Stocking, Elizabeth Montagu, who was then widowed and one of the wealthiest women in England. Learned and sociable, the Blue Stockings (Elizabeth Carter was also in Bath) were renowned not only for their writing but for the quality of their conversation. “We see Mrs Montagu very often, and I have already spent six evenings with her at various houses.”She wrote when they had been in Bath three weeks. Her most intimate companion, apart from the Thrales seems to have been Augusta Byron (aunt of the poet (1788-1824) who was not born at this time).

“Sunday – We had Mrs Byron (grandmother of the poet) and Augusta, and Mrs Lee, to spend the afternoon. Augusta opened her whole heart to me, as we sat together, and told me all the affairs of her family. Her brother, Captain George Byron, is lately returned from the West Indies, and has brought a wife with him from Barbadoes, though he was there only three weeks, and knew not this girl he has married till ten days before he left it! – a pleasant circumstance for this proud family. Augusta is a very amiable, ingenuous girl, and I love her the more for her love of her sisters: she talked to me of them all, but chiefly of Sophia…”

Poor Sophia was dead before the year was out. There was considerable space taken up with accounts of Augusta’s conquest of a young soldier, Captain Brisbane, who was expected to propose. If he did, nothing came of it, because Augusta married into the navy which was fitting for the daughter of Vice Admiral John Byron (foul weather Jack). Her husband, Vice Admiral Christopher Parker, son of Admiral Sir Peter Parker and she had three sons, Captain Sir Peter Parker (killed in a battle in Maryland USA in 1814), Captain Sir John Edmund George Parker and Admiral Sir Charles Christopher Parker. There is a family vault where they are all buried in St. Margaret’s, Westminster.

Another favourite was an Irish Peer, Lord Mulgrave, captain in the Royal Navy (“his wit is of so gay, so forcible, so splendid a kind…” says Fanny), who, on one occasion after mentioning Captain George Byron and his recent marriage, turned to Fanny and called out:

“See, Miss Burney, what you have to expect – your brother will bring a bride from Kamschatka, without doubt!” Fanny replied ”That may perhaps be as well as a Hottentot, for when he was last out, he threatened us with a sister from the Cape of Good Hope.”

Mrs Thrale reported that all the sea captains would fall upon Fanny “Captain Cotton, my cousin, was for ever plaguing her about her spite to the navy”. They were taking Fanny to task in a good humoured way about the rough Captain Mirvan in “Evelina”. Augusta Byron told Fanny that her father, the admiral, often talked of Captain Mirvan, whom he regarded as a brute but he loved the novel.

Painting by John Robert Cozens 1773

“I went to the Belvedere, (a hotel) and made Mr Thrale accompany me by way of exercise, for the Belvidere is near a mile from our house, and all up hill.

The Belvidere is a most beautiful spot, it is on a high hill, (Lansdowne) at one of the extremities of the town, of which, as of the Avon and all the adjacent country, it commands a view that is quite enchanting.”

Painting is Belvedere by Walter Sickert 1907

Pleasure grounds laid out on the opposite side of the Avon from South Parade – were reached by ferry. One day, their dinner guest, the Bishop of Peterborough, proposed a trip to Spring Gardens “where he should give us tea, and thence proceed to Mr Ferry’s to see a very curious house and garden”.

“Mr Ferry is a Bath alderman; his house and garden exhibit the house and garden of Mr Tattersall enlarged. Just the same taste prevails, the same paltry ornaments, the same crowd of buildings, the same unmeaning decoration and the same unsuccessful attempts at making something of nothing.”

One of the, ‘puerile wonders he delighted in. This was a strange device that causes the dining table to rise up through a trap door in the floor and a carved eagle to descend from the ceiling and take up the table cloth revealing a rich display of confectionary’

The villa stood to the right of the approach road to the later constructed Cleveland Bridge, roughly on the sites of 10-15 Forester Road. It closed in 1790 and by 1851 was subdivided and used as a poor house. It became derelict and was finally demolished in 1897.

A few miles east of Bath, the home of Sir John and Lady Miller. In a bow window overlooking the Avon stood a Frascati vase into which, on certain Thursdays, guests were invited to drop poetical contributions which were eventually published in four volumes. Fanny writes on Thursday June 8:
“We went to Bath Easton…The house is charmingly situated, well fitted up, convenient, and pleasant, and not large, but commodious and elegant. Thursday is still their public day for company, though the business of the vase is over for this season.”

Not everyone delighted in a visit to Batheaston. Horace Walpole, in a letter to the Hon. H. S. Conway, says: “I am glad you went [to Bath], especially as you escaped being initiated into Mrs. Miller’s follies at Bath-Easton” (Letters, vii. 163).

Where Christopher Anstey lived. Writer of The New Bath Guide published in 1766, not a guide, but a satirical poem in the form of letters describing and making fun of the fashionable life in Bath.

“Of all the gay places the world can afford,
By gentle and simple for pastime ador’d,
Fine balls and fine concerts, fine buildings and springs,
Fine walks and fine views, and a thousand fine things,
(Not to mention the sweet situation and air,)
What place, my dear mother, with Bath can compare?”

But Fanny wasn’t at all impressed by him though she loved his Guide.“I heard but little that he said, and that little was scarce worth hearing.”He was, she said “shyly important and silently proud”. Elizabeth Montagu lived at number 16, the house in the centre of Royal Crescent at some stage. She writes “the beautiful situation of the Crescent cannot be understood by any comparison with anything in any town whatsoever”.

August 20 – September 10 1791

To help Fanny recover from the illness brought on by her time with the Royal household, a kind friend, Mrs Ord, offered to go with Fanny on a tour of the west of England. They reached Bath around August 20th when Fanny wrote to her sister, Susan:

In a letter dated 8 September, she wrote to her sister Hetty (Mrs Burney No2. Upper Titchfield Street, Portland Place, London)

Fanny begged Mrs Ord not to introduce her to any new people, but she welcomed Lady Spencer (mother of Lady Georgiana Spencer, Duchess of Devonshire and Lady Duncannon, (infamous for her affair with R.B Sheridan; mother of Lady Caroline Ponsonby who married Charles Lamb much to the sorrow of her cousin Charles who became 6th Duke of Devonshire and never married) and whom she had met at Mrs Delany’s. Fanny’s description of Lady Spencer included a tart comment that “she spends her life in such exercises of active charity and zeal, that she would be one of the most strikingly exemplary women of Rank of the age, had she less of shew in her exertions, & more of forbearance in publishing them.”

 Fanny’s letters are full of gossip about the Devonshires and Lady Elizabeth Foster. Poor Fanny is torn by her prudery and her fascination or “pain and pleasure” as she called it.

Although never won over by Lady Duncannon or Lady Elizabeth Foster, whom Fanny was horrified to find was the mother of a little girl by the Duke of Devonshire, she was enchanted by the Duchess.“Poor Duchess! Is all I can say, if her entanglements are thus thrown about the Duke! It is generally believed her own terrible exravagancies have extorted from her a consent to this unnatural inmating of her House, from the threats of the Duke that they should else be separated! What a payment for her indiscretions – & she, at least, escaped further censure, & is allowed, even by the calumniators, to have been guiltless in point of fidelity to her Duke.”

Poor Fanny, did she learn that the Duchess was bearing a child born on February 20 1792 fathered by Charles Grey (later in 1834, Prime Minister)?

Smallpox was rife and Fanny records that “The little Marquis (of Huntingdon, eldest son of the Duke of Devonshire) is as much guarded as a Prince of Wales: he has not had the smallpox, & they dare not, therefore, carry him about with them. His House, in Marlborough Buildings, is sacred; not a Tradesman is permitted to enter it; not a servant but of the family, so fearful is the Duchess of any infection’s reaching him.” Not unlike the lockdown of these days but there was no vaccine to protect them.