Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
  1. Home
  2. Books
  3. Reading with the Burneys
  • This Element is free online from 3rd June 2024 - 17th June 2024
    • You have access
    • Open access
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
May 2024
Print publication year:
2024
Online ISBN:
9781009439480
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009439480
Creative Commons:
Creative Common License - CC Creative Common License - BY Creative Common License - NC
This content is Open Access and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence CC-BY-NC 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/creativelicenses
Series:
Elements in Eighteenth-Century Connections
Subjects:
Literature, English Literature: General Interest, English Literature 1700-1830
Information

Book description

This Element offers a multidimensional study of reading practice and sibling rivalry in late eighteenth-century Britain. The case study is the Aberdeen student and disgraced thief Charles Burney's treatment of Evelina (1778), the debut novel of his sister Frances Burney. Coulombeau uses Charles's manuscript poetry, letters, and marginalia, alongside illustrative prints and circulating library archives, to tell the story of how he attempted to control Evelina's reception in an effort to bolster his own socio-literary status. Uniting approaches drawn from literary studies, biography, bibliography, and the history of the book, the Element enriches scholarly understanding of the reception of Frances Burney's fiction, with broader implications for studies of gender, class, kinship and reading in this period. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

References

Bibliography

Anon., (1780). Answers to the Enigmas, Ladies’ Diary, or Woman’s Almanack 77 (1780), 15–16.
Anon., (1775). Mathematical Correspondence, London Magazine, or Gentleman’s Monthly Intelligencer, 44 (August 1775), 417.
Anon., (1779). Mathematical Correspondence, London Magazine, or Gentleman’s Monthly Intelligencer, 48 (January 1779), 34.
Anon., (1779). A new catalogue of the Aberdeen Circulating Library, consisting of several thousand volumes …, Aberdeen: Alexander Angus. University of Aberdeen, (SC) SBL 1779 NP 2.
Anon., (1818). Imperial Parliament of Great Britain and Ireland, Morning Chronicle [1801], 5 May 1818. British Library Newspapers, link.gale.com/apps/doc/BB3207279401/BNCN?u= uniyork&sid=bookmark-BNCN. Accessed 15 March 2023.
Allan, David (2008). A Nation of Readers: The Lending Library in Georgian England, London: British Library.
Alston, Robin (2006). ‘Libraries in Scotland to 1850’, Scribd, uploaded by Andrew Prescott 19 July 2006, accessed 26 July 2023. www.scribd.com/document/63097322/Robin-Alston-Library-History-Scotland, https://data.cerl.org/sbti/000738.
Austen, Jane (2004). Persuasion, ed. Kinsley, James, intr. Deidre Shauna Lynch. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Balderston, Katharine C. (1942). Thraliana: The Diary of Mrs. Hester Lynch Thrale, 1776–1809, 2 vols., Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Bander, Elaine (2021). ‘The Astronomic Muse: Charles Burney and Astronomy’, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 44:3 (September 2021), 259–276.
Bannet, Eve Tavor (2017). Eighteenth-Century Manners of Reading: Print Culture and Popular Instruction in the Anglophone Atlantic World, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Burney, Frances (1779). Evelina: Or, the History of a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World, 3 vols. London: Thomas Lowndes, 1779 (3rd ed.). University of Aberdeen, SB 82366 E1.
Burney, Frances (2002). Evelina: Or, the History of a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World, ed. Bloom, Edward A., intr. Jones, Vivian, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Burney, Frances (2008). Cecilia: Or, Memoirs of an Heiress, ed. Sabor, Peter and Anne Doody, Margaret, intr. Margaret Anne Doody. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Certeau, Michel de (1988). ‘Reading as Poaching’, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall, Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press. Reproduced in Towheed et al., 2011, 130–139.
Chisholm, Kate (1998). Fanny Burney: Her Life (1752–1840), London: Chatto & Windus.
Clark, Lorna J., (2020–21). ‘Growing up Burney, and the Role of a Commonplace Book’, Journal of Juvenilia Studies, 3:1, 3–20.
Colclough, Stephen (2007). Consuming Texts: Readers and Reading Communities, 1695–1870. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Coulombeau, Sophie (2018). ‘Introduction’, New Perspectives on the Burney Family, special issue of Eighteenth-Century Life, 42:2, 1–13.
Coulton, Richard, Mauger, Matthew and Reid, Christopher (2016). Stealing Books in Eighteenth-Century London, London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Cummings, Brian (2021). Bibliophobia: The End and the Beginning of the Book, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Dale, Amelia (2022). ‘The Quixotic Eighteenth Century’, Literature Compass, 19:5.
Darby, Barbara (1997). Frances Burney, Dramatist: Gender, Performance, and the Late Eighteenth-Century Stage, Lexington: University of Kentucky Press.
Dingwall Fordyce, Alexander (1885). Family Record of the Name of Dingwall Fordyce in Aberdeenshire …, Toronto: C. Blackett Robinson.
Doody, Margaret A. (1988). Frances Burney: The Life in the Works, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Eger, Elizabeth and Peltz, Lucy (2008). Brilliant Women: Eighteenth-Century Bluestockings, New Haven: Yale University Press.
Ellis, Markman (2013). ‘Reading Practices in Elizabeth Montagu’s Epistolary Network of the 1750s’, Bluestockings Displayed: Portraiture, Performance and Patronage, 1730–1830, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 213–232.
Erickson, Amy (2018). ‘Esther Sleepe, Fan-Maker, and Her Family’, Eighteenth-Century Life 42:2, 15–37.
Fergus, Jan (2007). Provincial Readers in Eighteenth-Century England, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ferris, Ina and Keen, Paul (2009). Bookish Histories: Books, Literature and Commercial Modernity, London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Fox, Adam (2020). The Press and the People: Cheap Print and Society in Scotland, 1500–1785, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gallagher, Catherine (1994). Nobody’s Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670–1920. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Genette, Gérard (1997). Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. Jane E. Lewey, foreword by Richard Macksey. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Goetsch, Paul (2004). ‘Reader Figures in Narrative’, Style, 38:2, 188–202.
Griffin, Dustin (1996). Literary Patronage in England, 1650–1800, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Halsey, Katie (2012). Jane Austen and Her Readers, 1786–1945, London: Anthem.
Harvey, Arnold D., (2001). Sex in Georgian England: Attitudes and Prejudices from the 1720s to the 1820s, London: George Duckworth.
Havens, Hilary (2016). Maria Edgeworth’s (Deleted) Thoughts on Frances Burney’s Evelina, Aphra Behn Online Public: An Interactive Forum for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830, 7 October 2016, https://web.archive.org/web/20180331004915/http://www.aphrabehn.org/ABO/maria-edgeworths-deleted-thoughts-on-frances-burneys-evelina/.
Havens, Hilary (2019). Revising the Eighteenth-Century Novel: Authorship from Manuscript to Print, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hemlow, Joyce (1958). The History of Fanny Burney, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Hemlow, Joyce. (1972–1984). The Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney (Madame d’Arblay), 1791–1840, 12 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Hinnant, Charles Haskell (2009). ‘The Erotics of the Gift: Gender and Exchange in the Eighteenth-Century Novel’, in Zionkowski, Linda and Klekar, Cynthia, eds., The Culture of the Gift in Eighteenth-Century England, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 143–158.
Holloway, Sally (2019). The Game of Love in Georgian England: Courtship, Emotions, and Material Culture, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Jacob, William (2007). The Clerical Profession in the Long Eighteenth Century, 1680–1840, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Jackson, Heather (2002). Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002.
Johnson, Samuel (2021). A Dictionary of the English Language, 1755, 1773. Edited by Beth Rapp Young, Jack Lynch, William Dorner, Amy Larner Giroux, Carmen Faye Mathes, and Abigail Moreshead et al. https://johnsonsdictionaryonline.com.
Justice, George (2002). The Manufacturers of Literature: Writing and the Literary Marketplace in Eighteenth-Century England, Newark: University of Delaware Press.
Kaufman, Paul (1969). Libraries and Their Users: Collected Papers in Library History, London: the Library Association.
Kochkina, Svetlana (2023). Frances Burney’s Evelina: The Book, Its History, and Its Paratext, Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.
Koehler, Martha J. (2005). Models of Reading: Paragons and Parasites in Richardson, Burney, and Laclos, Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press.
Krawczyk, Scott (2009). Romantic Literary Families, London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Lanning, Katie (2020). ‘Scanner Darkly: Unpopularization in the Burney Newspaper Collection’, Archives and Records, 41(3), 215–235.
Lawrance, Robert Murdock (1923). An Old Book-Selling Firm: Alexander Angus & Son, Aberdeen: D.Wylie & Son.
Levy, Michelle (2008). Family Authorship and Romantic Print Culture, London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Lough, J. and M. (1945). ‘Aberdeen Circulating Libraries in the Eighteenth Century’, Aberdeen University Review 31, 17–23.
Lynch, Deidre Shauna (2014), Loving Literature: A Cultural History, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Mandelbrote, Giles and Taylor, Barry (2009). Libraries within the Library: The Origins of the British Library’s Printed Collections, London: British Library.
Matthews, Charley (2022). ‘“I Feel the Mind Enlarging Itself”: Anne Lister’s Gendered Reading Practices’, Journal of Lesbian Studies, 26:4, 367–381.
Matthews, Charley (2023). ‘“To Do a Little and Well”: Anne Lister’s Reading Routine’, Reception: Texts, Readers, Audiences, History, 15, 25–31.
Mauss, Marcel (1970). The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. Ian Cunnison, London: Cohen & West.
McDonald, William R. (1968). Circulating Libraries in the North-East of Scotland in the Eighteenth Century, Bibliotheck, 5,119–137.
Mee, John, and Matthew Sangster, ‘Introduction’, Institutions of Literature, 1700–1900, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1–23.
Michaelson, Patricia Howell (2002). Speaking Volumes: Women, Reading and Speech in the Age of Austen, Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Nedobity, Wolfgang (2007). ‘Lord Findlater and His Impact on Continental Landscaping’, 23 July 2007). SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1172282 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1172282.
Päckert, Martin, and Klyne, Frank (2022). Lord Findlater und die Gärten seiner Zeit: Mehrdeutigkeiten eines Lebens und einer Kunstform, Darmstadt: wbg Academic.
Paluchowska-Messing, Anna (2020). Frances Burney and Her Readers: The Negotiated Image, Berlin: Peter Lang.
Peake, Richard Brinsley (1841). Memoirs of the Colman Family: Including Their Correspondence with the Most Distinguished Personages of Their Time, 2 vols, London: Richard Bentley.
Pearson, David (2019). Provenance Research in Book History: A Handbook, Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2019.
Piper, Andrew (2009). ‘The Art of Sharing: Reading in the Romantic Miscellany’, in Ferris, Ina and Keen, Paul, eds., Bookish Histories: Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 126–147.
Raven, James (2018). What Is the History of the Book?, Cambridge: Polity Press.
Raven, James, Small, Helen and Tadmor, Naomi (2007). The Practice and Representation of Reading in England, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rennhak, Katharina (2011). ‘Paratexts and the Construction of Author Identities: The Preface as Threshold and Thresholds in the Preface’, in Karremann, Isabel and Muller, Anja, eds., Mediating Identities in Eighteenth-Century England: Public Negotiations, Literary Discourses, Topography, Kent: Ashgate Publishing, 55–70.
Readioff, Corinna (2021). ‘Recent Approaches to Paratext Studies in Eighteenth-Century Literature’, Literature Compass, 18:12.
Richardson, Samuel (1776). The History of Sir Charles Grandison, in a Series of Letters, 8 vol. London: John Donaldson.
Ritter, Richard de (2014). Imagining Women Readers, Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Russell, Gillian (2020). The Ephemeral Eighteenth Century: Print, Sociability, and the Cultures of Collecting, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sabor, Peter, ed. (1995). The Complete Plays of Frances Burney, 2 vols., London: Pickering & Chatto, 1995.
Sabor, Peter, ed. (2015–8). Additional Journals and Letters of Frances Burney, 2 vols., Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Sabor, Peter, ed. (1991–). The Letters of Dr. Charles Burney, 6 vols., Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Sabor, Peter, ed. (2018). ‘The March of Intimacy: Dr Burney and Dr Johnson’, Eighteenth-Century Life 42:2, 38–55.
Saggini, Francesca (2012). Backstage in the Novel: Frances Burney and the Theater Arts, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.
Salih, Sarah (2002). ‘Camilla in the Marketplace: Moral Marketing and Feminist Editing in 1796 and 1802’, in Emma Clery, Caroline Franklin, and Garside, Peter, eds., Authorship, Commerce and the Public: Scenes of Writing, 1750–1830. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 120–135,
Schellenberg, Betty A. (2016). Literary Coteries and the Making of Modern Print Culture, 1740–1790. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Scholes, Percy (1948). The Great Dr Burney: His Life, His Travels, His Works, His Family and His Friends, 2 vols., Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Sherwood, George Frederick Tudor (1908). The Pedigree Register, 2 vols., London: Society of Genealogists.
Skelton-Foord, Christopher (2002). ‘Economics, Expertise, Enterprise and the Literary Scene: The Commercial Management Ethos in Circulating Libraries, 1780–1830’, in Emma Clery, Caroline Franklin, and Garside, Peter, eds., Authorship, Commerce and the Public: Scenes of Writing, 1750–1830, Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 136–152.
Sol, Antoinette (2002). Textual Promiscuities: Eighteenth-Century Critical Rewriting, Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press.
Spencer, Jane (2005). Literary Relations: Kinship and the Canon 1660–1830, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
St. Clair, William (2004). The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Stephen, James (1954). The Memoirs of James Stephen, Written by Himself for the Use of His Children, ed. Bevington, Merle M., London: Hogarth Press.
Stewart-Murphy, Charlotte (1992). A History of British Circulating Libraries: The Book Labels and Ephemera of the Papantonio Collection, Newtown: Bird & Bull Press.
Tayler, Alastair and Henrietta, (1925). Lord Fife and His Factor, Being the Correspondence of James Second Lord Fife 1729–1809, London: William Heinemann.
The Multigraph Collective (2018). Interacting with Print: Elements of Reading in the Era of Print Saturation, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Towheed, Shafquat, Crone, Rosalind and Halsey, Katie (2011). The History of Reading: A Reader, London: Routledge.
Towsey, Mark (2010). Reading the Scottish Enlightenment: Books and Their Readers in Provincial Scotland, 1750–1820, Leiden: Brill.
Towsey, Mark (2013). ‘I Can’t Resist Sending You the Book: Private Libraries, Elite Women, and Shared Reading Practices in Georgian Britain’, Library & Information History, 29:3, 210–222.
Towsey, Mark (2015). ‘Store Their Minds with Much Valuable Knowledge: Agricultural Improvement at the Selkirk Subscription Library, 1799–1814’, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 38:4, 569–584.
Troide, Lars, ed. (1988–2012). The Early Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney, 5 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Varma, Devendra P. (1972). The Evergreen Tree of Diabolical Knowledge, Washington, DC: Consortium Press.
Walker, Ralph (1962). ‘Charles Burney’s Theft of Books at Cambridge’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, iii, 313–326.
Walker, Ralph (1973). ‘Charles Burney’s Tour in the North-East of Scotland’, 1780, Aberdeen University Review, XLV, 1:149, 1–19.
Whitehead, Angus (2006). ‘A Various Complicated Ill: Echoes of Cotton and Cowley in Evelina’, Notes and Queries, 53:3, 309–310.
Williams, Abigail (2017). The Social Life of Books: Reading Together in the Eighteenth-Century Home, New Haven: Yale University Press.
Williams, Abigail (2023). Reading It Wrong: An Alternative History of Early Eighteenth-Century Literature, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Manuscript Collections Referenced

Burney Family Collection, The James Marshall and Marie-Louise Osborn Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven. OSB MSS 3.
Catalogues / lists, Library Administration, Library, Kings College Archives, University of Aberdeen Special Collections. GB 0231, KINGS 5/1/1.
Caution Book of the Archbishops of Canterbury 1758–1785, Lambeth Palace Library. VO14-1.
Collection of Commonplace Books (I. Epigrams), Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass. MS Eng 926.
Carter, Elizabeth and Hannah More Letters to Mary Hamilton, Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass. MS Eng 1778.
Frances Burney d’Arblay Collection of Papers. Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lennox and Tilden Foundations. Berg Coll MSS Arblay.
National Archives, Death duties 1796–1903, IR 26.
Papers relating to Duff family of Duff House, William Rose of Montcoffer, Factor and Hay of Rannes (Lumley-Smith papers), University of Aberdeen Special Collections. MS 997.
Papers of the Duff family of Duff House, and William Rose of Montcoffer, Their Factor, University of Aberdeen Special Collections. MS 2226.
The James Marshall and Marie-Louise Osborn Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven. Osborn c6, Osborn c35, Osborn c37, Osborn c6, Osborn c 38.

Digital Projects Referenced

Books and Borrowing: An Analysis of Scottish Readers’ Registers 1750–1830. 2020–2024. University of Stirling. Project funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council (Ref.AH/T003960/1). https://borrowing.stir.ac.uk
Libraries, Reading Communities & Cultural Formation in the 18th Century Atlantic. 2019–2024. University of Liverpool. Project funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council (Ref.AH/S007083/). https://c18librariesonline.org/
The French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe Project, 1769–1794. 2015–present. University of Leeds & Western Sydney University. Project funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council (Ref. AH/E509363/1) and Western Sydney University. http://fbtee.uws.edu.au/stn/.
READ-IT (Reading Europe Advanced Data Investigation Tool). 2018–2021. Université du Main le Mans. Project funded by the Joint Programming Initiative for Cultural Heritage (JPICH, Ref. 335-54-103). https://readit-project.eu/.
Unlocking the Mary Hamilton Papers. 2019–2023. University of Manchester. Project funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council (Ref. AH/S007121/1), https://www.maryhamiltonpapers.alc.manchester.ac.uk/.

Metrics

Altmetric attention score

Full text views

Total number of HTML views: 0
Total number of PDF views: 0 *
Loading metrics...

Book summary page views

Total views: 0 *
Loading metrics...

* Views captured on Cambridge Core between #date#. This data will be updated every 24 hours.

Usage data cannot currently be displayed.