Monkey Business: Lord Orville and the Limits of Politeness in Frances Burney’s Evelina
Patricia L. Hamilton, Union University
Volume 19, no. 4, Summer 2007
©McMaster University, 2015. All articles published on the Eighteenth-Century Fiction website are protected by copyright held by Eighteenth-Century Fiction, a journal published by the Faculty of Humanities at McMaster University.
ABSTRACT
In a journal entry in the spring of 1774, Frances Burney rendered her judgment of the newly published volume of letters that Philip Dormer Stanhope, fourth Earl of Chesterfield, had written over a period of thirty years to his illegitimate son, Philip Stanhope, starting in 1738, when the boy was six years old. Burney observed that the letters are “extremely well written” and contain “some excellent hints for Education,” but they tend towards making Chesterfield’s son “wholly unprincipled” by “inculcating immorality; countenancing all Gentlemanlike vices; advising deceit, and exhorting to Inconstancy.” Although Lord Chesterfield’s Letters to His Son was reviewed positively in the London Magazine and some of his advice excerpted in conduct manuals such as The Polite Preceptor (1776), Burney’s verdict echoed the volume’s generally negative reception. Complaints about the moral tenor of the work can be found both in private correspondence and in the public forum. … In this context, it would be easy to dismiss Burney’s response to Letters to His Son as an echo of popular sentiment, epitomized by Samuel Johnson’s famous quip that the work “teaches the morals of a whore, and the manners of a dancing master.” Yet the fact that Burney read Chesterfield’s Letters and debated the merits of his advice with her family and friends reveals that in the period preceding the publication of her first novel, Evelina (1778), she was engaged in thinking about what constitutes male virtue.
Other ECF articles on the topic of “Frances Burney” include:
“Black, Patched and Pennyless”: Race and Crime in Burney’s The Wanderer
by TARA CZECHOWSKI (ECF 25.4, Summer 2013)
Dangerous Fortune-telling in Frances Burney’s Camilla
by JENNIFER LOCKE (ECF 25.4, Summer 2013)
Rewriting Radicalism: Wollstonecraft in Burney’s The Wanderer
by TARA GHOSHAL WALLACE (ECF 24.3, Spring 2012)
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