“Frances Burney's Legacy Duty Account” (1840)

In the twelfth and final volume of The Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney, Joyce Hemlow published, for the first time, a transcription of the will of Frances Burney d'Arblay (1752 – 1840), dated 6 March 1839 and proved on 17 February 1840, six weeks after her death.1 The will provides much valuable information on Burney's final intentions for the disposal of her effects, including her vast horde of manuscripts, as well as on the state of her finances. Unknown to Hemlow or to subsequent scholars, however, another key document in the National Archives throws new light on these matters: “Burney's Legacy Duty Account,” dated 19 October 1840, thanks to which we now have complete information about her finances at the time of her death.2 Of particular interest are its valuations of Burney's literary manuscripts and correspondence, as well those of her father, the music historian and man of letters Dr. Charles Burney (1726 – 1814). As well as transcribing the “Legacy Duty Account” below, we shall consider why the Burneys received valuations for their manuscripts that are not only shockingly low from a modern perspective, but also significantly lower than those of several of their literary contemporaries.The National Archives Legacy Duty files of famous people includes the “Account for Frances Burney” (indexed under her married name of d'Arblay).3 The account is a printed form, no. 3 for residuary estates, comprising a single sheet of paper folded bookwise to create four pages with information filled in by the executors or attached on separate sheets. There are a few instructions for completion at the beginning and in the left-hand margin, including the strange one that “Any Account transmitted by Post, or left under cover at the Office, will either be returned to the Parties, or thrown aside unnoticed.” The duty had to be paid within fourteen days or a penalty of triple the duty was payable. The condition of the account is generally good, although the part of the sheet containing pages 3 and 4 has suffered some damage, making a few words in the declaration at the foot of page 3 illegible.Legacy duty had been first introduced in 1780 by Lord North, and subsequently made effective in legislation introduced by William Pitt.4 In contrast to the existing (and continuing) probate duty that was based on the value of the deceased's total estate, this was a tax on each legatee at rates that varied according to the relationship of the beneficiary to the deceased.5 Various increases in the rates of duty were made so that, by the time of Burney's death in 1840, the rate for brothers and sisters and their descendants had increased first to 2.5 percent, and then to 3 percent, with the top rate to 10 percent.6 The yield from legacy duty and the duty on probates was significant, amounting in 1840 to £2.125 million out of tax revenue, other than customs and excise, of £13.951 million, or 15.2 percent.7 One of the features of legacy duty was that assets were valued at the date of the legacy duty account rather than the date of death, because the focus was on the receipt by the legatee rather than the estate at death. The “Account for Burney” shows that her government stocks were valued just before the document was completed, and it then had to be updated to include a further payment of interest on one of the stocks.8 In our notes to this account below, we have compared it with our own transcription of Burney's original will.9The provisions of the will relating to Charles Burney's manuscripts are as follows: To my Nephew Doctor Charles Parr Burney I leave the entire arrangement of the correspondence of my dear Father excepting my own Letters which I give to my Niece Charlotte Barrett—I had already in the last year made it over to my beloved son, who was preparing it for the press—I now commit it to Doctor Charles Parr Burney, either for a small select publication, or for the flames—I leave to him likewise indiscriminately and without reserve or direction, whatever composition may remain in the hand writing of my dear Father whether in prose or in verse, well assured that I cannot do more honor to his memory.10Frances Burney had previously expressed her concerns about the significance and extent of her father's correspondence in several of her letters, as well as in her Memoirs of Doctor Burney, where she declares, in a prefatory note, that “upon examining the collection, there appears such a dearth of the Doctor's own Letters, of which he very rarely kept copies, that it seems expedient to postpone their publication, till it can be rendered more complete.”11 Her will is somewhat more positive, suggesting that at least “a small select publication” might be viable. The putative editor, however, Charles Parr Burney, seems to have disagreed. He had been appointed Archdeacon of St. Albans in 1840, the year of Frances Burney's death, and then of Colchester until his own death in 1864. Although he retained possession of his grandfather's manuscripts during those twenty-four years, there is no indication that he ever gave the projected edition of Burney's letters the slightest consideration.Charles Parr Burney's apparent indifference to Dr. Burney's correspondence echoed that of his cousin Henry Burney, one of Frances Burney's executors. His valuation of Dr. Burney's manuscripts, set out below under the heading Valuations of Manuscripts, was harsh. It describes the letters as “devoid of public interest” and “generally so unimportant in their manner as to be little worth the trouble and expense of editorship & risk of publication,” adding “that they are not (especially in their present condition) worth £50.” Henry Burney, however, a career soldier who had served as a lieutenant-colonel in the Bengal Army, was entirely unqualified to estimate the value of his grandfather's archive; the valuation above his name might well have been written out for him to sign.12Despite Henry and Frances Burney's strong reservations, Dr. Burney's archive included a large number of items—both drafts and copies of Dr. Burney's own letters and letters he received—and several of his correspondents were major figures, such as Samuel Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith, Joshua Reynolds, and Hester Thrale in England, and both Rousseau and Diderot in France.13 Some 1,100 of his letters are extant (as well as a similar number addressed to him), and the majority of them were in Frances Burney's hands at the time of her death; after Dr. Burney's death, numerous recipients of his letters returned them to his daughter. Evidence for this is provided by the notations that she made on the manuscripts for a putative edition, before deciding to abandon the task.To take just one example, consider Charles Burney's correspondence with the polymathic poet, playwright, satirist, critic, painter, player, and maker of keyboard instruments, designer of gardens, cleric, and ardent Whig: William Mason. The two men, born only a year apart, first met in 1746, when they were in their early twenties, renewing their acquaintance in the 1760s after Burney returned to London from a nine-year stay in King's Lynn. Sixteen letters between them are extant, five by Burney and eleven by Mason, extending from February 1769 to October 1795, eighteenth months before Mason's death. Their principal subject is music, including church psalmody, on which they held very different views—with some interesting discussions and disputes about Burney's publications, in particular Memoirs of . . . Metastasio (1796). In the autumn of 1810, a year before Mason's collected Works appeared in four volumes, Burney wrote to his former music pupil, Lady Elizabeth Lowther, giving her an overview of his correspondence with the poet: “I loved his early poetry extremely; but he afterwards became a great polititian, upon principles totally different from my own,—& was such a calvinistical reformer of cathedral & even parochial music that I never cd subscribe to his opinions—yet we never discussed those subjects with acrimony.”14 Frances Burney must have seen this letter, since she docketed it after her father's death. She also had access to almost all of Mason's letters to Dr. Burney, as well as to the five by Burney himself, either in draft or in fair copies. All of these letters bear her characteristic editorial marks. Their existence belies her complaint about her father's letters not having been preserved; far from having too few letters to edit, she was overwhelmed by the plethora of material that she had inherited.It seems surprising, then, that Henry Burney should lend his name to a depreciation of his famous grandfather's archive. Since, however, a low evaluation meant that less tax would need to be paid, and that more money would thus be available for Henry's cousin Richard Barrett, the residual legatee, the disparaging remarks are understandable. The seemingly arbitrary figure of £50 was probably proposed by the publisher William Shoberl, who was responsible for evaluating Frances Burney's archive. The provisions of the will relating to that archive are as follows: The whole of my own immense Mass of Manuscripts, collected from my fifteenth year, whether personal or collateral, consisting of Letters, Diaries, Journals, Dramas, Compositions in prose and in rhyme I bequeath to the care and sole and immediate possession of my Niece Charlotte Barrett, with full and free permission, according to her unbiassed taste and judgment, to keep or destroy them, simply but strictly stipulating, that she faithfully bequeaths at her death whatsoever she has not disposed of or annihilated, to her son the said Richard Barrett, . . . my Nephew.15The valuation of Frances Burney's manuscripts by Shoberl, also set out below, was £100, double that of her father's. This reflects their relative standings in 1840, when Charles Burney's fame was dwindling. His major publication, A General History of Music, first published in four volumes in 1776 – 89, had been reprinted on only one occasion and was seldom consulted in 1840, while Frances Burney, at this time, was known primarily as the author of four novels, and above all, of the first, Evelina, reprinted and translated on numerous occasions since its initial publication in 1778. None of her eight plays, the “Dramas” referred to here, had yet been published; her “Letters, Diaries, Journals,” still unknown, would be published in seven volumes later in the 1840s, adding considerably to her celebrity.16 Even so, the £100 estimate seems low, and was doubtless intended to incur the least tax possible, while also satisfying the authorities who would have to approve it—as they did.Some contemporary valuations of authors’ copyrights for legacy duty, including those for Thomas Babington Macaulay (died 1841, £10,000), Robert Southey (died 1843, £400), and William Wordsworth (1850, £2,950), are much higher than those for Frances and Charles Burney.17 Intriguingly, Southey's was originally valued at £300 by the publisher Thomas Longman, with the executors increasing it to £400, “to close the Official Accts,” implying that the tax office had not accepted the valuation. This suggests that Burney's executors were somewhat fortunate that their much lower valuations passed muster.We have not found any copyright valuations for authors who died before Burney, most likely because only a small number of legacy duty accounts has survived.18 Comparisons between authors are difficult and depend on whether the copyrights are in unpublished works, as for the Burneys, where the value is more speculative, or in published ones, and if so, everything depends on the publishing method. If an author sold the copyright outright (as Jane Austen did for Pride and Prejudice), there will be no copyright to value, but the value may be reflected in money in the estate; a publishing contract might be at the author's risk and expense, with the author paying the publisher a royalty (as for Jane Austen's other works); or the publisher might take the risk and pay the author a royalty or a share of profits, in which case the copyright to be valued will be an estimate of future receipts; or the risk to both parties might be avoided by relying on subscription to cover the cost of publishing (as Burney did for Camilla), with the author taking the whole of the proceeds apart from a handling fee to the publisher. The high value for Macaulay's copyrights, for which unusually there is an itemized valuation in the legacy duty account, relates solely to published works, mostly on terms of an equal split of profits between the author and publisher, but for his highly successful History of England, which had sales of 40,000, the split was three-quarters to the author.19Another notable feature of the Burney account is the “Debt due to deceased for sale of Books,” which is given as £25 6s. 10d. The books in question are, presumably, copies of Frances Burney's Memoirs of Doctor Burney, her only relatively recent publication; she had long since ceased to receive payments from any of her novels. First published in November 1832, the three-volume set was priced at £1 11s. 6d. In the absence of both the contract between Burney and the publisher, Edward Moxon, and of the publisher's records, the number of copies printed is unknown, as is the form and rate of payment. Joyce Hemlow estimates, on the evidence of Burney's account at Hoares’ Bank, that £1,000 was paid to the author in installments from 1832 to 1835, and further payments evidently followed.20 Surprisingly, however, the account put no value on the benefit from future sales, although a number of copies of the Memoirs had been sold shortly before and after Burney's death.Reproduced below is our transcription of “Burney's Legacy Duty Account.” Only items containing entries are included, and no attempt has been made to reproduce the pagination and layout of the original. The form was originally completed and dated 2 September 1840 (but not signed), before the two valuations of manuscripts were made on 9 September (Shoberl) and 1 October 1840 (Henry Burney). We can deduce that including the valuations was a last-minute decision made after the form had initially been completed, and that the valuations were made quickly (in a week, in Shoberl's case). The valuation figure must have been added after that date in the same fine pen nib as the rest of the form. The 2 September date was crossed out and the form redated 19 October 1840 and signed using a thicker pen nib. The thicker pen nib was used to add the figures required to be up-to-date immediately before the form was completed, including the price and values of the government securities, an interest payment received after 2 September, the bank balances, and all the totals; these are indicated by including those figures (other than the totals) in bold.

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