Another engaging passage describes the king's ceremonial visit to Oxford — not a territory with which he was familiar or where the niceties of courtly behaviour were fully understood. The account of well-fed dons tumbling over one another as they made to bow or kiss hands with their sovereign is delightful: "The sight at times was very ridiculous. Some of the worthy Collegiates, unused to such ceremonies, and unaccustomed to such a presence, the moment they had kissed the King's Hand, turned their backs to him...others, attempting to do better, did still worse, by tottering and stumbling, and falling foul of those behind them...others plumpt down on both knees, & could hardly get up again; & many, in their confusion, fairly arose by pulling His Majesty's Hand to raise them."
These two volumes are the first of six which, when the series is complete, will for the first time make accessible the whole of Fanny Burney's vivid account of her life at the court of George III. Thus they constitute something of a publishing landmark, because although portions of these letters and journals have appeared in print before, it was in a garbled form. This scholarly new edition from Oxford is intended to present not only everything she wrote, but to do so free from the numerous changes and deletions which have been added subsequently.
This has proved to be laborious work. In her later years Madame d'Arblay (as Fanny became) worked over the texts of her voluminous correspondence, deleting many passages with a view to publishing extracts. The present editors have aimed at recovering all her original writings, which often meant penetrating the heavy black ink of Fanny's sweeping erasures, as well as getting rid of the cuts and distortions introduced in her turn by Burney's niece, who published a muddled selection of the letters soon after their author's death in 1840.
Generally the recipients of these newly edited letters are members of Fanny's family, most often her beloved sister Susanna, to whom she could express herself quite openly — as when, early in her time with Queen Charlotte, she wrote that she found she was to be summoned routinely by a bell: "At first, I felt inexpressibly discomfited by this mode of Call; a Bell! — it seemed so mortifying a mark of servitude, I always felt myself blush, although alone, with conscious shame at my own strange degradation, — but I have philosophised myself now into some reconcilement with this manner of summons." Class distinctions evidently lost no potency even in the purlieus of monarchy.
