Charlotte Campbell Bury

Artist Info

Charlotte Campbell BuryLondon, 1775 - 1861, London

LC name authority rec.nr89007190

LC Heading: Bury, Charlotte Campbell, Lady, 1775-1861

Biography:

Bury [née Campbell], Lady Charlotte Susan Maria (1775–1861), novelist and diarist, was born on 28 January 1775 at Argyll House, Oxford Street, London, the youngest child of John Campbell, fifth duke of Argyll (1723–1806), army officer and politician, and Elizabeth (1734–1790), second daughter of John Gunning of Castle Coot in co. Roscommon, widow of James Hamilton, sixth duke of Hamilton, and at one time lady of the bedchamber to Queen Charlotte. As a young woman, Lady Charlotte was noted for her beauty: in 1791 Horace Walpole wrote that ‘everyone admires’ her ‘person and understanding’ (Walpole, 188). Her contemporaries also praised her ‘charming manners, all ease and simplicity’ (Memoir, ed. Grant, 137). Maria Edgeworth, who met her in 1830, thought her ‘agreeable—unaffected—free from authorship pretension or pretension of any sort’ (Letters from England, 448).

Until 1809 Lady Charlotte was frequently in Edinburgh, where she entertained many of the literary celebrities of the day. It was at one of her parties that Sir Walter Scott met Matthew Lewis, and she was also a long-standing friend of the novelist Susan Ferrier. Her first publication, Poems on Several Occasions, appeared anonymously in 1797, when she was twenty-two. The poems are mainly sentimental and melancholic, written on such fashionable topics of the day as the simple virtues of highland peasants and the transitory nature of fame and happiness. In ‘An Ode to Evening’ Lady Charlotte describes her work as ‘artless lines’ which

impart

The soften'd feelings of the heart.

(Poems, 5)

On 14 June 1796 Lady Charlotte married her distant cousin Colonel John Campbell (eldest son of Walter Campbell of Shawfield and his first wife, Eleanora Kerr), who, at the time of his death in Edinburgh on 15 March 1809, was member of parliament for the Ayr burghs. The couple had nine children, of whom only two—Lady A. Lennox and Mrs William Russell—survived Lady Charlotte.

In 1810 Lady Charlotte was appointed lady-in-waiting in the household of the princess of Wales, afterwards Queen Caroline, and began keeping a diary, in which she recorded the foibles and failings of the princess and other members of the court. Lady Charlotte also began her career as a novelist at this time, publishing Self-Indulgence anonymously in 1812. She left her position at court in May 1815, and on 17 March 1818, in spite of the reservations of friends such as Sir Walter Scott, she married the Revd (Edward) John Bury, the only son of Edward Bury of Taunton. Educated at University College, Oxford (BA 1811, MA 1817), John Bury became rector of Lichfield, Hampshire, in 1814. Lady Charlotte Bury had two daughters from this marriage, but throughout it she was short of money, and it was probably her financial difficulties which led her to begin writing fiction again in the 1820s. She published Conduct is Fate in 1822, following it by more than a dozen other novels, the last of which, The Two Baronets, was published posthumously in 1864.

Some of Lady Charlotte's novels were once very popular, including Flirtation (1827), which went into a third edition in 1828; The Divorced (1837), which was also published in both France and America; and The History of a Flirt (1840), which was reissued in the Parlour Novels series in the 1850s. According to one commentator, she earned as much as £200 for a novel at the height of her career (Steuart, ix), but the books were less successful with critics. They were not extensively reviewed, and Lady Holland wrote dismissively of Alla giornata (1826) that ‘it is said to be better than her former publications. It had need be so to be worth anything’ (Adburgham, 121). Most of these works originally appeared without her name, but even at the time there does not seem to have been any secret as to the identity of the writer. The novels have attracted some scholarly attention in studies of the ‘silver fork’ literature of the 1820s and 1830s, but none of them has been reissued in the twentieth century. In addition to her fiction, Lady Charlotte also wrote Suspira santorum, or, Holy Breathings (2 vols., 1826), a collection of prayers, and a year after her husband's death at Ardenample Castle, Dunbartonshire, in May 1832, she published The Three Great Sanctuaries of Tuscany (1833), a poem illustrated by him. She also edited two novels, Caroline Lucy Scott's Marriage in High Life (1828), and Catherine Gore's Memoirs of a Peeress, or, The Days of Fox (1837).

Lady Charlotte Bury was best-known, however, for her Diary Illustrative of the Times of George IV (2 vols.); when it appeared anonymously in 1838, it was thought to bear evidence of a familiarity with the scenes depicted which could only be attributed to Lady Charlotte. It was reviewed with much severity, and attributed to her by both the Edinburgh and the Quarterly reviews. Thackeray also mocked the Diary in his ‘Skimmings from the Dairy of George IV’, even though he used gossip from it when writing The Four Georges. Probably helped by the controversy, the volumes sold rapidly, and the book was soon republished in an expanded edition. The charge of the authorship was not at the time denied, and the Diary was published under her name in 1908. It was largely sympathetic to Queen Caroline, and Lady Charlotte was called as a defence witness at her trial. Lady Charlotte Bury died at 91 Sloane Street, Chelsea, London, on 31 March 1861.

G. C. Boase, rev. Pam Perkins

Sources A. F. Steuart, introduction, in The diary of a lady-in-waiting, by Lady Charlotte Bury, ed. A. F. Steuart, 1 (1908) · A. Adburgham, Silver fork society (1983) · Maria Edgeworth: letters from England, 1813–1844, ed. C. Colvin (1971) · Memoir and correspondence of Mrs Grant of Laggan, ed. J. P. Grant, 2nd edn, 3 (1845) · Walpole, Corr., vol. 11 · The Times (2 April 1861) · The letters of Sir Walter Scott, ed. H. J. C. Grierson and others, centenary edn, 12 vols. (1932–79), vol. 6 · GM · Burke, Peerage

Archives BL, diary, M/497 [microfilm] · UCL, letters :: Bodl. Oxf., letters to Mary Anne Disraeli · NL Scot., letters to Gordon–Cumming family

Likenesses J. Opie, oils, c.1784, Inveraray Castle, Strathclyde · lithograph, 1795, NPG, BM · T. Wright, stipple, 1830 (after T. Lawrence), BM, NPG; repro. in La Belle Assemblé (1830) · A. Blakley, chalk drawing, 1841, Scot. NPG · J. Hoppner, oils (as Aurora), Inveraray Castle, Strathclyde · J. Posselwhite, stipple (after G. Hayter), BM, NPG; repro. in C. Bury, The three great sanctuaries of Tuscany, Valombrosa, Camalodi, Laverna: a poem · J. W. Tischbein, oils, Scot. NPG · engraving, repro. in New Monthly Magazine (Jan 1837)

G. C. Boase, ‘Bury , Lady Charlotte Susan Maria (1775–1861)’, rev. Pam Perkins, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://proxy.bostonathenaeum.org:2055/view/article/4147, accessed 23 Oct 2015]