A one-day symposium, ‘Scandal and Sociability: New Perspectives on the Burney Family, 1750–1850’, was held at Cardiff University on 1 September 2015. Although most papers were concerned with the generation of the novelist Frances (‘Fanny’) Burney rather than that of her father Dr Charles Burney, there was much that was of relevance to music historians. Peter Sabor's keynote address, ‘The March of Intimacy: Dr Burney and Dr Johnson’, chronicled the progress of the remarkable friendship between the two men, which began when Burney was young and unknown and lasted until Johnson's death in December 1784. Johnson was famously averse to music, but such was his friendship with Burney that he gladly agreed to write the dedications of the General History of Music and the Account of the Musical Performances . . . in Commemoration of Handel, both of which appeared as being by Burney himself. In ‘Authoring the “Author of My Being” in Memoirs of Doctor Burney’ Cassie Ulph discussed the refashioning of the character and life of Charles Burney by his daughter Frances (by now Mme d’Arblay) in her notoriously unreliable memoir of 1832. My own paper, ‘Scandal and Secretiveness in the Burney Family’, examined the circumstances of Burney's first marriage, to Esther Sleepe in 1749, and his second, to Elizabeth Allen in 1767, suggesting that the secretiveness involved in both marriages presaged a more general culture of secrecy in the later history of the Burney family. Finally, in ‘The Sleepe Family of Fanmakers’ Amy Erickson presented important discoveries about Burney's first wife and other female members of her family. Information about the Sleepe family has up to now been scarce, partly because Charles Burney destroyed all correspondence with her after her death, and partly as a result of the later censoring activities of Mme d’Arblay. But we now know that, far from being an artisan or ‘in trade’ in a fairly humble way, as has often been supposed, Esther, together with her mother and two sisters, had a prosperous and successful career as a retailer of fans, with shops in the most prestigious streets in the City of London. She thus played an important part as a businesswoman in one of eighteenth-century London's luxury trades.

Mention of this conference also provides an opportunity to bring to readers’ attention the welcome news that after a long period in abeyance the project to publish the complete letters of Dr Charles Burney has now resumed. The one volume of the edition to have appeared so far was the first, covering the letters from 1751 to 1784; edited by the late Alvaro Ribeiro, SJ, it was published by Oxford University Press as long ago as 1991, and was based on Ribeiro's 1980 Oxford DPhil dissertation. Four further volumes will now be published over the next five years or so, under the general editorship of Peter Sabor, Director of the Burney Centre at McGill University, Montreal. Editors of the individual volumes are Lorna J. Clark (‘Volume 2: 1785–1793’), Stewart Cooke (‘Volume 3: 1794–1801’), Philip Olleson (‘Volume 4: 1802–1807’) and Peter Sabor (‘Volume 5: 1808–1814’).