In the period 1797–1801 Burney wrote three comedies that remained unpublished in her lifetime: Love and Fashion, A Busy Day and The Woman Hater. The last is partly a reworking of subject-matter from The Witlings, but with the satirical elements toned down and more emphasis on reforming her characters' faults. First performed in December 2007 at the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond, it retains one of the central characters, Lady Smatter – an absent-minded but inveterate quoter of poetry, perhaps meant as a comic rendering of a Bluestocking. All the other characters in The Woman Hater differ from those in The Witlings.
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The Witlings is a comedic play written by Frances Burney in 1779. It is a comedy of manners that satirizes the self-same literary society which Burney depended on for her support. The story involves the young lovers, Beaufort and Cecilia, who become estranged when Cecilia's estate is suddenly lost. Lady Smatter, Cecilia's governess, will not allow the match to proceed, but Beaufort's friend, Censor, catches Smatter in her own literary pretensions.
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Thus blackmailed, Smatter is forced to relent, and the lovers are reconciled and the estate is recovered. Burney's father, Charles Burney, understood the insulting parallels in the play, and persuaded his daughter to bury the play. The Witlings was not published until 1994, when Katherine Rogers included it in her anthology of Restoration and 18th-century women playwrights. The play was first performed on February 7, 1998 at the Main Street Theatre.
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In 1779, encouraged by the public's warm reception of comic material in Evelina, and with offers of help from Arthur Murphy and Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Burney began to write a dramatic comedy called The Witlings. The play satirised a wide segment of London society, including the literary world and its pretensions. It was not published at the time because Burney's father and the family friend Samuel Crisp thought it would offend some of the public by seeming to mock the Bluestockings, and because they had reservations about the propriety of a woman writing comedy.Doody, p. 451.
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The word is derived from the Greek άριστον (ariston), meaning "breakfast" or "lunch", and the suffix -logy, connoting a systematic discipline. Its earliest attestation in the Oxford English Dictionary dates from 1835. Edward Abbot, the author of the first Australian cookbook (The English And Australian Cookery Book — Cookery For The Many, published 1864), described himself as "an Australian Aristologist". The term has also been used in the mystery novels of American author Rex Stout, whose corpulent protagonist, Nero Wolfe, has a couple of encounters with a society known as the Ten for Aristology, who in his eyes are "... witlings, as dining is an art and not a science".
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Cecilia, or Memoirs of an Heiress was published in July 1782. Frances Burney began working on the novel in 1780, after her father, Dr. Charles Burney, and her literary mentor, Samuel Crisp, suppressed her play entitled The Witlings. Her father had concerns that the play, a comedic satire of bluestocking(s), would offend "real people" whom he depended on for artistic patronage, particularly Elizabeth Montagu. This disappointment and the pressure to produce a second novel in order to capitalize on the success of her first work Evelina, seems to have placed considerable strain on Burney, and may have colored the tone and content of Cecilia.
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Wharton p.191 At the same time, within the satire of the painting, the poet who is distressed is going to be one of Pope's dunces. The lines by Pope, though referring to Theobald, the hero of The Dunciad, are a characterisation of a Grub Street hack, a stereotype popular in the 1730s denoting a man of limited writing ability who lived in poverty but nevertheless determinedly pursued a career in literature; therefore, the particular scribbler depicted in the painting would be one of this fraternity of "witlings" who banded together to protest Pope's poem. In this context it would make sense, therefore, for the poet to have the scabrous anti-Pope print, or an emblem of Pope's fight with the hack writers' patron, above him.
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