Online Texts

Selected texts by members of the Burney family are available online.


Frances Burney (1752-1840)

Evelina (1778)
Made available online by the Celebration of Women Writers project.

Cecilia (1782)

Made available online by Google Books.

Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay (1842)

"Edited by her niece [Charlotte Barrett]."

Made available online by Google Books.

The Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney
An electronic version of the Oxford/McGill-Queen's University Press editions.
Available to online subscribers to the InteLex Past Masters database.

The Complete Plays of Frances Burney
An electronic version of the Pickering and Chatto edition.
Available to online subscribers to the InteLex Past Masters database.


Charles Burney (1726-1814)

For recordings of Charles Burney's work. see his biography page.

The Present State of Music in France and Italy (1773)
Made available online by Google Books.

The Present State of Music in Germany, the Netherlands and United Provinces (1775)
•  Volume I made available online by Internet Archive Texts Archive.

•  Volume II made available online by Google Books.

An account of the musical performances in Westminster-Abbey, and the Pantheon, May 26th, 27th, 29th; and June the 3d, and 5th, 1784 in Commemoration of Handel (1785)(1834 reprint)
Made available online by Google Books.

A General History of Music, from the earliest ages to the present period (1789)
Ed. Frank Mercer; 1935 Harcourt Brace edition (reprinted by Dover)

Made available online by Internet Archive Texts Archive.

Memoirs of the Life and Writings of the Abate Metastasio (1796)
Made available online by HathiTrust.

Memoirs of Doctor Burney (1832)
"Arranged from his own manuscripts, from family papers, and from personal recollections,
by his daughter, Madame d'Arblay [Frances Burney]."

Made available online by Google Books.

The libretto of The Cunning Man, available on HathiTrust.

Scores for hymns: 1769: PDF icon cb_hymns_1769.pdf, 1790: PDF icon cb_hymns_1790.pdf, 1817: PDF icon cb_hymns_1817.pdf.

RISM UK Catalogue: an index of printed music manuscripts ca. 1600-1800 held by libraries in the UK and worldwide.

IMSLP Catalogue: catalogue of Burney's compositions and written works (as author, editor, and translator). This includes links to 2 of Charles Burney's music scores, 13 collections which included his work, 51 music scores extracted from the General History, and 1 translation of a letter by Tartini, as well as digitised texts of his General History, Life of Metastasio and the 2 volumes of Travels. The page also links to pages with music scores by his nephew, Charles Rousseau Burney (1747-1819), and granddaughter, Cecelia Burney (1797-1821).

"Dr Charles Burney and Hymn Tunes" by A.P. Woolrich:PDF icon cb_hymns_woolrich.pdf

An Essay towards a History of the Principal Comets that have appeared since the year 1742, available on HathiTrust.

Account of an Infant Musician, available on Archive.org.

Rees's Cyclopaedia

The below documents by A.P. Woolrich recreate the texts of Dr Charles Burney’s writings in Rees’s Cyclopaedia. Because the full PDFs are around 12mb, users with slower Internet may wish to check the individual index lists before downloading the full documents.

For an introduction and overview of the work, see the Digitization Introduction: PDF icon rees_digitization_introduction.pdf

For general articles, see the General files: PDF icon rees_general_list.pdf   |   PDF icon rees_general_fulldocument.pdf

For biographies, see the Biography files: PDF icon rees_biographies_list.pdfPDF icon rees_biographies_fulldocument.pdf

Addendum of Kepler's biography: PDF icon rees_kepleraddendum.pdf

Addendum of Putavari's biography: PDF icon rees_putavariaddendum.pdf

See also the music plates: PDF icon rees_musicplates.pdf

These documents are generously released by A.P. Woolrich under the Creative Commons license BY-NC-SA.


James Burney (1750-1821)

With Captain James Cook in the Pacific (1772-73)
Excerpt on the topic of the Maoris of New Zealand.
Made available online by the Modern History Sourcebook.

Correspondence between Sir Joseph Banks and James Burney (1791)
Facsimile copy of letter dated September 5, 1791.
Made available online by the State Library of New South Wales Sir Joseph Banks Collection.

Chronological History of the Voyages and Discoveries in the South Sea or Pacific Ocean (1813)
Chapters four and seven of Volume III.
Made available online by Colin Choat and Bob Forsyth for Project Gutenberg of Australia.

Chronological History of the Voyages and Discoveries in the South Sea or Pacific Ocean (1816)
Excerpts from Volumes I and IV.
Made available online by John Woram.

History of the Buccaneers of America (1816)
Selected excerpts from chapters one through seven.
Made available online by Google Books.

Chronological History of North-eastern Voyages of Discovery (1819)
Made available online by Google Books.

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