“ If Cecilia has not quite the freshness and charm of Evelina, it is more carefully constructed, and contains many happy examples of what Johnson called Miss Burney’s gift of “character-mongering.” Burke sent her a letter full of high praise. But some of her friends found the writing too often modelled on Johnson’s, and Horace Walpole thought the personages spoke too uniformly in character.
On the 24th of April 1783, Fanny Burney’s “most judicious adviser and stimulating critic,” “daddy” Crisp, died. He was her devoted friend, as she was to him, “the dearest thing on earth.” ”

“ Madame D’Arblay is still read in Evelina, but her best title to the affections of modern readers is the Diary and Letters. The small egotisms of the writer do not alienate other readers as they did John Wilson Croker. Dr Johnson lives in its pages almost as vividly as in those of Boswell, and King George and his wife in a friendlier light than in most of their contemporary portraits. Croker, in The Quarterly Review, April 1833 and June 1842, made two attacks on Madame D’Arblay. The first is an unfriendly but largely justifiable criticism on the Memoirs of Dr Burney. ”

“ The play had no great success, and in 1764 Crisp established himself in retirement at Chessington Hall, where he frequently entertained his sister, Mrs Sophia Gast, of Burford, Oxfordshire, and Dr Burney and his family, to whom he was familiarly known as “daddy” Crisp. [1] It was to her “daddy” Crisp and her sister Susan that Fanny Burney addressed large portions of her diary and many of her letters. After his wife’s death in 1767, Dr Burney married Elizabeth Allen, widow of a King’s Lynn wine-merchant. ”