I was terrified to Death – I felt the utter impossibility of resisting not merely my Father’s persuasion but even his Advice. […] I wept like an Infant – Eat nothing – seemed as if already married – & passed the whole Day in more misery than, merely on my own account, I ever did before in my life[.]46
The crisis resolved itself the next day in a tearful scene between father and daughter, during which Fanny declared that she wanted nothing but to live with him. ‘My life!’ the Doctor exclaimed, kissing her kindly, ‘I wish not to part with my Girls! – they are my greatest Comfort!’ Fanny left the room ‘as light, happy & thankful as if Escaped from Destruction’.47
To Mrs Burney, the matter must have presented itself rather differently. The girls were not her greatest comfort, and seemed perversely determined not to marry well. Esther had made an impoverished love-match; in 1772 both Maria Allen and her seventeen-year-old brother Stephen shocked and offended their mother by runaway marriages – Maria with Martin Rishton, her former jilt, and Stephen with a girl called Susanna Sharpin. Now Fanny was declaring she would probably never marry, but wanted only to live with her father. With Fanny hunkering down after the Barlow episode as a possibly permanent fixture at home, relations between her and ‘Mama’ began to stiffen.
Progress with the History of Music was much slower than Dr Burney had anticipated, and although he was working at it obsessively and making as much use as possible of his daughters as secretaries and his new friend the cleric and scholar Thomas Twining as an adviser, it began to look as if he had taken on too much. He had other disappointments and difficulties at the same time, including the failure of his plans to found a school of music with the violinist Giardini and, a few weeks later, the publication of a raucous parody of his two books of travels (The Present State of Music in Germany, the Netherlands and the United Provinces had been published the previous year), satirising the credulity and affectation of earnest fact-gatherers such as the Doctor in a succession of absurd and often quite amusing ‘musical’ encounters around England. Burney was deeply alarmed and offended by the pamphlet, and is believed to have tried to suppress it by buying up the entire stock,48 a drastic measure which (if he took it) did not prevent the work going through four editions in the next two years. In the Memoirs Fanny made as light of the incident as she could, though she betrays her strong feelings in metaphors of ‘vipers’ and ‘venom’. According to her, the pamphlet ‘was never reprinted; and obtained but the laugh of a moment’,49 but there was a great deal in the squib to touch her own feelings as nearly as it had the Doctor’s. If he, with his Oxford doctorate, could attract a lurid parody of his books about music, what treatment might not an uneducated female would-be novelist expect?
In the autumn of 1774 the Burneys were forced to leave Queen Square because of ‘difficulties respecting its title’.50 The house they moved to was right in the centre of town, on the corner of Long’s Court and St Martin’s Street, which runs south out of Leicester Square. Although the air was not so balmy as in Queen Square, with its ‘beautiful prospect’, and though St Martin’s Street was, in Fanny’s blunt words, ‘dirty, ill built, and vulgarly peopled’,*51 there were many things to recommend the new address. It was convenient for the opera house and the theatres, the aunts in Covent Garden, Hetty and her young family in Charles Street and many of Dr Burney’s fashionable friends (Sir Joshua Reynolds lived just round the corner in Leicester Square). It also had the distinction of having been Sir Isaac Newton’s house, which alone would have recommended it to the astrophile Burneys. Newton lived there from 1711 to his death in 1727, and built a small wooden observatory right at the top of the property, glazed on three sides and commanding a good view of the city as well as the sky. ‘[W]e shew it to all our Visitors, as our principal Lyon’, Fanny wrote in her journal ten days after moving in.
The Burneys were so proud of the connection with the great scientist that they thought of calling their new home ‘Newton House’ or ‘The Observatory’ as a boast. Charles Burney was particularly fond of dropping Sir Isaac’s name into conversation, and displayed a certain ingenuity at creating occasions to do so. Once when a visitor broke his sword on the stairs Burney protested that they ‘were not of my constructing – they were Sir Isaac Newton’s’;53 and on Mrs Thrale’s first visit to the house he said he was unable to ‘divine’ the answer to a query about a concert, ‘not having had Time to consult the stars, though in the House of Sir Isaac Newton’.54 As a sort of homage to their illustrious precursor, Burney spent a considerable sum having the observatory renovated. He did not, however, choose the chilly rooftop perch for his study (a small room adjoining the library on the first floor performed that function much more comfortably), and it was soon colonised by the children, Fanny adopting it as her ‘favorite sitting place, where I can retire to read or write any of my private fancies or vagaries’ – a substitute for her closet or ‘bureau’ of former days.
Of all the Burneys’ homes, number 1 St Martin’s Street is the most famous.* Dr Burney and his wife lived there for thirteen years, by the end of which the children, with the exception of their younger child, Sarah Harriet (born in 1772), had all left home. The house had a basement and three storeys each consisting of a front and back room, with a projecting wing to the rear on each floor. On the ground floor at the front was the panelled parlour where the family took their meals,† and behind it was another parlour (the kitchen, presumably, was in the basement). Above it, up the fine oak staircase, was the drawing room, with three tall windows looking onto St Martin’s Street. This room was the most splendid in the house, and had an ‘amazingly ornamented’ painted ceiling, probably depicting nudes, since it seems to have been something of an embarrassment to the Doctor: ‘I hope you don’t think that I did it?’ he said to one curious visitor, ‘for I swear I did not!’56 Sir Isaac’s name was not invoked on this occasion. There had been three other owners since the scientist, one of them French.
The drawing room was separated from the library by folding doors which, when opened, provided a large and elegant space for the many parties and concerts which the Burneys soon began to hold at St Martin’s Street. Dr Burney’s library was extensive and highly specialised: when Samuel Johnson visited for the first time and abandoned the company to inspect the books, he would have found few volumes on any subject other than music (although he still preferred looking into books on music to attending the Burneys’ informal concert which was the alternative entertainment). The library, also known as the music room, had a window looking down onto the small, overshadowed garden at the back and contained the Doctor’s two harpsichords. Beyond it, in the part of the building which projected out at the back, was Burney’s narrow workroom, grandly named ‘Sir Isaak Newton’s Study’ (on hearsay), but commonly known as ‘the Spidery’ or ‘Chaos’ and habitually so untidy with Burney’s sprawl of papers that no guests were invited to look in.
On the top floor at the front was the main bedroom, used by Dr and Mrs Burney, with a powdering closet adjoining. The girls’ bedroom was beyond it at the back, above the library. The three attic rooms, from which one gained entrance to the observatory, were probably servants’ bedrooms and the nursery, with a poky stairway leading from the top floor. James was scarcely ever at home, but still had a room on the ground floor kept for him that opened onto the little garden; Charles junior probably slept there when he was home in the holidays from Charterhouse. Beyond ‘Jem’s room’, opening onto Long’s Court, was a small workshop, which Dr Burney rented