How much of a wrench the death of his twin was to the little Charles Burney is hard to tell, since he was ejected from the family at the age of three and sent with his older brother Richard to live with a woman called Ball in Condover, four miles outside Shrewsbury. He was left in the care of Nurse Ball nine years – his whole childhood – a fact which shocked his daughter Fanny when she discovered it almost ninety years later. Fanny was particularly appalled by the mother’s behaviour, which she thought ‘nearly unnatural’,7 and she destroyed what evidence there was of the ‘niggardly unfeelingness’ and neglect she felt her father had suffered. By editing the episode out of her father’s papers, Fanny hoped to conceal ‘a species of Family degradation’ from public view; but no member of the public could have been more upset by it than she. She had known her grandmother Burney all her childhood, when the widow was living in Covent Garden with her two unmarried daughters. It must have seemed astonishing that this same grandmother, so much part of the family background, had, for whatever reason, opted out of caring for her own sons all those years before. Fanny’s novels are full of orphaned or abandoned children laid open to peril through lack of parental care; in them, bad parents are punished or vilified and made to repent, but Ann Burney seemed to have committed the cardinal sin of unfeeling and got off scot-free.
Charles Burney himself did not seem embittered by the long separation from his parents, although his intense affection for his own children (especially when they were little) and his apparent desire to establish a solid, admirable and outstanding Burney dynasty within one generation may have been reactions against it. The splitting up of the MacBurney family in the late 1720s was probably necessitated by lack of money. James went back to London temporarily to take up work as an actor at the new Goodman’s Fields Theatre at about this time; perhaps he and his wife felt that the boys would be better off out of the way, getting some education at Condover village school. The fact that Ann Burney’s later relations with her sons were detached could of course have been the effect as much as the cause of her not bringing them up herself, but Fanny seems not to have considered the kind of harsh compromises that might have to be made when a couple with five children of their own (and nine older semi-dependants) find themselves close to destitution. The threat of poverty is the most potent danger that faces the heroines of Fanny Burney’s novels; all other evils stem from it. But it is also something that never really overcomes any of them. Poverty brings out the best in her heroines: they act with dignity, expand their sensitivities, and support themselves by plain sewing, teaching, governessing or becoming ladies’ companions. The charting of a gentlewoman’s descent into wage-earning carries a sort of illicit thrill for author and reader alike (one can say quite clearly a sexual thrill, because of the unspoken threat of prostitution, the obvious last-ditch job-opportunity for women), but class always ultimately protects Burney’s heroines from crossing the line into ‘degradation’.
In the 1740s, the MacBurneys were struggling to cross that line in the other direction. The family name was changed, soon after Charles’s birth, from MacBurney (or ‘Mackburny’ as the twins were christened) to plain Burney. This was probably done to facilitate James’s revived stage career, for as the scholar Roger Lonsdale points out, Charles Burney himself suggested the reason for another actor’s name-change from McLaughlin to Macklin might have been ‘to get rid not only of its Paddy appearance but of its harshness’.8 The new name had an added significance for Charles: it marked a fresh start. Burney’s later success, riding under the banner of an (as he thought) untraceable family name, became a source of profound pride to himself and his children, so important to Fanny that her stated reason for destroying most of her father’s early memoirs was to protect ‘the Name of Burney’, even if it was only a few decades old and had started life as a professional convenience.
Charles Burney was assimilated back into his re-christened family when they moved to Chester in 1739. He had led what seems a truly happy, country-boy’s life at Condover with Nurse Ball, and left her with an ‘agony of grief’.9 But the city offered obvious advantages, and at the Free School in Chester he began the musical training, as choirboy and then organist, which was to shape his life. The cathedral organist suffered from gout, and recruited the fourteen-year-old Burney as an assistant while the boy was still hardly able to read music. His success was such, both as a singer and player, that his half-brother James, who was organist of St Mary’s Church in Shrewsbury, asked to have him as an assistant. Charles ‘ran away’ back to his native town for a couple of years, despite his parents’ disapproval, but by 1744 was back in Chester, on the persuasion of his father ‘who I believe, loved me very affectionately’, as Charles wrote later.10
However fragmented their family life was at times, James MacBurney’s strong paternal love and good nature held the clan together, and there were evenings of great gaiety in the household. Charles Burney inspired similar affection among his own children, recalling after one family party in later years,
we were as merry, & laughed as loud as the Burneys always do, when they get together and open their hearts; tell their old stories, & have no fear of being Quizzed by interlopers. It was so in my poor dear old father’s time, & my boyish days – when my brother Thomas from London – or James from Shrewsbury came on a visit to Chester, we used, young & old, Male & female, to sit up all night – not to drink, but to laugh à gorge deployée.11
Charles Burney’s important career break came the same year (1744), when the composer Thomas Arne was passing through Chester on his way from Dublin to take up the post of composer at the Drury Lane Theatre. Arne got to hear of the diligent and talented young musician, who was already composing as well as able to play the violin, harpsichord and organ, and suggested to James Burney that the boy ought to be apprenticed to ‘an eminent Master in London’. On a subsequent meeting, Arne said that he himself would take Charles for £100 down, with no further liabilities, and at a third attempt said he would take him for nothing, realising he was still getting a good deal. Delighted and grateful, the Burneys of course agreed, though Charles was to look back on the bargain with mixed feelings.
Once in London, Arne got as much out of his apprentice as possible, making him transcribe quantities of music, teach junior pupils, run errands, play in the Drury Lane band and sometimes sing in the chorus there, any payment always going straight into the master’s pocket. Arne himself was passing the peak of his fame; the revival of his Masque of Alfred in 1745, containing the popular patriotic song ‘Rule, Britannia!’, was not successful, but his close connections with the capital’s best musicians and actors were very valuable to young Burney, who lived with the curmudgeonly composer and his wife in Great Queen Street and attended parties with them at the house of Arne’s sister, the actress Susannah Cibber. The charismatic David Garrick, who was to become a close friend of Burney, was the star of this coterie, which included Drury Lane and Covent Garden’s other leading men and ladies James Quin, Peg Woffington and Kitty Clive. Burney met literary men too, through his friendship with ‘the Scottish Orpheus’ James Oswald, James Thomson, Tobias Smollett and Christopher Smart among them. His career as an arch-networker among London’s bohemians was off to an excellent start.
As time went on, Burney became disillusioned with his apprenticeship to