The Burneys’ was a self-contained and self-sufficient household. Charles Burney had stools placed in the organ loft of St Margaret’s for his family, from which they could look down on the rest of the town during services. Esther did not mix much with the local women and educated her children at home, except for James, who had a couple of years at the grammar school on grounds of his gender. Hetty was the child who showed greatest promise, both intellectually and musically. Even as a small girl, it was clear she had the makings of a first-class harpsichordist, and attention was lavished on her by both parents. Fanny, who showed no special ability at anything and no inclination to learn to read, was left to develop in her own time. There was always a baby to play with: another son christened Charles was born in December 1757, when Fanny was five and Susan almost three. An eighth child was born in late 1758 or early 1759, and christened Henry, but he died in 1760. Fanny had been too young to remember the death of the second baby Charles, but was turning eight when Henry died.48 It must have affected her sadly, she was known as a ‘feeling’ child, of the most delicate sensibilities towards all living creatures.
Fanny Burney’s intense admiration for her father had its roots in these early years in Lynn. In such a community, a talented, energetic and ambitious man like Charles Burney was treated with enormous respect. He persuaded the corporation to have St Margaret’s ‘execrable’ organ cleaned, and when it fell apart in the process, got them to have a brand new one built, on which he performed dazzlingly various pieces of exciting contemporary music, such as Handel’s Coronation Anthem. Charles Burney’s playing in church, Charles Burney’s subscription concerts and Charles Burney’s evening parties were the best by far (there was no competition) in a town Fanny described as culturally in ‘the dark ages’.49
But however popular he was in Lynn, Charles Burney never intended to stay there very long, and the children must have got used to their parents talking about London as if it were their real home. Burney made a couple of attempts to leave during the 1750s, but his obligations (and some strategic salary hikes) kept him in place. His noble patrons made him feel valued and full of potential; Lord Orford was particularly generous, and allowed the musician the run of his library at Houghton. Burney would get the key from the housekeeper and wander around when the master was absent, no doubt fostering fantasies of one day possessing such a library and such a lifestyle himself. Early on in his Norfolk days, Burney had bought a mare called Peggy on which to travel the long distances from Lynn to his aristocratic and county clients, and typically he made use of the time spent on horseback (she was obviously a very trustworthy animal) teaching himself Italian from the classic authors, with a home-made Italian dictionary in his pocket. He bore all the marks of a man in training for something greater. His mind was turning to literary schemes, and perhaps it was as early as in these years that Burney first conceived his plan to write a history of music, something monumental in the style of Diderot’s Encyclopédie or Samuel Johnson’s new Dictionary of the English Language, to which he was also a subscriber. He kept himself in touch with the musical and intellectual life of London by going to town every winter. He hardly needed the urgent advice of his friend Samuel Crisp, whom he had met through the Grevilles:
is not settling at Lynn, planting your youth, genius, hopes, fortunes, &c., against a north wall? […] In all professions, do you not see every thing that has the least pretence to genius, fly up to the capital – the centre of riches, luxury, taste, pride, extravagance, – all that ingenuity is to fatten upon? Take, then, your spare person, your pretty mate, and your brats, to that propitious mart, and, ‘Seize the glorious, golden opportunity,’ while yet you have youth, spirits, and vigour to give fair play to your abilities, for placing them and yourself in a proper point of view.50
By 1760, Burney felt he had fulfilled his obligations to the ‘foggy aldermen’ of Lynn Regis. He decided to move his growing family back to London, ostensibly to further their chances in life, but more immediately to further his own. James, an easy-going boy who had not shone at school, was not to accompany them. It was agreed that he should join the navy, and he was signed up as Captain’s Servant on board the Princess Amelia. This was a recognised way for poorer boys to get some rudimentary officers’ training, but it was also an abrupt and dangerous introduction to adult life for a ten-year-old, and one wonders why his parents submitted him to it. Perhaps their ignorance of seafaring was as great as their backgrounds suggest. The Princess Amelia was a man-of-war, a huge floating artillery, with eighty cannon and 750 men on board, a far cry from the fishing boats and merchantmen James might have watched sailing up the Great Ouse. The Seven Years’ War was at its height, and the Princess Amelia was on active service: the year James joined the crew, it formed part of Hawke’s squadron in the Bay of Biscay and was almost blown up by French fireships in the Basque Roads the following year. News from the war took a long time to reach England, and the Burneys would have had little idea of the danger their son was in until it was well past. James’s career would keep him out of family life all through his formative years, and, not surprisingly, his own later behaviour as a family man was eccentric, to say the least. The violent contrasts between home life and the sea must have made the former seem vaguely surreal to him; he didn’t let one impinge on the other, and it is doubtful that his family ever understood the privations or excitements of his day-to-day existence.
The Burney family made their momentous move to London in September or early October 1760, to a house on Poland Street in Soho, a significantly better address than Charles Burney’s last one in the City. Soho, which had been very sparsely inhabited up to the sixteenth century but heavily developed by speculators after the Great Fire, was new and fashionable. The elegant squares and streets that spread their gridwork across the fields, the former military yard and around the old windmill* contained rows of houses quite different from the ‘Cottages … Shedds or meane habitacons’ that had straggled there as recently as 1650.51 Poland Street had been begun in 1689 and named, topically, in honour of John Sobieski’s intervention against the Turks at the siege of Vienna. It wasn’t one of the best addresses in the area – Leicester Fields, Golden Square and King’s (later Soho) Square had far more aristocratic associations – but it was a very respectable one for an ambitious music-teacher. Soho was full of middle-class families providing services to the rich: Huguenot craftsmen and jewellers, German instrument-makers, gun-makers, portrait-painters, wine merchants, watchmakers, architects and medical men. Next door to the Burneys was a hair-merchant who made wigs for the legal profession, a specialised business with dignified associations. The children of the two households played together in the little paved yards behind the properties.
By the time Fanny Burney was writing the Memoirs in the late 1820s, she was aware that her readers might be unimpressed by the family’s former address, ‘which was not then, as it is now, a sort of street that, like the rest of its neighbourhood, appears to be left in the lurch’.52 She stressed how genteel Poland Street had been in the 1760s, when the Burneys had lords, knights and even a disinherited Scottish Earl for neighbours, and exotic visitors such as a Red Indian Cherokee chief who was staying in a building almost opposite number 50 and whom the Burney children watched come and go with awed delight.
The contrast with Lynn was dramatic, the scope for entertainment and