This is an article from my blog The Engineering Hopkinsons. It is set in Manchester and it's called
'Henry Burnett & Fanny Dickens at the Rusholme Road Chapel'
The unaccompanied hymns at the Chapel (see The Rusholme Road Chapel & the Rev James Griffin) had always been plain and hearty, led by a rudimentary choir. But at the beginning of the 1840s two musicians, fresh from London and the stage, had joined the congregation and, as their contribution to church life, formed a new and inspiring small choir to lead the singing.
They were Henry and Fanny Burnett, the two young people mentioned in the chapter 'Becoming a member of the Rusholme Road Chapel'. Theirs was a world beyond John Hopkinson's imaginings. He was 59 when he first went to the theatre in 1883 and seemed to his son and daughter-in-law to be fairly baffled by it, while his wife dared not tell his sister Elizabeth, "she would have been so shocked."
Henry and Fanny Burnett came to Manchester after the baptism of their second son in London in the middle of May 1841. Three or four weeks after settling in, they were walking along the Rusholme Road one Sunday evening when they saw the lights of the Chapel and the people going in. They followed and were shown to seats. Something – they could never say exactly what it was – impressed them deeply with the earnest wish to come again. At the end of the service, Fanny had turned to Henry and said, "Henry, do let us come here again: if you will come, I will always come with you." He was quite taken aback because she had never said anything like this before.
For him, a Nonconformist service was a coming home. He had been an acclaimed and successful operatic tenor, trained in music from an early age – at the age of ten he had stood on a table to sing a solo in the Brighton Pavilion to the Court and seen the old king George IV, gout-ridden and wrapped in bandages. But though his father had been persuaded by a friend that the boy's voice was too good to be wasted, that he could make an excellent living from it, it was reluctantly because theirs was a Nonconformist family. Henry had lived until the age of seven with a pious grandmother and aunt and their early teachings left a lasting impression on him. And so his success in the world of music had become less and less fulfilling. He was, as Mr Griffin wrote in his memoirs
gradually coming to feel the emptiness of worldly pleasure, and to yearn in his "secret heart" after more substantial satisfaction
In the end, he could no longer bear the contradiction between the life he was leading and what he felt to be right. He decided to leave the stage and make his living from teaching. He and his wife were advised that Manchester was the place to go, as music was highly appreciated there.
Fanny Burnett wrote to Mr Griffin in these early days that
I was brought up in the Established Church, but I regret to say, without any serious ideas of religion
but of that evening in the Rusholme Road Chapel, she said
More or less all through the service, I seemed in a state of mind altogether new to me; and during the sermon it was as if I were entering a new world.
Her old world had been very different. She was the elder sister of Charles Dickens. In the Rev James Griffin's description of her new life in the chapel we can see the distinctive world of John Hopkinson and his family.
Fanny Dickens, 1836 |
Fanny (1810-48) and Charles (1812-70) were born in Portsmouth, the first of the large family of John Dickens, a pay-clerk in the Navy Pay Office, and his wife Elizabeth Barrow.
In 1822 John Dickens was posted to London where Fanny was one of the fortunate children to get a place at the newly established Royal Academy of Music at its opening in March 1823, where she studied piano and singing. The fees were 38 guineas a year, which wasn't cheap – as is recorded in A History of the Royal Academy of Music (1922), one of the committee members wrote to another, "we find that there are a great many schools where children do not pay so much".
At this point, her parents' Micawber-like attitude to money, their habit of living beyond their means, caught up with them. In September 1823, to save school fees and boost the family finances they sent their bright little 11 year old boy Charles to work in Warren's boot-blacking factory at Hungerford Stairs, an experience which Michael Allen has shown lasted for one year and which certainly marked him for life. (His argument is to be found in this article on the National Archives website).