27. Henry Burnett & Fanny Dickens at the Rusholme Road Chapel

The unaccompanied hymns at the Chapel 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 blogpost 7. 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 Revd 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 (in this article on the National Archives website) has shown lasted for one year and which certainly marked him for life.  

On 20 February 1824 John Dickens was finally arrested for debt and sent to the Marshalsea Prison  where he, Elizabeth and the younger children lived for three months.  They managed to keep paying Fanny's fees, a strangely unworldly decision.  Boys' education was usually prioritised because their far greater earning capacity frequently meant they would be relied on to support family in need.  Fanny, though very able and determined – after February 1827 when her father's debts had left her fees badly in arrears and she had to leave the Academy, she was able to keep receiving tuition by taking on part-time teaching there – didn't in fact have a voice for the operatic stage where high earnings would have been possible.  Charles' feelings about his mother were permanently soured by his experiences.  He always said he never felt jealous of Fanny, but the contrast in their fortunes was dreadful for him.

Fanny married Henry Burnett, who had also studied at the Royal Academy, in 1837.  When Charles, already famous for The Pickwick Papers (serialised 1836-7) and Oliver Twist (1837-9), began to write Nicholas Nickleby (1838-9), people hailed Henry Burnett as Nicholas because he looked exactly like the pictures.  Dickens' illustrator Phiz (Hablot Browne) had probably used Henry as a model – and in fact there was a likeness of character too between Henry and Nicholas Nickleby (cf this article in the Christian Science Monitor)

At the time when Henry decided to remove himself and Fanny and their boys from London, they were spending their Sundays as professional singers at the Chapel of the Sardinian Ambassador and their Sunday evenings in the lively jollities of Charles Dickens' house – "in a manner which, though strictly moral, was not congenial" to his feelings, wrote Mr Griffin.  Fanny later told Mr Griffin that she too 

seemed gradually to lose my relish for the pleasures of the world, but I was still wholly ignorant of gospel truths. 

Charles Dickens found his brother-in-law's decision incomprehensible.  He was never a friend of this sort of religion.  As is obvious from his books, he had a great love of conviviality, parties, parlour games, dancing and noisy family fun and he loved the theatre.  He didn't think "the world, and pleasure, and dress, and company" – the sort of life condemned in the story called The Dairyman's Daughter described in this earlier blogpost  – were necessarily blameworthy.  He campaigned fiercely against the Sabbatarian movement which tried for decades to have work, trade and travel banned on Sundays.  Sunday was the only day of the week on which the lower classes could enjoy the sort of pastimes and entertainments that the upper classes could enjoy at any time.  He saw Sabbatarians as totally un-Christian and in 1843 he voiced his condemnation through the Ghost of Christmas Present speaking to Scrooge in A Christmas Carol 

"There are some upon this earth of yours," returned the Spirit, "who lay claim to know us, and who do their deeds of passion, pride, ill-will, hatred, envy, bigotry, and selfishness in our name, who are as strange to us and all our kith and kin, as if they had never lived. Remember that, and charge their doings on themselves, not us"

But by the time A Christmas Carol came out, Fanny was delighting in Sundays as a day of holy rest spent at divine service and prayer.

 

Perhaps Fanny had found life darker and sadder because of her anxiety over her eldest boy, Henry, who was far from strong.  He was born in 1839 with a physical disability – Mr Griffin wrote of a "deformed back".  He described little Harry, whom he knew well, as "a singular child – meditative and quaint in a remarkable degree".  It's said that he was the inspiration for Tiny Tim in A Christmas Carol.  Mr Griffin wrote that

He was the original, as Mr Dickens told his sister, of little "Paul Dombey."  Harry had been taken to Brighton, as "little Paul" is represented to have been, and had there, for hours lying on the beach with his books, given utterance to thoughts quite as remarkable for a child as those which are put into the lips of Paul Dombey.  But little Harry loved his Bible, and evidently loved Jesus.  The child seemed never tired of reading his Bible and his hymns, and other good books suited to his age: and the bright little fellow was always happy.

(Dombey and Son was published in instalments between October 1846 and April 1848)

A few weeks after their first visit to the chapel, Fanny and Henry approached Mr Griffin to talk about joining the congregation.  They soon became good friends of James and Eliza Griffin – interestingly, they were all born in Portsmouth – spending many evenings together over the following years.  One year they all spent a month on holiday in the Lake District, driving and walking about Windermere, Rydal Water, Keswick and Coniston.  

James Griffin thought that because Henry and Fanny might still be exposed to "strong worldly influences which it might require no common degree of Christian principle to withstand" they should take becoming members slowly.  A year later Fanny wrote to Mr Griffin describing her progress in her faith.  "By degrees," she wrote,

my eyes were opened, and I saw with shame and confusion my utter worthlessness in the sight of God, and that unless I came to Him through His dear Son, I could not be saved  

Now, 

I seem to have clearer views.  I delight in the ordinances of the sanctuary.  I feel great pleasure in mixing with God's people.  I feel anxious to be spiritually-minded and to devote myself entirely to the service of Christ

During this time she and Henry "greatly endeared themselves to the hearts of the good people" of the congregation, who were deeply moved at the meeting in which Henry and Fanny were received into the church.  I feel sure we can assume that John Hopkinson and his family, with their deep involvement in the chapel and John's closeness to his friend and mentor Mr Griffin, knew the Burnetts.

The life of John Hopkinson and his family – described years later by his daughter-in-law Evelyn Oldenbourg as "their fine, almost austere, life" – and the ways of the people of the Rusholme Road Chapel could not have been more different from the life Fanny had known, the life loved by her brother Charles.  Mr Griffin wrote

the principles, the tastes, the pursuits, the habits of life, of those with whom she now came into daily intercourse, were almost entirely new to her …  

Thrown very much by the nature of her [teaching] engagements into worldly company, and with her natural buoyancy of spirits and fondness for society, her chief difficulty consisted in maintaining a spiritual and visible separation from the world.  No doubt it would demand much prayerful effort to make natural and educational tendencies bend to the requirements of religious duty and disposition 

She persevered.  She now felt that "a saving change had been wrought on her soul by the Spirit of God" and she "delighted to feel that she was now decidedly and irrevocably 'on the Lord's side,' for ever devoted and given up to Him".  She knew when she saw old friends that her "supposed fanaticism might be the object of their pity or contempt" but she kept on in her new ways all the same. When her parents came to stay, she told her husband not to miss out family prayer morning and evening.  John and Elizabeth Dickens stayed for many months and the Griffins got to know them well.  They went to chapel services and seemed to show great interest "in the new character and new associations of their daughter".

James Griffin's description of Fanny is very reminiscent of descriptions of her brother Charles – he wrote of Fanny's 

habit of endurance, fortitude, self-reliance, and firmness, in no ordinary degree – together with almost restless activity and practical energy

Her new life didn't change her attitude to her brother's work – she enjoyed equally the humour and the pathos of his books

She was no ascetic or recluse; nor was there any assumption or affectation of extraordinary piety ... She despised and detested affectation, assumed mannerisms, and shams of all sorts

Frank and open, a cheerful companion and hearty friend, she became "a general favourite.  She mingled freely with all classes, and apparently with equal interest".  She frequently asked at the end of evening service if they could go home with the Griffins and stop with them a while, even though this took the Burnetts quite out of their way.  The Griffins lived in Richmond Terrace in the hamlet of Old Trafford, more than a mile to the west of the chapel, while the Burnetts lived a considerable distance in the other direction.  They would have supper and family prayer and she would say, "Can't we have a hymn?" and they would usually sing the hymn  

When, O dear Jesus, when shall I

Behold Thee all serene …

O.S. map 1848: Richmond Terrace, Old Trafford
(National Library of Scotland)

Fanny's friends often feared that 

her incessant exertions were undermining her health.  It was difficult, however, to prevail on her to relax them

And then, about seven years after the Griffins first met her, Fanny's health began to show serious symptoms of decline.  She could not believe she was really ill, but in fact she had tuberculosis of the lung.  At last she was persuaded to go for medical care to London, where she stayed with her sister.  James and Eliza Griffin went there to see her for the last time, a "deeply affecting" and "touching" interview.  She died on 2 September 1848.

By her dying request, Mr Griffin went to London to take her funeral.  She was to be buried in "a secluded and picturesque nook in Highgate Cemetery".  All the men of her family were there.

Mr Dickens appeared to feel it very deeply.  He spoke to me in terms of great respect and affection for his departed sister – he had always so spoken of her – as I accompanied him in his brougham on my way to my brother's house.  His behaviour to myself was most courteous and kind.

Henry Augustus Burnett

Henry Burnett returned with his little boys Harry and Charles to Manchester.  Little Harry did not long survive his mother.  He died at the age of nine on 29 January 1849.  Mr Griffin wrote

He died in the arms of a dear, dear nephew of mine since passed away, John Griffin.

(John Griffin became a merchant in Manchester and lived in Bowdon.  When little Harry died, John was a youth of about 18)

I think this photograph of Harry, from the New York Public Library's digital collections, was possibly taken after his death, a not uncommon practice at the time.

Henry Burnett remarried in early summer 1857 and moved back south with his family in 1860.  

By then Mr Griffin had left Manchester, retiring from the Rusholme Road Chapel in September 1854 on account of his health.  He and his wife returned to their native South Coast where the climate did him so much good that he was able eventually to go back into the ministry in 1858.

Note:  James Griffin and his wife Eliza Marden knew Henry and Fanny well and he wrote of them at length in his Memories of the Past: Records of Ministerial Life, published in 1883.  I’m afraid this seems no longer to be available as a free e-book online.

Next:  28. John Hopkinson at chapel & at home:  1840-1848