Poland Street

1760 – 1770

It was to 50 Poland Street, Soho, that the family moved when they returned to London in 1760. Fanny was 7 and still could not read though she had already developed her remarkable ability to observe, memorise and mimic. Many years later, Fanny wrote to her sister, Hetty “Well I recollect your reading with our dear mother all Pope’s works and Pitt’s Aeneid. I recollect you also spouting passages from Pope, that I learned from hearing you recite them…”

“Dear, dear Poland Street” Fanny later enthused, “where we were all so happy”.

London provided her with endless opportunities to develop her skills. Around the corner was the Drury Lane theatre. David Garrick, its director and actor became a close friend, lending them his box. Dr Burney wrote of Fanny that ”she had a great deal of invention and humour in her childish sports; and used, after having seen a play in Mrs Garrick’s box, to take the actors off, and compose speeches for their characters; for she could not read them. But in company or before strangers, she was silent…”

Exciting outings to Ranelagh, Vauxhall Gardens, the Pantheon, local Assemblies, and dances were observed and recorded and often re-enacted by Fanny providing her with plenty of material for her Journal and novels. In 1768 she writes: “This strange Medley of Thoughts and Facts was written at the age of fifteen, for my genuine and most private Amusement.” “Amusement” was clear in her lively, extraordinarily remembered account of a Masquerade at the home of Mr Laluze, a French dancing master. Everyone had to go in fancy dress, masked, and spend the evening talking and behaving as the character of the dress. Fanny observed a Nun, dressed in black who took her hand saying in a plaintive voice “Beautiful creature, with what pain do I see you here, beset by this crowd of folly and deceit! O could I prevail on you to quit this wicked world, and all its vices, and to follow my footsteps!…” The Nun was actually a pretty, young Scottish woman who quite soon afterwards married a wealthy baronet but as the Nun she continues in a most hilarious fashion to advise Fanny on the “wickedness of mankind and degeneracy of the world, dwelt with great energy and warmth on the deceit and craft of man, and Pressed me to join her holy order with the zeal of an enthusiast in religion…”

I laugh whenever I read this.

Photograph of York Street now 11-21 Tavistock Street, where her grandmother and aunt lived. plate from British History online.

Apart from the distinguished people mentioned by Fanny, there was a Perruquier next door, and a Scottish widow, Mrs Pringle on the other side feeding her curiosity and skills. In an often told story, Fanny is reported to have said to the perruquier in response to his vehement complaint that the children (his own and the Burneys who had been romping in the garden) had ruined one of his 10 guinea wigs;

“What signifies talking so much about an accident? The wig is wet, to be sure, and the wig was a good wig, to be sure, but it’s of no use to speak of it any more, because what’s done can’t be undone.”

The ways of the house were recorded by Fanny. Maria Allen’s room, in which the girls “browsed by the fire upon dainties brought out of “Allen’s cupboard”; and Fanny’s “pretty little neat cabinet, that is in the bedchamber, – where I keep all my affairs, – whenever yet was there a heroine without one?” The children’s playroom was a closet up two flights of stairs, in which the younger children kept their toys, and Fanny wrote plays and novels. Downstairs were Betty Langley, the Burney’s old cook who was courted by John Hatton, footman, and married in May 1767. Bridesmaids were the Misses Ann Burney, and her nieces Hetty and Fanny and the “father” giving her away was 10 year old Charles Burney. As Fanny commented, “both husband and father were young enough to own her for a mother”.

Frequent visits to Burney grandmother and aunts in York Street provided more interest as they lived over and possibly ran Greggs coffee shop in York Street, Covent Garden. No mention of the trade was ever made by Fanny in her journals or memoirs as with her mother’s successful fan business. It is interesting that although Fanny did not want people to know about these associations with trade, she used them as a source for many of the characters and situations in her books.

Of the house in Poland Street, Fanny wrote in the Memoirs of her father:

“The new establishment was in Poland-street; which was not then, as it is now, a sort of street that, like the rest of the neighbourhood, appears to be left in the lurch. House-fanciers were not yet as fastidious as they are become at present, from the endless variety of new habitations. Oxford-road, as, at that time, Oxfordstreet was called, into which Poland-street terminated, had little on its further side but fields, gardeners’ grounds, or uncultivated suburbs. Portman, Manchester, Russell, Belgrave squares, Portland-place, etc. etc., had not yet a single stone or brick laid, in signal of intended erection: while in plain Poland-street, Mr. Burney, then, had successively for his neighbours, the Duke of Chandos, Lady Augusta Bridges, the Hon. John Smith and the Miss Barrys, Sir Willoughby and the Miss Astons; and, well noted by Mr. Burney’s little family, on the visit of his black majesty to England, sojourned, almost immediately opposite to it, the Cherokee King.”

The painting is Edward Francis Burney’s ‘Amateurs of Tye-Wig Music’ (‘Musicians of the Old School’) completed c.1820

Her father rapidly became the most fashionable music teacher. He was charming and intelligent and a consummate networker so he attracted not just the pupils but musicians, artists, writers to his home.

“Pupils of rank, wealth, and talents, were continually proposed to him; and in a very short time, he had hardly an hour unappropriated to some fair disciple. ”

— Memoirs of Dr Burney

The 9 year old Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and his sister Nannerl were amazing London audiences in 1764/65. Little Wolfgang was recommended to Charles Burney, and sitting on his knee played on subjects given to him by Burney. Burney later wrote that “We had frequent opportunities of witnessing his extraordinary talents and profound knowledge in every branch of music.” Brother and sister Mozart performed duets, “The first instance of two persons performing on one instrument in this kingdom and the first music of this nature printed as duettos, was composed by the ingenious Dr. Burney” said one reviewer.

But they weren’t always happy. Esther, became pregnant again fairly soon after the move and her daughter Charlotte was born in 1761 but from then on Esther was ill. Despair hit the household when Esther died in 1762. Fanny was sent to Mrs Sheeles in Queen Square who said.. “she had never met with a child of such intense and acute feelings” as Fanny.

Charles seemed inconsolable, but a few years later, he persuaded Mrs Allen, the widow of his Kings Lynn friend Stephen Allen to marry him. She enlarged the household with her 3 children and then went on to have two more with Charles.

On her fifteenth birthday, Fanny lit a bonfire in the courtyard of the house in Poland Street. Witnessed only by her weeping sister Susanna, into the fire went manuscripts of everything she had up to that time written; “Elegies, Odes, Plays, Songs, Stories, Farces, Tragedies and Epic Poems” and a novel, “The History of Caroline Evelyn”.

The reason for this dramatic gesture was said to be a powerful sense of guilt and disobedience. It was not accepted that a young lady should spend her time writing; contemporary society frowned upon any female who “Wasted” her time writing anything other than familiar letters or household memoranda.

Fortunately, though, the urge to write was irresistible, and in March 1768 she began a private journal which opens with “To have some account of my thoughts, manners, acquaintance and actions, when the Hour arrives at which time is more nimble than memory…A Journal in which I must confess my every thought, must open my whole Heart!” For the rest of her life she wrote accounts of all that went on either in a Journal or letters. As a result of this compulsion, we have the most fascinating record of the family but also the events and people of her times.

Crowning all other family achievements of the sixties, Charles Burney gained the reward of long hard labour with a degree in music from Oxford University. He had planned a history of music for many years, corresponding from Kings Lynn with Dr. Johnson about it. Now Dr. Burney, he decided to “fly to Italy this summer, and to allay my thirst of knowledge at the pure source…” He set off in June 1770.

He made a special visit to Bologna, in Italy to visit the extraordinary, famous and by then retired castrato, Farinelli, who had sung with Handel in London. In 2015 a brilliant play about Farinelli and King Phillip V of Spain written by Claire van Kampen was on in London with Mark Rylance as the King and Iestyn Davies singing as Farinelli. It won many awards.

By the time he returned, the family had moved to Queen Square. Whether the move was to give them more room or whether it was to separate the girls from the unwelcome association with Mrs Pringle, next door, is not clear. They had greatly enjoyed Mrs Pringle’s parties and at one Hetty had met Alexander Seaton whom Fanny describes initially as “a very sensible and clever man, and a prodigious admirer of Hetty’s”. Hetty waited for two years for him to declare himself. Fanny wrote “Poor Hetty, passed an uneasy night racked with uncertainty about this Seton, this eternal destroyer or her peace! Were he sincere, she owned she could be happier with him than with any man breathing.. but the next morning, when she had considered well of everything, she declared were he to make her the most solemn offer of his hand she would refuse him…and accept of Charles!”

The end result of the Seaton affair was the total exclusion of Mrs Pringle from the Burneys’ lives. So that was the unhappy ending to life in Poland Street, and Fanny grieved over it for a long time later confessing “I must own that since we have dropped her acquaintance, we have never made any half so lively and agreeable”.

My Trip to Poland Street

After one of the visits my mother and I made to Poland Street, she wrote an account of Poland Street today and I will quote from it:

“Poland Street is something of a hell-hole these days – choked with trucks, vans and taxis, the uneven footpath awkward to walk on, the buildings given over to commerce. Noise and petrol smells replace those of horse-drawn traffic and coal fires. Nevertheless, at seventeen, coming back from a holiday in Norfolk, Hetty enthused, ‘I love the smoak of London’. As for noise, Fanny did not complain in her journal about clattering hooves and rattling carts, but of the call of the ‘frightful old Watchman’. ‘Past 11 o’clock’ she imitated him. ‘Bless you friend, don’t bawl so loud!'”

Corner of D'Arblay Street and Poland Street

Looking towards NCP car park where 50 Poland Street used to be from d’Arblay Street (used to be Portland St.)

Corner of Poland Street and Marlborough Street

54 Poland Street, well restored providing offices to rent. Maybe Mrs Pringle lived here.

“Many of the buildings would have shops and small workrooms on street level, though not the bars, cafes and restaurants of today, nor anything else that the Burneys would recognise. Their ground-floor room on the street was the front parlour, which allowed them to see and be seen. A young Lord Pigot who stood on the opposite footpath one day looking in for Hetty mistook Fanny for her sister and took courage to walk over and ring the bell. Any sudden social demand sent Fanny into a fit of embarrassment, but luckily her father was at home and able to make polite conversation. Some of the old facades are left in Poland Street and rather more in d’Arblay Street – yellow London stock bricks, regular three floors above ground, kitchen quarters below and sometimes attic windows on the sloping roofs at the top.

The site of no. 50 is now part of the Poland Street Car Park. The old parish poor-rate records in the Westminster Archives show the Burney dwelling standing at one end of a row of four whose rateable value was £30 each, higher than most others in the street. In 1762/63 stables were added along the back of the middle pair.

Towards Oxford Street, where Marks & Spencer’s Great Marlborough store covers most of the western side with a blank side wall, there were cheap dwellings in the 1760s, mainly occupied by women ratepayers. Widows, perhaps, or unmarried women claiming widow status to dignify them in business? Were they milliners…dressmakers…landladies…or down the line to street-sellers of milk, bread, cherries or hot cross buns? According to later gossip, other more personal female sales were commonly made around here – but not in the Burney’s time, certainly.
Where were the fields or gardeners’ grounds described by Fanny; “just more shops, rising, commercial buildings and cranes.”

When I went back in June 2020 to photograph Poland Street, it was a rather different scene from the one my mother described twenty years earlier. The coronavirus pandemic was in full swing so there was much less activity on the streets. Few cars or trucks, empty shops, vacant tables on the street combined with the endless road works and construction sites everywhere in central London.

This work was commissioned by the BBC. It was inspired by 18th century Masquerades. The music is filled with sounds of dancing, fireworks, acrobats. One theme is “Juice of Barley” an old English country dance melody.

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