Fanny Dickens

Born in Landport in Portsea Island (Portsmouth) on 28 August 1810 and baptised on 23 November at St Mary's Church, Portsea, she was the eldest of eight children of Elizabeth Dickens, née Barrow, and John Dickens, a clerk in the Navy Pay Office. Charles Dickens was the second child of the family, born in 1812.^[1] Dickens showed musical ability and in 1823 gained a place at the Royal Academy of Music which had opened the year before in Tenterden Street, off Hanover Square.^[2] The fees were thirty-eight guineas a year which her family could ill afford but, unusually for the time, they paid for a daughter to be educated rather than their sons.

Dickens studied singing, and piano with Ignaz Moscheles, a former pupil of Ludwig van Beethoven. In her second year she received a prize for ‘good conduct and improvement in music’ and a silver pencil case as 2nd prize in piano. In 1835 she sang in a concert as part of a group which included Henry Burnett, who had studied at the Academy. They married on 13 September 1837 at St Luke's Church, Chelsea, where Charles Dickens had married Catherine Hogarth the year before.