‘The Astronomic Muse’: Charles Burney and Astronomy

Abstract

Late in life, musicologist Dr Charles Burney composed Astronomy: An Historical and Didactic Poem, a twelve-canto poem on the history of astronomy, uniting his two amateur pastimes, poetry and astronomy. The poem led to friendship with Court Astronomer William Herschel, and for years Burney shared the work-in-progress, modelled (I argue) on Erasmus Darwin's scientific poems, in scribal coteries. Between 1807 and 1812, however, Burney burned the manuscript; only fragments survive. While biographer Roger Lonsdale attributes this destruction to Burney's 'realization that for years he had been boring his friends', I argue it was his fear, as he prepared the poem for publication, that the changing literary marketplace would damage his reputation as man of letters. My re-dating of the major fragment reinforces this argument.