In the early Victorian period many popular entertainers began to realise how much the guitar could offer them as a portable source of accompaniment to use for a musical spot in their act. During the ‘hungry’ 1840s, sustained economic downturn, and a series of bad harvests, created conditions that demanded as much resourcefulness from travelling performers as they could muster, especially the small fry with no reputation to trade on. This large tribe of guitar-players, who have never received the attention they merit, included some who performed are in costume or worked under a stage name such as ‘The British Minstrel’ or ‘The Banker’s Daughter’. Although most of these players have left few traces, sometimes indeed only one, they do not form the background to Victorian guitar playing, unless we choose to put theme there. They populate the foreground as the paid exponents of the guitar that members of the public were most often given the chance to see.

Although the guitar was primarily used to accompany singing in Victorian England sophisticated chamber arrangements of music by Beethoven and Mozart were circulating in manuscript during the first decades of Victoria’s reign. This repertoire is almost entirely unknown and is discussed here for the first time. Duets for guitar and pianoforte were also fairly abundant into the 1840s. There was also a clear sense, especially among music publishers with a vested interest in the notion, that a ‘classical’ solo repertoire of guitar music had emerged during the first third of the century when the instrument was in fashion. Yet although there were still notable solo players towards mid-century, such as Joseph Anelli, making a career as a ‘serious’ guitar player, which had always been a precarious business was by 1850 virtually impossible, at least in Britain. Even Anelli’s concert programmes started to show the influence of the many popular entertainers who had begun to use the guitar, explored in the next chapter.

A wide range of new opportunities for playing in ‘public’ emerged after mid-century and awaited the venturesome amateur guitar-player who could sing, especially young and unmarried female player who might come from every social class above the labouring poor. Social clubs, political societies such as the Primrose League, and sports clubs for tennis, cycling, golf and cricket mounted regular (or at least annual) entertainments which provided amateur singers using guitars with something to play for in every sense of the expression. Their instrument seemed agreeably novel; so did their art of self-accompaniment as they faced the audience directly in a manner that few self-accompanying singers using a pianoforte could hope to do. In addition there were new contexts for amateur performance that have almost been in entirely overlooked by historians of nineteenth-century music, notably the ‘Penny Reading’ where a wide variety of vocal and instrumental music was performed, reaching down to the level of small villages in parish halls and school rooms, often to raise funds for some charitable or philanthropic purpose.

When Henry Mayhew produced the greatest single survey of the Victorian poor in London, in the years around 1850, he encountered and interviewed various street guitar players. With the aid of the contemporary newspapers and archives, the picture of these musicians given by Mayhew can be very much enlarged. The accounts of legal hearings in police courts and quarter sessions, for example, often give an edited paraphrase of statements given by the musicians themselves in court (usually as the defendant, on charges connected with affray and drunkenness, but also sometimes as the plaintiff). These reports disclose a large number of the street guitar players by name, both white and black, male and female, together with details of the life they led, the repertoire, they performed, and the many hardships that they endured. These are the lost players of an instrument hitherto lost to musical history.

The guitar was in high fashion in Britain during the first third of the nineteenth century, but this ‘Great Vogue’ for the instrument as a solo and concert resource was over by 1850. This has led to a widespread misunderstanding of the guitar’s Victorian history, even to the point where it may seem to have none. The trajectory of the guitar in the England of Queen Victoria actually shows a continual process of ascent and rehabilitation based on the art of guitar-accompanied singing. The scope for exploring this return to favour has been immeasurably enhanced by the advent of databases offering many thousands of pages of Victorian newspapers in a digital and word-searchable form. Even the most severe critics were prepared to admit that the guitar offered a very serviceable accompaniment to an untrained (or indeed a trained) voice. That will be the secret of its success under Victoria, as the newspaper record abundantly reveals.