“Rage,” “mania,” and “craze” were the words contemporaries typically chose to characterize the upsurge in string playing of the 1880s and 1890s. Punchy descriptors, the terms nevertheless imply that the phenomenon was thought of as temporary. In contrast, a passing remark printed in early 1897, the year in which Queen Victoria would mark sixty years on the British throne, turned out to be more prescient, hinting at something more enduring: “Truly,” ran the text, “this is the reign of the fiddle.”Footnote ¹ As the Introduction argues, the new, unprecedented interest in the violin in the late Victorian era seeded violin culture’s growth and consolidation well into the early twentieth century. Setting the scene for what follows in the book, this chapter places violin culture (and the said craze) in historical perspective. It traces the culture’s arc in time by tackling questions of numerical extent. It goes on to discuss the societal positioning of string players and outline the socioeconomic factors that triggered the initial surge in learning. It ends by tracking Victorian-era values and activities that persisted from the 1870s into the 1920s, to underline the coherence of the book’s periodization.

Counting the Countless?

A major challenge for violin culture’s story is the difficulty in determining, even roughly, how many string players were involved during the 1870–1930 period. Generalizations abound. Writing in the Orchestral Times in 1891, a well-known London violin teacher commented that over the past few years the “gigantic growth of violinists” had been “quite phenomenal,” especially with young women, and he acknowledged the eagerness of children (boys and girls) to learn the violin too.Footnote ² Similar remarks pop up in many sources, pointing to what at first blush looks like a relentless growth in numbers of learners and in interest in the violin.

Aside from sounding warning bells about the folly of tropes of ceaseless rise and progress, such inferences raise many issues. Ideally, we would be able to ascertain how many people were involved, how long the upward growth endured, the trajectory of development over time, and how truly widespread violin culture was geographically. But those questions are not easily addressed. Even approximate numbers for how many people were playing stringed instruments at specific points during the 1870–1930 period are elusive, not least because so many of the musicians involved were operating in private, gendered, and class-based domains that functioned “off the grid” of conventional historical records. In addition, where data does survive it must be handled cautiously, for several of the reasons that Ehrlich articulated decades ago.Footnote ³ Numbers may be unrepresentative, strategically inflated, or hopelessly incomplete. Take Strings: The Fiddler’s Magazine, founded in 1894 and from September 1896 subtitled The Official Organ of the I.U.M. (International Union of Musicians). In 1897, it printed a note to advertisers guaranteeing a circulation of “AT LEAST 10,000 COPIES” of any given issue, further arguing that six times that number of people would read it, and that readers would keep copies for reference.Footnote ⁴ The information is suggestive, not least because magazines were invariably passed along to additional readers; yet in all probability the statistic is inflated, since journal publishers were known to make exaggerated claims about print-runs in order to drum up advertising revenue, and in any case the IUM was not limited to string players. Electronic census records for England and Wales in 1881 and 1911, the years that are searchable for people’s occupations, suggest a more productive way to enumerate at least those string players and teachers who operated professionally. And certainly, the number of musicians who were classified as violinists or violin teachers is greater in 1911 than in 1881, and their geographic spread more evident too.Footnote ⁵ But census returns, reliant on self-reporting, are not foolproof sources and surely underrepresent the situation.Footnote ⁶ Many – probably most – string players reported themselves as a professor of music, music teacher, or musician, as opposed to a violin teacher or violinist: perhaps because the broader categorization made better sense for bureaucratic purposes; perhaps because the person worked in multiple areas of the profession; perhaps both.Footnote ⁷ Meanwhile, the size of the amateur population remains unknowable.

On the face of it, these issues could suggest abandoning attempts to estimate the extent of the culture or to map the trajectory of string playing over time. But enough empirical data survives to allow us, if we interpret it carefully and align it sensibly with qualitative evidence, to understand something of the orders of magnitude, and to build an indicative picture of the volume and range of activity in separate performance domains – those inhabited by amateurs, professionals, semiprofessionals, or mixtures thereof – or in groups based on variables such as gender, age, class, skill level, or geography. Student registers at the Royal Academy of Music (RAM), for instance, show that more than 1,400 string players studied there between 1870 and 1930.Footnote ⁸ Annual reports of the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music (ABRSM) from its exams’ inception in 1890 until 1930 record that 5,370 candidates were tested across the country for its most advanced grade examination in violin, viola, and cello.Footnote ⁹ By way of comparison, some 7,578 “Primary” exams were taken by beginner violinists and cellists in the mere fourteen years between 1917 and 1930.Footnote ¹⁰ Documentation of the local centers and representatives administering the practical exams of another assessment board, the College of Violinists (CoV), shows that, within the first three years of examining, it was covering some 100 locations, from Dublin to Inverness, Merthyr Tydfil to the island of Guernsey.Footnote ¹¹ Many were in northern industrial regions. See Fig. 1.1.

Figure 1.1 Map of the United Kingdom showing the spread of College of Violinists examining locations, 1892–1894. To aid geographic orientation, some locations on the map are identified by name.

If we augment this data with estimates made by contemporaries – liable to be exaggerated, but suggestive nonetheless – the scale and spread of activity starts to emerge. Charles Hallé apparently commented in 1890 that “in Sheffield alone over five hundred working men are students of the violin,”Footnote ¹² while in 1905 the Musical Times conjectured that “probably not fewer than” 100,000 children across the country had been “set going recently” in group classes in schools, reflecting initiatives sparked during the late 1890s.Footnote ¹³ Two reports elsewhere (1907–1909) claimed that around 5,000 schools were undertaking such education, with 400,000 boys and girls enrolled in violin classes in England and Wales, representing some 10 percent of children aged six or older – a notable proportion given that, even in the heyday of state-school instrumental lessons in England in the mid twentieth century, total participation covering all instruments reached only around 10 percent.Footnote ¹⁴ The veracity of the numbers was queried by one of the authors, but that person was nevertheless in no doubt that pupils could be “counted literally by the hundred thousand.”Footnote ¹⁵ The other commentator reported “scarcely a town throughout England” without one or more classes for children, “some numbering as many as” 120 students.Footnote ¹⁶ What this all suggests is that in the 1890–1910 period the number of children and adults learning a stringed instrument reached well into the hundreds of thousands. Indeed, it may be not too great a stretch to suggest that participation numbers easily broke the million mark, if considered cumulatively across 1870–1930. Of course, many students gave up; others reached only basic competence. Yet what matters here – indeed throughout this book – is less the question of “how good” the majority of players were, and more the fact that violin playing held such attraction for a considerable slice of the population.

And what of patterns of participation over time? These, too, are elusive, but an examination of activities by domains reveals how and when string playing ebbed and flowed in different spheres. Ehrlich’s sampled numbers of string players in London who advertised as professionals (though excluding those who self-identified as music teachers) between 1890 and 1931, as shown in Table 1.1, provide important pointers.Footnote ¹⁷ Even though these figures make for an imperfect “census” – culled from commercial directories, the totals reflect only those who were willing to pay to advertise in those publications – they indicate a sharp rise between 1890 and 1900, with continued, if slower, growth up to 1910 and further acceleration thereafter. A sharp downturn, however, is evident by 1931, when the wider collapse of demand for musicians was hitting string players hard.Footnote ¹⁸ Ehrlich’s figures also give some sense of the corresponding growth of the amateur market, because most instrumentalists, even those mostly engaged in performance work, taught amateurs. However, the data leaves unanswered questions about the impact of World War I and about what shaped the patterns and rates of growth and decline within decades, especially from 1920 to 1930.

A different perspective emerges from statistics on the violinists and cellists at the RAM between 1870 and 1939. Compiled from the institution’s student registers, this data provides a broad, if somewhat approximate, picture of changing trends.Footnote ¹⁹ Importantly, for much of this period the RAM was more a finishing school for young lady amateurs than a hothouse for professional training, which makes it potentially useful as a barometer of violin culture’s dilettante side, even if it thwarts meaningful separation of the two groups.Footnote ²⁰ Besides, women students who trained to professional standards often ended up playing as amateurs. Table 1.2 summarizes the findings, tracking a more than fourfold increase in student numbers up to 1899, continued (if much slower) growth in the 1900s, and a downturn during the 1910s (largely War-related), with rebounding buoyancy after the War decade, and a strong showing into the 1930s.

Another source that speaks to both professional and amateur sides of the culture is The Strad magazine. Founded in 1890 and priced 2d, it subtitled itself A Monthly Journal for Professionals & Amateurs of All Stringed Instruments Played with the Bow, although its content and tone were such that it was clearly aiming at middle- and upper-class readers only. After World War I, its content tilted towards professional matters of teaching and cinema playing. Like all periodicals, The Strad’s financial viability was determined by its ability to attract not only readers but advertisers, meaning that its changing page extent reflects something of the magazine’s general economic health and the size of its readership. A sampling of the cumulative pagination for annual volumes indicates quick initial growth, a steady state from the mid 1890s, followed by modest expansion, fallback during the War years, and sharp increases in the 1920s, when the profession boomed (Table 1.3a). The Strad peaked in size in the mid 1920s, when advertising also rocketed, but had shrunk in both respects by 1930–1931 (Table 1.3b).

For a sense of the amateur sphere, one can consider extant data for a regional amateur orchestra, the York Symphony Orchestra (established 1898). Table 1.4 plots the changing size of its string sections, as documented in the program books for a sampling of concerts between 1899 and 1927. Notwithstanding that the string section was bolstered by a few professional players and that circumstances unique to the local situation may make the results ultimately unrepresentative, the substantial growth up to World War I (when concerts were suspended) is striking and supports the view of the robustness of violin culture into the 1910s. Notable, too, are the smaller numbers in the postwar period, reflecting the need to recruit new members and rebuild the ensemble, as well as hinting at the impact of competing leisure interests and economic challenges in the 1920s.

Much of the patterning in the examples above is corroborated by qualitative evidence. It confirms that string playing hit a first major peak in activity in the 1890s, thus eliciting so much commentary about a “craze.” However, the information presented here and in the chapters that follow also indicates that growth had been considerable right from the 1870s, and that high activity levels continued beyond 1900, albeit at varying rates in different spheres. Certainly, the healthy numbers of school and conservatoire students in the prewar period prompt reconsideration of the assertion (1922) by composer and RAM administrator Frederick Corder that the “perfect craze for learning the fiddle” had begun c. 1891 and lasted about ten years.Footnote ²¹ This book argues that the first decade of the twentieth century was a period of consolidation, during which a shared culture of activities, backed by a solid infrastructure, was evident across Britain. At this point, individuals trained in earlier generations were making significant contributions to the vitality of activities, ensuring its continuity as newcomers joined the ranks. Self-evidently, 1914–1918 brought upheavals and falloff in some domains when younger male string players went to join the War effort, some never to return. But the culture got back on its feet in the 1920s, even while the signs of what would eventually become irreversible change in some arenas were starting to appear.

The Late Victorian Backdrop: Backstories, Beginnings, Continuities

Underpinning much of this book’s historical analysis is the concept of class: a central aspect of British social structure throughout the Victorian period and one that endured past World War I, albeit with shifts in the size and composition of class populations.Footnote ²² Whether using public baths or railway carriages, or seeking employment or marriage, most Britons were conscious of their perceived class position and the inequalities wrought by that system of categorization. Much musical life functioned along class lines, although boundaries could be (and were) crossed, sometimes successfully, even permanently. Strong practical skills in music constituted one of several accomplishments that could help people fulfill desires for social betterment – often understood as the attainment of “respectability” – or financial gain. String playing ticked these boxes, potentially serving to mask a player’s origins in the eyes of socially advantaged admirers.

That said, violin culture’s class composition resists glib generalization. Although its social identity was broadly middle class, violin playing straddled all three class categories, inhabiting a social continuum populated at one end by men and women born into excessive wealth and privilege, and at the other by individuals whose family breadwinner did low-paid manual work and struggled to get by. People with comfortable lifestyles and a penchant for respectable home life typified the group in between. None of the three British social classes – upper, middle, or working class – was a homogeneous entity of human beings who saw the world the same way; all embodied significant social and economic variation, and, especially for the purposes of any commercially driven musical culture, the three descriptors should be understood thus. The middle class, for instance, was a wide band, with wealthy lawyers and industrialists at its top and schoolteachers and shop workers on small incomes at its bottom. Music historians have become used to acknowledging the variation of people who played or listened to classical music within both the middle and upper classes, but they have less frequently applied a nuanced lens to the working class. However, recent studies by Alan Bartley and Gordon Cox have usefully complicated the category, the former citing a London School Board bureaucrat who, as early as 1873, described the working class as “not a single-acting single-idea’d body.”Footnote ²³ It ran, as Cox explains, between the skilled-artisan elite (people trained to a high level over years) to semiskilled workers (who learned their jobs in months) to the unskilled (who picked up tasks in a matter of hours).Footnote ²⁴ Such distinctions become especially relevant in the discussion of working-class violin playing and how widespread it was across the working class. In many contexts, it makes sense to speak of the working (or upper, or middle) classes in the plural.

Yet, as social historians tend to point out, definitions of class are ultimately elusive and the class concept can turn slippery when one tries to categorize real people of the past in those terms. Occupation (findable in census returns) is the element often invoked and the one leant upon in this study to judge family background. Yet occupation paints only part of the picture, since there were other determinants of class position, including financial status, education, and domicile, which add layers of overlap and complication, as the following examples indicate. The working-class artisan was frequently better paid (and had more expendable income) than the lower-middle-class shop worker, yet his social status was less exalted.Footnote ²⁵ Advanced academic schooling was deemed the province of the middle and upper classes, yet, as Jonathan Rose has demonstrated, mechanics’ institutes, public libraries, and other institutions offered a world of the mind for working-class people so inclined (in practice, mostly men); in the 1920s, scholarships enabled a tiny few to attend university.Footnote ²⁶ Finally, Charles Booth’s social cartography (Maps Descriptive of London Poverty, 1898–1899) shows that class assumptions made on the basis of the neighborhood in which someone lived can be problematic, since in many residential areas of London rich and poor were in close proximity.Footnote ²⁷ With such issues in mind, I have done my best to position socially, economically, and geographically the pupils, teachers, players, collectors, and makers that pepper the book’s narrative. For, despite the undoubted challenges for interpretation, a nuanced use of class remains an indispensable tool of analysis for activities that were often sites of social and musical interaction between individuals from different rungs of Britain’s societal ladder.

Around 1870, the time when interest in the violin began to grow, the most visible group of string players comprised male “professional” musicians – which is to say, people who made their living from string teaching or playing. Their training and levels of accomplishment varied.Footnote ²⁸ Many of them were starting to crave the elevated societal recognition that was awarded to lawyers and doctors on the basis of training and certified expertise – a quest that would be actively pursued, with some success, during the following sixty years.Footnote ²⁹ Socially pegged between the upper working class and lower middle class, most working musicians were beset by perceptions of artisanship, low incomes (sometimes penury), dubious social standing, and cultural inferiority – attributes that did not affect Continental musicians to the same extent. In consequence, working as a musician, especially a performer, was generally considered an inappropriate means for a gentleman to make his living.

Not that leisured string playing was without its problems for men from prosperous middle-class (or aristocratic) circles at the point when violin culture’s story begins. Historically, the idea of a gentleman playing a stringed instrument for pleasure had been frowned upon for several interconnected reasons. The first was the longstanding gendering of music as a feminine mode of expression on account of its subversive potential to rouse the emotions – a topic treated by many scholars and, in English contexts, notably Linda Austern and Regula Hohl Trillini.Footnote ³⁰ This connotation alone had rendered music-making a dubious activity for men, and especially so in early Victorian Britain, where the nation’s conception of itself was still what historian Linda Colley has defined as an “essentially ‘masculine’ culture – bluff, forthright, rational, down-to-earth.”Footnote ³¹ Respectable men avoided shows of emotion. A third reason turned on the concomitant belief that particular types of music-making were a required social accomplishment for genteel women, as the stereotype of the young woman at the keyboard or singing in the parlor in many an eighteenth- or nineteenth-century novel conveys. A gentleman (or would-be gentleman) playing an instrument socially – especially with other men – carried connotations of compromised masculinity and effeminacy, to the extent that many men seem to have talked down or kept quiet about their hobby. In his 1988 study, Music and Image, Richard Leppert argued that in eighteenth-century England making music was something young men knew they should not be seen to excel at.Footnote ³² There is evidence, too, that cultural anxieties about well-born men playing stringed instruments as a leisure pursuit continued through much of the nineteenth century – a potent amalgam of issues of class, gender, sexuality, musicians’ professional status, and national identity, all of which pushed a good deal of activity under the radar.Footnote ³³ Still, such attitudes would start to be publicly challenged in the 1880s and 1890s. (A related taboo, as we shall see, had long excluded women from playing stringed instruments, whether as amateurs or professionals; it, too, would crumble, albeit more dramatically.)

Meanwhile, where it existed as a pastime in mid-Victorian working-class culture, string playing – often taught informally within families – was an acceptable male pursuit, unburdened by bourgeois stigmas and inhibitions. In rural communities, until the demise of the Anglican West Gallery tradition (fading from the 1830s but making a last stand into the mid 1890s in southwest EnglandFootnote ³⁴), local men who were amateur “fiddlers” were often part of the Sunday music-making in parish church services, also playing dance tunes at local weddings and parties.

***

In the run-up to the 1870s, the social and economic landscape of string playing started to change. The crucial ingredient fueling developments was the new availability of affordable instruments, the price of which dropped significantly after 1860, as “factory fiddles” from Germany and France saturated the market, increasing participation among the less affluent classes over several decades. From the 1870s, too, real wage increases raised working- and middle-class prosperity.Footnote ³⁵ And by the 1890s, an inexpensive violin adequate for a novice retailed for a fraction of what it cost to buy even a modest piano, the prices of which had also fallen dramatically. In this environment, working-class string playing flourished, particularly among men and children, and the favorable economics endured, with lively secondhand markets for private sales operating during hard times. Cheap instruction took root, including in elementary schools and adult learning institutes, alongside informal home teaching by friends or relatives. By 1921, the celebrated violin pedagogue Leopold Auer, writing about parents choosing an instrument for a young child, was averring that “[i]n the case of the poor, or those of slender means, the violin, as a rule, is the instrument favored, because it may be bought so cheaply.”Footnote ³⁶ Two years earlier, an advertisement for Arthur Broadley’s Studying Violoncello Technique placed a pupil testimonial from a “pit worker” alongside another by a doctor.Footnote ³⁷

Just because violins were inexpensive did not mean that only poor people purchased them. Factory-made starter instruments were a suitable incentive for anyone who wanted to try out learning, while for more advanced students higher-grade, moderately priced models were available. Individuals for whom money was no object often purchased pricier and typically older violins, violas, and cellos – a market that soon became driven by endemic social aspiration and plagued by the development of a quasi-mythology around the exceptionalism of Stradivari’s instruments. Fake labels and overpriced phony goods abounded, as did an interest in violin construction, preservation, and authenticity, which ushered in other hobbies that became popular among men: collecting fine instruments and learning how to make them.

The other main trigger for Britain’s emergent violin culture was the crumbling in the 1870s of the gendered societal conventions about who could or could not learn stringed instruments – a development that soon initiated the tsunami of amateur and professional activity among middle- and upper-class women and girls. Vienna-trained Wilma Norman-Neruda, the first woman violinist to sustain a career in Britain as a top-rank soloist and string quartet leader (from 1869), would later remember this period as bewildering. Recalling in an interview of 1890 the “reproachful curiosity” she received when she first played in public, she spoke of how “it was thought almost improper … for a woman to play on the violin,” adding that “[i]n Germany the thing was quite common and excited no comment.”Footnote ³⁸ In truth, she was not the “first” to play publicly in Britain: a few other Europeans, including Louise Gautherot and Teresa Milanollo, had occasionally appeared as soloists since the late eighteenth century, but they were exceptions to the norm.Footnote ³⁹ Indeed, in 1860s Britain it was still largely considered socially inappropriate for women to twist their necks and contort their faces by lowering their chins in order to hold a violin, as well as unbecoming for them to move the right arm rapidly when making bow strokes (and to be doing so in public view). Similar objections about arm movements pertained to women and cellos, but with this instrument the affront to respectability was greater, given the leg-straddling playing position for holding the cello and the unseemliness of “a lady grasping [it] with all her limbs.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Taboos about women playing cellos melted more slowly, but by the time significant numbers of them were active in the 1890s, the initial battles over propriety had been won and adjustable endpins, which improved sound and would enable women to hold the instrument further from their bodies, were available.Footnote ⁴¹ Even so, in 1898 one authority acknowledged that playing sidesaddle (facilitated by the endpin) or modifying the position of the knees – both for propriety’s sake – were more popular with women than the leg-straddling position.Footnote ⁴² As George Kennaway explains, what women cellists actually did is unclear and probably varied a good deal.Footnote ⁴³ By the 1920s it had become acceptable for them to use the leg-straddling position with the endpin.

In violin culture’s early days, complaints about women playing stringed instruments were usually justified in visual and aesthetic terms but were about much more than that. In her seminal study of women musicians in England, 1870–1914, Paula Gillett devotes two chapters to violinists, documenting considerable moral disapproval of such players in the late Victorian period and diagnosing that disapproval as having “psychologically potent” roots.Footnote ⁴⁴ These she traces to various ideas, including the longstanding sexualized construct of the violin as female, and the erotic subtext contained therein when it is played, not least because the bow was construed as male, to be wielded (only) by men. Late Victorian women who attempted the violin were prone to be considered – subconsciously at least – sapphically suggestive, as her reading of imaginative literature shows. The gendering and sexualization of the cello, which Kennaway has detailed in a broader, international context, is a more complicated story. In the early 1800s, the cello had an intensely masculine and serious identity, according to Kennaway, who pins its manliness to its size, low pitch, and role in maintaining order (control) in ensemble music.Footnote ⁴⁵ Gendered constructions in the late century were, he argues, less clear-cut. So, although there are instances of the instrument being deemed less masculine, somewhat feminized, and sexually charged in (some British) sources by the fin de siècle, “‘feminizing’ traits were not sufficiently well established to cause problems of autoeroticism for female cellists like those encountered by female violinists.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Of course, as in other male domains that women challenged, public objections to women string players concealed deeper issues that turned on a more foundational fear about the threat that their transgressive activities posed to male structures of social and economic power.

Gillett propounds practical reasons for the gradual dissolution of what she terms a “ban” on women playing stringed instruments, some of which are discussed in this book. The most important in terms of the changing social context was first-wave feminism and the changing assumptions about women’s roles in society during the late Victorian era, including women’s entitlement to opportunities hitherto reserved for upper- and middle-class men – namely, advanced education, respectable paid jobs, and professional careers. Embedded in these changes were new ideas as to whether girls’ lives should necessarily culminate in marriage. Before long, some women were studying at universities; others were training for secretarial, teaching, or nursing work; a few were qualifying as physicians.Footnote ⁴⁷ Seeking more control over life choices, women also started to challenge the assumption that certain recreational activities were for men only, be it riding bicycles, playing tennis, or learning stringed instruments. And with the violin, and subsequently the viola, cello, and double bass, young women with aptitude were soon seriously contemplating the possibility of making a living by teaching and/or performance. Gillett rightly points out that many women string players would not have identified as feminists.Footnote ⁴⁸ Nevertheless, as the latter made advances and new activities for women became normalized, thousands of women took up stringed instruments, thus contributing to the social change afoot. After the turn of the century, as women players became socially accepted, morally freighted public discussion faded. However, their professional and economic status was a different matter, and difficulties lay ahead, particularly with their male peers.

Other, music-related factors may have contributed to the speed at which violin playing among women escalated in the late Victorian era. Gillett identifies several, including the altered position of the piano as a marker of elite social status once less expensive pianos started to become available in the 1860s,Footnote ⁴⁹ which was also a consequence of the removal of tariffs on imported instruments. With the piano “diminished” in terms of its social “prestige,” the violin enabled socially conscious women in the upper tranches of society to recapture some cachet; as the music-loving Rev. Haweis later remarked, it stood to help “nice girls … stand out and shine.”Footnote ⁵⁰ This perception of social distinction may have been true for a while, but only a while, since inexpensive violins would always trump pianos in terms of price, and because from the late 1890s working- and lower-middle-class schoolgirls took up the instrument in considerable numbers. In addition, once women began performing in public, role models could be seen, heard, and pointed to by girls and women who aspired to learn. How this and other dimensions of the growing culture around the violin helped them make headway is woven through this book.

As this study also demonstrates, by the 1880s and 1890s amateur string playing among middle- and upper-class men was being publicly seen, heard, and more widely accepted – as social concerns about their doing so lessened. That said, the stigma never entirely disappeared. Even in the 1920s, the wealthy industrialist and tireless amateur violinist Walter Willson Cobbett, editor of the celebrated two-volume encyclopedia of chamber music, would lament that enthusiasm for chamber music-making was “not an English trait,” nor “‘good form’ in society.”Footnote ⁵¹ In some quarters, indifference may have been exacerbated by an increased feminization of string playing, caused by its take-up by well-to-do women. Meanwhile, some men from respectable backgrounds had begun making livings from string playing, despite, as one insider put it, “[t]he prejudice against taking music seriously as a study, still more as a career, remain[ing] incredibly strong among the upper classes right down to the close of the nineteenth century.”Footnote ⁵² They were likely spurred on by the increased legitimacy of music as a profession.

***

As much as the “rage for the violin” was ushered in by changing economic circumstances and social attitudes, its continuance and vitality were shaped by preexisting activities and values that persisted through the late Victorian era and, in several cases, beyond it. Both listening to and making music continued to be embedded in everyday life up to 1930, whether on the street or in the park, in schools or in the home, in music halls or opera houses, in restaurants or hotels. Latterly, music became integral to the experience of cinema-going, while gramophone and broadcasting brought it into many homes. In all such settings, string sounds were frequently to the fore. It was no coincidence either that string mania first mushroomed right when public concert life, which had been on the rise since the 1830s, was expanding rapidly. That concert-audience growth owed much to other continuities, including reductions in the length of the working week from midcentury and the concomitant increase in leisure time for the less affluent; indeed, once better wages brought increased spending power in the last decades of the nineteenth century, many people found they had significant opportunities for recreation.Footnote ⁵³ Evenings and Saturday afternoons became the principal times for leisure activities such as listening to music, as Chappell & Co. had recognized in establishing its (long-lived) cheap, Saturday-afternoon Popular Concerts of chamber music in London in 1865. On the participatory side, amateur orchestras, which boomed from the 1890s, typically met on weekday evenings.

Victorian aspirations for upward social mobility, self-improvement, and education also endured in violin culture, as did beliefs in the importance of classical music – whether experienced as player or listener – for both edifying the individual and building informed, orderly community in all tranches of British society and across age groups. Joseph Pearce had written in his dictionary of violin makers (1866) about the elevating qualities of (classical) music and its “doing much for the mental cultivation and refinement of all [social] classes.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Still, it was the lower orders who were most frequently targeted by such rhetoric, with string playing cast as a means for young people to employ their “leisure hours in a fascinating pursuit,” and as being especially useful for drawing those “with a latent love for music” into “select and cultured society,” to cite a source of 1888.Footnote ⁵⁵ More trenchantly, a writer in 1914 invoked old arguments of music’s moralizing force, opining that a young man who had found pleasure in playing the violin was “not likely to go in search of amusement to a public-house,” and that a “young working-girl” who had “a sure companion in a violin at her mother’s house” would be less inclined to “accept the offer of a doubtful one for a stroll in the public parks.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Especially after World War I, the influx of dance music, jazz, and cinema brought new leisure pursuits into competition with violin culture, which remained largely – though not exclusively – associated with classical music. Violin advocates reacted by insisting on the higher fulfillment that learning a stringed instrument could engender. An advice column for string teachers in 1923 even compared their work to the mission of Christianity: “We must also believe that the diffusion of a taste for good music and a constant care for the increasing elevation of its character is as high and noble a calling as any ministry that God has entrusted to man,” ran the text.Footnote ⁵⁷

For all that, the concept of classical music at this time requires historicization. Though people today might equate it with what we think of as high-serious repertoire, in violin culture’s heyday it was understood more broadly, encompassing works that would later be designated as “middlebrow” or “popular classics” – that is, excerpts from operas and choral works, movements from concertos and symphonies, standalone instrumental pieces, and songs. Drawing a large, mainstream, cross-class audience, such repertoire was frequently presented alongside works that are now considered the popular music of the period: dance tunes, comic songs, etc. The roots of this world of performance resided firmly in the Victorian era, but it flourished through the 1920s, being manifest in cinemas and broadcasting; also in J. Lyons’s “Corner House” eateries, where live music-making and much string playing was a defining feature.Footnote ⁵⁸

Commercial enterprise and the challenges it wrought for working players brought continuities, too. One longstanding characteristic of British musical life was its reliance on an open, unregulated marketplace for events and initiatives, along with the limited opportunities for musicians to find salaried, year-round employment. Added to which, by the 1880s and 1890s an overabundance of job-seeking musicians was generating a tough and competitive work environment. In a society that lacked social welfare and state pensions, musicians’ freelance lifestyles were especially precarious (government pensions for people over seventy were introduced in 1909 but were small). Into this world marched hordes of aspirant string players. Further, suppliers of music-related goods responded to the growth of violin playing at multiple levels with new merchandise, the commerce extending to innovations in the educational sphere (affordable teaching programs, attainment exams). Periodicals for string players, both the professional and the amateur, became an important cog in the wheel, providing publicity for goods and performers alike. At least nine titles joined the music-magazine market between 1884 and 1914, seemingly more than in any other specialist area of music-making at that time, including the piano. Three enjoyed some longevity; The Strad is still published today. Also, as music-making broadened socially and the marketplace became oversupplied with musicians of wide-ranging competencies, the fight for work intensified and the push for systems of professionalization gained ground. Formal qualifications, trade unions, and vocationally oriented advanced training came into existence, molding and energizing violin culture in multiple ways, as the ensuing chapters gradually reveal.