In the nineteenth century Western art music advanced towards a peak of sonorous magnificence, perhaps reached in 1848 at Paris when Hector Berlioz conducted an ensemble of 1,022 performers. The guitar, however, continued to sound at the level of a small continuo group for an Italian opera of the 1640s. During the 1800s the guitar’s reputation was deeply affected, often for the better, by its evocation of past sonorities that the ear was prepared to relinquish but the historical imagination could not bear entirely to forgo. Various attempts were nonetheless made to strengthen the sound by external and internal changes, some of them well received in their day, but no increase in the size or depth of the guitar’s body, no change in the pattern of the internal bracing and no addition of extra strings fundamentally enlarged its scope. Not suited to the new concert halls in which provincial towns and cities invested much of their civic pride, the guitar fared no better amidst the din of the music halls either, according to the guitarist and vaudeville comedian Ernest Shand (1868–1924). The editor of Shand’s compositions finds that ‘interest in the instrument was all but gone’ by the 1890s when Shand was unable to make a living from his composing, playing and teaching.

Catharina Pratten was the only exponent of the guitar to make a lifelong career from the instrument in Britain. A living link with the ‘Great Vogue’ for the guitar of the 1830s, she composed companionable solo pieces designed for the amateur, arranged songs, published methods, and taught a wide range of pupils, including some form the aristocracy, during almost the entire Victorian period. The considerable revival of interest in Madame Pratten during recent years, however, is in danger once more of the underestimating the importance of accompanied song to the Victorian fortunes of the guitar. About half of her many publications comprise guitar-accompanied vocal music including settings of nursery rhymes, opera favourites and English ballads. Although this was not the part of her legacy most valued by the coterie of advanced pupils she left behind, it undoubtedly inspired many who sought the services of this unique female musical entrepreneur.

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.