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.

Inscriptions collected in this chapter demonstrate that women were employed in a wide range of occupations: not only were they engaged in gendered professions, as hairdressers, wet nurses and midwives, but they were also involved in more general vocations, for instance as physicians, albeit less frequently than men. Women were involved in trade and a limited number of crafts (primarily clothing and luxury production), and in education, entertainment and prostitution. Most working women we meet in inscriptions were freedwomen who had been trained as slaves. Their brief epitaphs advertise their professions as part of their social identity. Apart from funerary inscriptions, amphora stamps and painted messages on potsherds record the names of female ship owners and traders exporting wine and olive oil, brick stamps demonstrate their engagement as managers and owners of brick production and lead water pipes their management of lead workshops, graffiti advertise their services as prostitutes and wooden tablets their particpation in business transactions. Most testimonies are from Rome and the cities of Italy.