An examination of class and musicality in industrial Britain: http://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/harmony-in-the-lowest-home-the-guitar-and-the-labouring-poor

By the 1830s, guitars could be bought very cheaply at pawnbrokers' shops, market stalls and the humblest of the 'musical repositories' that sprang up in response to the spread of musical amateurism. For the first time in the history of western music, the working classes, and even some members of the labouring poor - never able to afford a piano, harpsichord or harp, but only a flute or fiddle - found themselves with a fully harmonic instrument and sometimes with ambitions to match. This development, often cruelly satirised is an unwritten chapter in the history of working-class self-improvement that comprehends the rise of the mechanicks' institutes and the spread of working people's access to newspapers and conversation in the urban coffee shops.

The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website: http://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/harmony-in-the-lowest-home-the-guitar-and-the-labouring-poor

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