After their Moment of Glory, the Books Slept …

Well, the talk seems to have gone well, and again, I found a very responsive audience. After being taken out for a delicious dinner, I headed for Dundee, which was the only way I was going to be at work on time in the morning.

Another time, I need to clarify, for anyone not familiar with Tonic Sol-Fa, that it was devised for singers, not instrumentalists.

If you played an instrument, you learned off standard staff notation or by ear – with or without an instructor. In late Victorian times, after the 1870 and 1872 Education Acts, it stands to reason that more children would have learnt sight-singing by Sol-Fa, than learnt an instrument. Children whose parents could pay, might have had private instrumental lessons. Some might have had opportunities to join a band, learn from someone known to them, or pick up a fiddle (for example), but I still maintain that the majority of children were more likely to have encountered Sol-Fa.

As to social mobility … I’m not entirely sure whether it was easier or harder to fight your way up the ladder in those days. I’d need to ask a social historian of that era. I can only comment on the few instances that I’ve observed: ‘my’ music publishers certainly seemed to do well for themselves.

So, here I sit on a train back to Glasgow. Like Cinderella, my carriage will change back to a pumpkin, and my garb back to rags, if I’m not a librarian behind my desk by nine o’clock!