Class of 1890

The birth of The Strad in London in 1890 was nothing if not timely, coinciding with what contemporaries a few years later were calling a ‘fiddle craze’. It’s an evocative phrase, although the upsurge in activity, which had begun in the 1870s, was far more than a craze. Rather, it was part of a sustained interest in playing instruments of the violin family among a wider slice of the British population than had hitherto been known. Hordes of middle-class females, for instance, started to learn and play violins and cellos, as long-standing cultural taboos about the acceptability of girls and women taking up stringed instruments crumbled. And people noticed. ‘Every other girl you meet in the street now-a-days carries a fiddle-box!’ said a character in a fictionalised feature in the March 1894 issue of Strings, a short-lived contemporary of The Strad.

At the same time, a certain amount of working-class participation developed, particularly in large cities, where inexpensive group violin and cello classes for adults were offered. In London, the Birkbeck Literary and Scientific Institution, formerly a mechanics institute, was a focal point of such education until 1904. The Birmingham and Midland Institute had begun a ‘penny violin class’ in 1882. As one journalist commented in The Fiddler in 1884, strings were being played ‘from among the most exalted in the land to the humblest dweller in the cottage’.

This ‘violin culture’ – to rephrase the term more commonly used by historians for the Victorians and their ubiquitous pianos – was created and underscored by several important phenomena. They include: the growing trade in making, importing and selling instruments, and in accessories and repair services; the desire to certify and classify musical achievement through grade examinations (the College of Violinists, also founded in 1890, was one of many such institutions; the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music, founded in 1889, is of course still with us today); the acceptance of women into training schools of music; a growing abundance of violin and quartet recitals; interest in collecting and connoisseurship; and the emergence of specialist magazines for string players, of which The Strad was one of the earliest – and the only one that truly lasted. Among related titles were The Fiddler (1884–7), The Violin (1889–94), The Violin Times (1893–1907), Strings (1894–8) and The Cremona (1906–11).

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