When I began this study many years ago the social history of music was still a fledgling discipline, and the few works in that field tended to focus primarily on sources of financial support such as patrons and audiences. Although patronage is certainly very important, from the perspectives of a social historian it is only one part of the story and neglects the lives, perceptions, and values of the musicians themselves. The present study was influenced by a number of approaches – the themes and methods of labor history, Marx's assertions that consciousness evolved from human interactions in pursuit of material subsistence, and the French Annales historians' rich interweaving of social and intellectual history. Inspired by such sources, it proceeds from the assumption that in order to study the social context of music it is necessary first to consider the musicians who created music and made decisions about musical life – their economic, social, professional, and artistic goals, and the material and cultural conditions under which these goals were pursued. Recreating the landscape of musicians' careers and perceptions from 1750 to 1850 is the central task of this book.

It soon became clear to me that during the social and economic transformation of eighteenth-and nineteenth-century Britain, professional musicians occupied a complex and ambiguous social status that did not fit neatly into existing social categories.