Like many other eighteenth-century professionals, musicians belonged to the large, socially and economically fluid group that historians term the “middling sort.” The economic pressures and occupational reconfigurations of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries presented them – both individually and collectively – with significant challenges. As a result, their social identities evolved in a variety of possible directions. The historian John Seed has argued convincingly that focusing solely on the “rise of the middle class” during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries neglects the history of the “middle ranks” from which it emerged. It is essential to perceive “the way in which as a social category ‘the middling sort’ were splintering into a number of quite different strata and quite divergent individual fates.” Many members of the middle ranks experienced downward social mobility. Others rose to the level of small employers, although perhaps not entirely partaking of the new cultural definition of “middle-class.” Still others stayed more or less in the same place but with some loss of social status and stability, evolving into what has been termed the “middling class” of the early nineteenth century. And some moved into “quite new and distinctive middle-class groups: new professions, white-collar groupings, specialised functionaries within commerce and so on.”

A close study of musicians has revealed the full range of outcomes just described, with important implications for the evolution of the profession.