The diary of Caroline Maud Berkeley née Tomlinson, compiled in thirteen sketch books from 1888 to 1901, offers the most extensive social record of guitar-playing to be found in any private document of the nineteenth century. This article, compiled with exclusive access to the original manuscripts, offers the first comprehensive digital record of more than twenty scenes of guitars in use, together with the accompanying diary text, which has never before been published in an authentic form. The diarist’s sharp eye for facial expressions and gestures, her radiant sense of color, and her keen sense of humor allow her to reveal, in a manner both incisive and engaging, the importance of guitar-playing in her life at the seaside resort of Sandown, on the Isle of Wight, just off the south coast of England. The guitar offered her a portable means to accompany her own amateur singing and the chance to share an interest with several young women who lived very close to her, for to Maud Tomlinson the guitar meant song, friendship and independence above all things. In text and image, the diary traces her activities from the struggles of her first lessons through to the assured public performances with a guitar trio that gave her quite as many opportunities to escape the parental home as her tennis racket and the bicycle she bought during the cycling craze of the 1890s. Above, all, the diary offers a uniquely vivid record of a revival of the guitar at precisely the time when the instrument is often supposed to have been on the verge of oblivion in Britain.
Christopher Page (Wed,) studied this question.