ABSTRACT
In eighteenth-century England, upper-class boys were educated for a life in the world, girls for a life in the home. This chapter suggests something about the life of the music masters who ministered to this social class, and indicates the kinds of social conventions at play between music teachers and their upper-class employers, and, in the process. It illuminates more clearly the general relation between musical life in eighteenth-century England and the social forces which in part controlled it. The most common surviving written references to musical education in the eighteenth century represent complaints about and satires of the music masters. Playwright Thomas Shadwell was already poking fun at this subject in the late seventeenth century. In 1784 Samuel Wesley began his twenty-five-year teaching career at Oxford House, Marylebone, in an establishment run by a Mrs. Barnes. The social position of music masters was not enviable.
