As has been well documented in many books and articles on his life, Elgar always resented his upbringing as a lower middle class, provincial Roman Catholic, whose family had been in trade. ‘Yet he still regarded himself as an outsider and looked back on his early struggles not with self-satisfaction but with bitterness.’ Indeed, his marriage to the daughter of an East India Company major-general added further complexities. With some well-known exceptions, the Worcestershire landed gentry and upper-class Imperial families would have seen the musician Elgar as an effete, somewhat suspect, outsider. August Jaeger, himself an outsider who had arrived in England from Düsseldorf in 1878, aged eighteen and with his family, and who had become an employee of Novello in 1890, summed up this attitude to Elgar: ‘But it's only an English musician (not an actress or a jockey, or a batsman) and he is treated like a very ordinary nobody.’

Yet, in an age of self-help and aspiration, this background acted as a spur for the highly ambitious young Elgar to become an acclaimed composer; to achieve recognition as a ‘gentleman’ by his social superiors; and finally to achieve a measure of financial independence. Although he resented the fact that his father was a piano-tuner to the Worcestershire gentry and kept a music shop close to Worcester Cathedral, he had, as an autodidact, a very good musical education. ‘I saw and learnt a great deal about music from the stream of music that passed through my father's establishment … I am self-taught in the matter of harmony, counterpoint, form.’