When Henry Mayhew produced the greatest single survey of the Victorian poor in London, in the years around 1850, he encountered and interviewed various street guitar players. With the aid of the contemporary newspapers and archives, the picture of these musicians given by Mayhew can be very much enlarged. The accounts of legal hearings in police courts and quarter sessions, for example, often give an edited paraphrase of statements given by the musicians themselves in court (usually as the defendant, on charges connected with affray and drunkenness, but also sometimes as the plaintiff). These reports disclose a large number of the street guitar players by name, both white and black, male and female, together with details of the life they led, the repertoire, they performed, and the many hardships that they endured. These are the lost players of an instrument hitherto lost to musical history.