Cecil James Sharp was born on the 22nd of November in 1859, in Denmark Hill, South London, the eldest boy in a family of nine. His father was a slate merchant in Tooley Street, near London Bridge, who had a taste for archaeology and was referred to lovingly by Sharp as 'The General'. His mother was of Welsh and Italian extraction. He was a nervous boy who was 'highly sensitive to noises'. Fortunately his parents were fond of Handel and Mozart. "An early and vivid recollection was the sound of a brass band in the street when he was in bed; in his ecstasy he wept" (Karpeles, 1933, p.4). When he was eight he was sent to a private boarding school in Brighton. At ten he went to Uppingham, the only British public school where music was taken seriously. He entered Cambridge in 1879 at the age of 20 to read mathematics, but mostly he played piano. At Cambridge he was much shaken by Charles Kingsley's Aalton Locke, which featured the Chartist rally of 10th April 1848, and was influenced by the Christian Socialists. It was here that he first met Charles Marson and George Bernard Shaw. He was later to become a member of the Fabians.
The Fabian Society is a British intellectual socialist movement, whose purpose is to advance the principles of Social democracy via gradualist and reformist, rather than revolutionary means.