I read somewhere that the Victorians created lots of 'folk' instruments for their parlour amusements... The 'lute harp' being one. Any others?

The concertina is the best known - intended as a violin substitute for people who couldn't tune the real thing or put their fingers in the right place.

I have two of these Victorian inventions on my website - the "mouth flutina" (which I've never seen - the ancestor of the melodica) and the Italian ocarina (pretty successful). I also have the rock band (not all that practical for the average household).

Late in the century you got the autoharp, the piano-harp and the Dulcitone, all of which seem to have been intended to accompany small groups of people singing hymns.

The modern guitar is the most successful member of that family - sociologically it's a just a harmonium that got lucky. Guitarists prefer to forget its origins as something the white bourgeoisie could use to play the dullest music in history.

Then by the middle of the 20th century the trend developed into instruments intended for children and which seem designed to ensure that kids get put off music permanently. Like those plucked psalteries with the tune notated on graphs that went under the strings, out-of-tune glockenspiels with multicoloured bars and no resonators so they just made nasty high-pitched plinks, or the Langley ocarina with a fingering system so weird and clumsy that nobody ever gets past playing "Speed Bonny Boat" off the tablature chart.