By the mid-nineteenth century, the only American dance manuals that contain large quantities of contradances are those from the New England area. Others may have a few here and there, but not the pages and pages of them, or entire manuals of nothing but contras. And, alas for reconstructors looking back 150 years later, the authors simply don't bother to explain how to do specific figures. Presumably, everyone knew.
For most figures this isn't a particular problem; they're self-evident from the name or unchanged from earlier eras. But there is one figure that is especially ambiguous to dance historians, and that is "right and left" or "rights and lefts". The major reason for the ambiguity is good old Thomas Wilson, a dancing master in early nineteenth-century London and a prolific author. Wilson wrote some of the most useful books on English country dance in all of dance history, with explanations, diagrams, and occasionally even steps for each figure. But he had a somewhat unusual take on right and left.
Bear with me while I jump back in time to the mid-eighteenth century and over the sea to Mother England. I'll get back to mid-nineteenth century America by the end of this post.
There are two major mid-eighteenth century English books on the figuring part of country dances, written by Nicholas Dukes (London, 1752) and "A. D." (London, 1764). Both are in agreement about what to do in right and left: take hands on each change. You can see this clearly in the diagram from Dukes of "Right and left half round" at left (click to enlarge). The little symbols that look like tuning forks are indications of taking hands.
"A. D." explains it verbally:
"...let all be sure to pass on the right side of their partner, and give the right hand in passing, all moving forward round...each missing their opposite corners will next meet woman to woman and man to man, who are to pass on the left sides of each other, and give the left hand in passing..."
Unfortunately, those two are the last clear word on the subject until Thomas Wilson starts publishing his manuals in the early 1800s. And from the first of the Wilson manuals that I have available, his 1808 edition of An Analysis of Country Dancing, Wilson is quite consistent that in right and left you do not take hands. From the 1811 edition of Analysis on, Wilson explains that right and left is often confused with something called a chain figure, which is exactly like right and left except that it includes taking hands:
"The Chain figure has frequently been substituted and performed for Right and Left."
Wilson got quite worked up about this in The Complete System of English Country Dancing (London, c1820):
"...it is clearly deducible, that the knowledge of the correct manner of performing it was not possessed, or otherwise perverted by the Dancers, as they frequently used the Chain Figure instead..."
Whew!
Along with disdaining taking hands, Wilson also considers right and left (and the chain figure) four-bar figures, when mid-eighteenth century usage generally makes right and left an eight-bar figure.
It would be easy enough to decide that Dukes and "A. D." represented the old style and Wilson the new, except that most writers of figures don't seem to have gotten the memo about the chain figure.
The question one always has to ask about Wilson is, was he an outlier? Wilson was in the mainstream of dance of his era, so his opinions can never be casually discarded. But he had some very definite opinions about how things ought to be, but they didn't always correspond to how the rest of the world was doing them. One always has to cross-check him against other surviving evidence.
In this case, the answer is mixed. There does seem to be an increasing tendency in the 1800s and 1810s to use more "fast" right and left figures that only take four bars, though it can be hard to sort out amid the generally careless editing of this era -- it is often difficult to tell a deliberate change in figure length from a mistake! But I do see a fair amount of use in the early 1800s of one of Wilson's favorite eight-bar combinations, "down the middle up again, right and left". The four-bar right and left is not universal, but it is certainly a presence in dance figures.
What is somewhat clearer is that Wilson's "chain figure" terminology was not widely used. I checked through quite a few books of dance tunes and figures. Only two writers seem to use the chain figure. One of them is Wilson, of course. The other, surprisingly, is his rival G.M.S. Chivers, who offers the same explanation of the two figures in The Modern Dancing Master (1822):
CHAIN FIGURE OF FOUR
Is the same as right and left, only that you give right and left hands in passing to places.
I didn't search exhaustively, but in what I would consider a reasonable sample of dances from 1770-1835 (around a thousand sets of dance figures), I found no books with chain figures other than Wilson's and Chivers'. That isn't conclusive; it's hard to prove a negative. But it's at least suggestive. Also suggestive is Wilson's statement that the chain figure was often "substituted" for right and left. It seems likely that, to Wilson's undoubted irritation, people persisted in giving hands in right and left, messing up his neat distinction between the figures.
One could conclude from this that "fast right and left" (four bars) is done without hands and "slow right and left" (eight bars) is done with them, except by Chivers, who departs from Wilson in making both his right and left and his chain figure take eight bars of music. One suspects that did not please Wilson either.
So is this evolution over time? Mid-eighteenth century, slow rights and lefts with hands. Very late eighteenth century into early nineteenth, fast rights and lefts without hands. Circa 1820, slow rights and lefts without hands. And forward from there...more of the same?
That would be very tidy, and it might be possible to convince me of it if England were the only country under consideration, though I'm not so sure it holds up even for England. But I have significant reservations about applying this in America. While there was plenty of dance information criss-crossing the Atlantic in the nineteenth century, what generally seems to have traveled westward is information about new dances: quadrilles, waltz, galop, and eventually polka and schottische and the other classic European nineteenth-century dances. But not country dances. The form was going rapidly going out of style in England by the late 1830s. In the corner of America where it was still thriving, New England, there was already an established tradition that was had diverged from English style and needed no additional input.
And that tradition was established in colonial times, before the United States separated from Great Britain. This is very noticeable in early nineteenth-century dance manuals from New England and New York State. Well into the 1810s, they continue to be full of country dances (and sometimes cotillions), but the repertoire of figures is ever-so-slightly different from those found in Wilson and in Chivers. It is smaller and somewhat old-fashioned. And it uses right and left constantly; looking at the second edition of Saltator's A Treatise on Dancing (Boston, 1807), well over half the country dances end with an eight-bar right and left, frequently following "down the middle, up again, cast off". (Casting off was a figure Wilson considered old-fashioned and not much used anymore. Maybe not in London!)
There is no way to be absolutely certain short of a mid-nineteenth-century manual of American contra dance figure explanations falling from the sky, but my best guess is that for the performance of mid-nineteenth-century New England contra (country) dances, we should be taking as our jumping-off point English country dances of the pre-Revolutionary era, not of the 1820s.
That means that for rights and lefts in those contras, which seem to be invariably eight-bar figures, unless and until some more informative source comes to light, I believe we should be taking hands.
This is for Eugenia Eremina-Solenikova, who cares about this sort of thing, with thanks for giving me a copy of Country Dancing Made Plain and Easy!
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