Annie Edwardes' two-volume novel, A Ballroom Repentance (London: Richard Bentley & Sons. 1882), was apparently a somewhat racy novel by Victorian standards. By today's, it falls into that dreary research category of deservedly-obscure novels that I plow through for the dance scenes.
Edwardes (c1830-1896) was an English author successful enough to publish twenty-one novels between 1858 and 1899, the last published posthumously. Three were adapted for theatre. I haven't read any of her other books, but the title of this one attracted me, since it promised a ballroom scene which might have include some useful tidbits of dance information. The ballroom scene comes very near the end, but to be thorough, I read all seven hundred or so pages of what it would be fair to call Victorian soap opera. It's a quick read with fewer words per page than a modern novel, so that wasn't quite as tedious as it sounds, but I can see why Edwardes has not come down to us as a major writer.
A pithy contemporary review:
There is not much to be said of a Ball-Room Repentance; indeed, it would be almost enough to say that it is written in the present tense. When that monstrosity was committed because authors knew no better there was some excuse for it; but now that they have had fair warning, the repetition is simply contumacious. A Lake Leman boardinghouse, an American grass widow, a vulgar family of Continent haunters, a refined ditto, a weak-minded young Oxonian, an older person who is deluded by a brazen married woman with a conniving husband, Monte Carlo, Rome, &c, &c. —these are the well-worn ingredients of the book. That they are not mixed up without a certain cleverness is as much as saying that Mrs. Edwardes is the author; but the book makes us deplore more than ever that a narrative faculty so considerable should not have been able to associate with itself better taste, fresher materials, and more conscientious workmanship. There are touches, too, of occasional grandiloquence in this book with which Mrs. Edwardes has not always been chargeable. Here is a wonderful specimen: "The process of degeneration makes itself visible by no outward or visible sign in Roger Tryan. The poppy retains its surface-whiteness, the man approaches our ruined cousins the Ascidians by steps as yet imperceptible." Mrs. Edwardes might have abstained from reminding us so soon after Mr. Darwin's death of the sufferings which a great man sometimes unwittingly brings upon humanity by making persons who are not great talk nonsense.
-- Saintsbury, George. “New Novels.” The Academy 532 (1882): 44.
Some excerpts from a considerably lengthier and more entertaining contemporary review:
...when we find a novel filled with cleverly drawn, but vulgar and unpleasant, characters, we may admit the descriptive strength of the novelist while we question his powers as an artist; and when there is abundant evidence that a dwelt pen has lovingly on disagreeable details...we have fair reasons for entertaining serious doubts about the taste of the writer...
Yet we readily admit that she draws her characters with great force, that her details are well worked out, that her scenes are life-like, and that she has considerable descriptive ability. If seldom congenial, her work is often amusing; and it must be owned that, where it offends good taste, it frequently provokes laughter also.
The scenes of the novel are laid chiefly in hotels and pensions frequented by the English at Clarens, Nice, Monte Carlo, and Rome. The people described are exactly those whom one would carefully avoid when travelling, and they represent the most objectionable type of our countrymen abroad.
With the plot of the story we have no cause for quarrelling. It is simple, transparent, and agreeably free from side issues.
As regards the style of the writer we will not say much, although it would be easy to be critical.
But a novel must be taken as a whole—for better or for worse; and with all its imperfections, with its vulgar and unpleasant characters, with its aimless story, and its disagreeable tone, A Ballroom Repentance has fair claims to be classed among the readable novels of the Season. It is written with considerable dramatic power, the characters are cleverly and forcibly drawn, and last, but not least, the book is not too long.
-- “A Ballroom Repentance.” Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science and Art 54.1396 (1882): 154.
The entire review may be read at the link above.
The plot of A Ballroom Repentance involves the thwarted romantic love of Miss Joyce Dormer for the virtuous Roger Tryan, whose engagement was ended at the behest of her mother when his financial circumstances were reduced from extremely wealthy to merely well-off. Both lovers are meandering around the European continent, she in the company of her sweetly barracuda-like mother and her wealthy-but-unpleasant new fiancé and he in the company of a vulgar married couple who are taking him for as much money as they can. There is a substantial supporting cast who provide lengthy distractions and sudsy drama, with the whole thing coming to a head at an Easter ball in Rome, at which Joyce, less than week before her marriage, discovers that Roger, though dying of a fever, has come in pursuit of her. She finally jilts her fiancé to flee to her true love's bedside.
The only suspense for me at this point was whether he was going to die tragically in her arms and she enter a convent, or perhaps become a professional violinist, or whether he would miraculously recover and they would live happily ever after. I won't spoil this oh-so-dramatic ending; if you feel a burning desire to read the novel for yourself, or just skip to the end to find out the fate of Joyce and Roger, The Internet Archive has both Volume I and Volume II of A Ballroom Repentance online.
Fortunately, my suffering for the sake of research was repaid with plenty of dance references. While the novel is set in various European locales, there is no evidence Edwardes actually visited them herself, so I'm hesitant to take any of her information as representative of balls in Europe at that time, but it does give some insight into what an Englishwoman of the late nineteenth century expected balls to include.
A quick summary of what I found useful references to:
- waltz, polka, galop, "round dances", and a new dance, the Boston
- quadrilles and Lancers; walking through them
- a cotillon (dance party-game) with props or favors
- ball cards, and the games a lady may play with them; "extras"
- the scarcity of dancing gentlemen at balls held at cheap European hotels
- a suggestion that ladies should dance with each other
- a large Easter ball in Rome
Taking the book page by page, here are the details.
There are three actual dance scenes, balls in Clarens (Switzerland); Nice; and Rome, plus a few scattered references elsewhere. The first of these, a suggestion that Joyce play her violin to entertain a gentleman, hints that quadrilles were considered tedious:
“Do you ask me to play, as people ask one to dance a quadrille, from a sense of duty…?
(Volume I, p. 44)
This scene takes place at a hotel on Lake Leman in Switzerland. Later, there is some sort of dance party or informal ball at the hotel, in which we find a reference to a lady having a male acquaintance as her escort for a ball:
“The dragons will muster in greater force than usual,” says Longmore, who has followed her. “M. Scherer has promised us a ball tonight, and an extra row of dowagers will be sure to line the salon windows. If you will accept my escort, Miss Dormer, I think you might perhaps get past them, alive.”
(Volume I, p. 67)
The ball itself is not very elaborate; one guest, Mrs. Skelton, "thrums antiquated waltz tunes on the battered piano" (p. 99) while her three daughters waltz with some nameless tourists (p. 90).
More interesting from a dance perspective (though utterly irrelevant to the plot) is a "thin little lady waltzing backwards" (p. 100). What is she dancing?
"...between them they are executing the only civilised dance to which the world has yet attained, the Boston. Mrs. Scipio Leonidas Briggs would herself call it the 'Bors'on'."
"...she is [graceful] in spite of the 'Bors'on', in spite of her exaggerated partner."
(Volume I, p. 100)
I haven't traced the history of the Boston, but 1882 may be a fairly early reference, and the implication is that the dance is new enough that not everyone would be familiar with it, perhaps because both dance and lady are American. I think the "only civilised dance" bit is sarcasm, since the second quote, from the always-tasteful Joyce Dormer, implies that the dance is not a graceful one.
Two pages later, Mrs Scipio Leonidas (as she is known) has been dancing the Boston "for exactly sixteen minutes without halting to draw breath" (p. 102) and a few pages after that, Joyce's jealous fiancé decides to take one of the Skelton daughters out for a polka (p. 108). He uses the disparity of genders as an excuse to Joyce:
...gentlemen being scarce this evening, he, as a dancing man, ought to do his duty. Ladies seem to be standing out...
(Volume I, p. 108)
This is too much for Joyce, who demands that he polka with her instead. Her fiancé is surprised, since she apparently has a policy against dancing "extras", which I assume refers to dances added to a program without actually being on the card. This ball doesn't appear to have ball cards, so perhaps all the dances are "extras".
"I thought you made a point of not dancing extra dances, that that was one of your very few principles...You have told me so, I am sure, pretty often--"
"In crowded London ballrooms, no doubt I have. What mortal being could want to do more than stern duty at a London ball? In Clarens it is quite another thing."
(Volume I, pp. 109-110)
Anything goes in Clarens, to be sure.
There are a few references to the Skelton girls' brother Thomas having met Joyce at "Aldershot balls" and at Woolwich (pp. 241, 244-5, 250), where he claims he "Never had any spare dances on my card" for her (p. 241). Note: a gentleman having his own dance card, or a figure of speech?
This is the point at which the Roger Tryan, Joyce's jilted lover, is introduced in absentia, as one of the Skelton daughters mentions never having scene him at a ball in Nice (p. 249). Possibly they just don't go to the same balls, since the scene soon shifts to that city, where poor Roger spends his time looking after the unpleasant Mrs. Pinto in public ballrooms (p. 312). She is currently a guest at the Pension Potpourri, which is giving a ball that evening (pp. 313-314), which she expects him to attend. The ball must start fairly late, since the conversation takes place on the 7:30 train to Monte Carlo (only a dozen or so miles away) for some gambling for the early part of the evening.
Volume I ends with Joyce, who has come to the casino to watch Roger and Mrs. Pinto, reminiscing about the mischief she and Roger used to get up to at London balls:
...the London balls at which night after night she used, through curiously-persistent mischance, to lose her programme, and was reduced to telling Mr. Tryan "he might decide as he liked" about her dances..."
(Volume I, p. 344)
That's a cute trick, deliberately losing one's dance cards to get out of any previous engagements so she can dance with her lover. Actual historical practice, or just a way of depicting the same flexible ethics that led Joyce to agree to dump Roger when he lost a large part of his fortune? It's interesting to note how much their relationship seemed to revolve around balls, which were, of course, the classic way for young people to meet and court.
Volume II opens in same the Nice casino. The unscrupulous Mrs. Pinto is trading a promise of a later waltz at the ball with an English gentlemen for stakes at the gambling tables (p. 4). Roger and Joyce meet and once more reminisce about their little dance card games:
"...the dances we never reckoned on -- not those lawfully set down in the programme -- were the ones best worth dancing!"
(Volume II, p. 13)
The gamblers return from Nice on the 9:00 train for the ball starting at eleven at the Pension Potpourri (p. 44). Conveniently, the Skelton family from Volume I is staying there as well. Mrs. Pinto argues with her husband about his promise to attend:
"Do not forget that you are to figure at the Pension At Home. Our cavaliers are few. The young ladies will expect you to put in an appearance before we reach the final cotillon..."
"The young ladies may dance with each other...I'm too old for dancing. I'm not feeling strong. The mistral tries my nerves. A man must be an athlete to trot out three consecutive Miss Skeltons to waltz time, and career through a Lancers or cotillon with their terrible mother as a finish!"
(Volume II, pp. 66-67)
The Lancers is well-documented as a ballroom perennial, but I've had a particular interest in cotillons (referring to the dance party games, not the eighteenth-century French contredanses) lately, so this is a useful reference to their being familiar to an Englishwoman.
I'm intrigued by the comment that the young ladies should dance together. Is this a serious suggestion of something that happened normally in England at that time? A comment on perceived Continental habits? Or just a bit of sarcasm? I've no immediate way to know.
With Chapter V, we finally begin the "cheap At Home of a cheap Anglo-French Pension", where the decor includes Chinese lamps and paper roses suspended across doorways and the musicians are two "itinerant fiddlers" (p. 71). Mrs. Skelton and Mrs. Pinto are acting as hostesses at a ball where some guests may "take a round and a half of a polka, but shake their heads at a waltz" (p. 74) or dance a Lancers (pp. 75, 78-79).
Roger Tryan does not show up until after midnight and listens as the guests dance to the Strauss waltz "Du und Du" (p.88). Mrs. Pinto complains at his lateness, since they remain short of gentlemen, especially those healthy enough to dance:
"We are so alarmingly in want of dancing men, especially of dancing men with a due allowance of lungs"
(Volume II, p. 90)
He dances the end of "Du und Du" with Mrs. Pinto (pp. 92-3) before taking leave of her, creating a small social problem:
"We want you awfully, Mrs. Pinto. You must set us all going in the cotillon," exclaims Aurora [Skelton]..."We want you and Mr. Tryan to lead..."
(Volume II, p. 99)
Aurora also complains of the lack of good dancing gentlemen but declares they must manage without Roger (p. 100). Mrs. Pinto steps up, with some interesting tidbits about the preparations for the cotillon:
"I shall be ready to show you the figures in five minutes...Get ready the bouquets and ribbons, ascertain if the Pension Potpourri can furnish a decent handglass...I suppose I shall have to lead the cotillon with some other rather worse waltzer than Mr. Tryan."
(Volume II, p. 101)
The handglass is presumably a prop for some figure; the bouquets might be props or favors to give to partners. Alas, due to some more soap-opera tragedy, Mrs. Pinto leaves the ball and refuses to return, even through Aurora has secured her a new co-leader (p. 105). So we do not actually get a description of the cotillon.
The final section of the novel takes place in Rome during the weeks leading up to Easter, climaxing with the "monster banker's ball" at the Palazzo Orsini (p. 183, 193). This is the titular ball in which Joyce will finally repent her disloyalty to Roger, which means there is considerably more description of emotional drama than actual dancing, since Joyce begins the ball still engaged, with her wedding expected on the following Saturday.
The Orsini Easter Ball begins in Chapter XII with a "mob of over three hundred guests" in attendance (p. 202). There are waltzes (pp. 204, 206, 210) and "round dances" (p. 219). Joyce must reserve several dances on her ball card for her possessive fiancé but is popular enough to be engaged for the rest of the dances as well (pp. 210-1), including with an acquaintance from Clarens (p. 214) who appeared earlier in the tale as a possible love interest and now, most conveniently, reappears to move the plot along.
Joyce's vigilant mother insists that Joyce and her current partner become her vis-à-vis couple in the Lancers she has promised to "walk through" with one Prince d'Orellana (pp. 215-216). She is concerned that Joyce is accepting inappropriate partners and urges her to be more discerning (p. 216-8). Joyce has nonetheless accepted her Clarens friend for the eleventh dance on the card, a quadrille, which her mother is planning to dance with Joyce's fiancé (pp. 218-219).
Joyce and a Baron, Mrs. Dormer and the Prince, join their Lancers set, where the youthful Mrs. Dormer "glides with girlish airiness, through the figures" (p. 219). Note the implication here and above that the steps are only walking/gliding, rather than the more athletic steps of earlier in the nineteenth century.
Joyce's partner appears for the eleventh dance at the last minute, "when most of the quadrille sets have formed". Joyce's fiancé, demonstrating the gentleman's duty to arrange a pleasing set for his partner, has arranged one "containing at least four titled or notable personages at the upper end of the room" for her mother. While they are thus occupied, Joyce and her friend ditch the dance and go out into the garden for an angst-filled conversation (pp. 220-1). Joyce fiddles with the bouquet bestowed by her fiancé -- a tradition for balls (p. 227)?
Unfortunately, at this point the melodrama takes over, and we get no more description of the ball except a brief mention of "horns and fiddles and bassoons" (p. 254), a "tumultous galop" (p. 265), during which the repentant Joyce and her friend sneak out of the ballroom to go see the dying Roger, and a reference to the carriages having been ordered to come at one o'clock in the morning for the departing dancers (p. 267).
As Joyce attends the Roger's bedside, they once again reminisce about the joys of their old acquaintance and their first meeting, where we once again see how much their courtship revolved around balls.
(Roger) "...you gave me a list of your coming balls, you promised me dances for them all"
(Joyce) "...I remember each of these dances as if it had taken place yesterday. I keep my programmes still. I read your name, written on them from end to end."
(Volume II, pp. 317-318)
As a dance historian, I am grateful for the women who, like Joyce, saved their ball cards, which I collect and examine as part of my research.
A Ballroom Repentance ends with a series of affecting scenes, but no more dance references.
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