And...here's the "United Six" dance card that inspired me to write about "Roy's Wife"!
The back of the card (click to enlarge) gives the printer as "Danvers Mirror Print", a printing company located in Danvers, Massachusetts (formerly Salem Village, of the famous Salem witchcraft trials) in the late nineteenth century. The date on the front of the card, April 2, 1879, called "Fast Eve" confirms the Massachusetts connection -- in 1879, April third was proclaimed Fast Day, a day of "fasting, humiliation, and prayer" by then-Governor Thomas Talbot. His original proclamation may be seen at the Boston Atheneum Digital Collections.
Sadly, there is no further information about the location of the ball on the card, and I have not been inspired to do a lengthy search. When the card was originally posted on Facebook, it was speculated that the ball was held by six local Masonic Lodges; I have no evidence one way or the other for that.
Fast Days in the young United States could be proclaimed anytime, but a springtime Fast Day was an ongoing tradition in many New England states in the nineteenth century. The day was officially religious in nature, and at least one Fast Day sermon from 1879, "The Future of New England", by noted minister Edward Everett Hale of the South Congregational Church. was later published and may be read here.
Not everyone's mind was solely focused on religion, however. The Pilot, a Boston-area Catholic newspaper, reported on March 22nd that the St. Mary's Young Men's Temperance Society, Bunker Hill District, would hold "an interesting exhibition of gymnastics on Fast Day" and on April 12th that members of St. Augustine's Lyceum had held a "Pedestrian Contest", a series of footraces, that day. In 1894, Massachusetts, perhaps bowing to the inevitable, converted Fast Day into Patriot's Day (April 19th), commemorating several battles -- most famously, those of Lexington and Concord.
But in the meantime, back in 1879, they were dancing on Fast Eve! The program is a typical New England one of the period, consisting overwhelmingly of quadrilles and contras, with a few couple dances interspersed.
The ball opened with a Grand March, followed by the "Circle", probably the Sicilian Circle (as discussed briefly here), followed by two quadrille/contra sets with a trio of couple dances interspersed, intermission, more couple dances, and a final set of quadrilles and contras.
Among the quadrilles were a Lancers (Lanciers) and a Caledonians, two of the most popular sets of the nineteenth century. There were also unspecified polka, waltz, and schottische quadrilles, many different variants of which were published in the later nineteenth century. The contras included the aforementioned Roy's Wife, the classics Chorus Jig and Hull's Victory, and Tempest, which involved an unusual formation with couples facing across the set and promenading four abreast down the middle. A full discussion of Tempest may be found here. The ball concluded with Portland Fancy, which was something between a quadrille and a contra, or perhaps both, depending on the description.
The couple dances, in two sets included the expected polka, schottische, and waltz, but the real reason I wanted the card was for the more unusual ones: Danish (a short sequence), Zulma (a polka variant), Esmeralda (polka/galop), and Redowa (a three-four dance akin to waltz and mazurka). All four appeared fairly regularly in dance manuals from the middle of the nineteenth century onward, but their appearances on dance cards are considerably more rare. The placement and format of the couple dances on the card is interesting: in groups of three or four dances, between numbered sets, and with neither numbers nor places to write in the names of partners. This way of listing couple dances is not uncommon on dance cards of this era, and while I have no direct information about the reason, my guess would be that there were a fairly limited number of people dancing those dances and that they were not considered the principle focus of the ball, which was clearly the set dances.
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