And now for something a little bit different: not quite a ghost story, but a story of a dream of ghosts dancing "The Dream Ball" was published in Aunt Judy's Magazine (London), Volume IV, Issue III, in 1885, the last year of its run. The author was S. D. Spicer, about whom I know absolutely nothing.
"The Dream Ball" tells the story of the highly imaginative "Duchess" Paulet, a thirteen-year-old history buff who, on a birthday excursion, finds herself alone in the South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria and Albert Museum), where she eventually falls asleep leaning against a plaster replica of the Apprentice Pillar from Rosslyn Chapel in Scotland. In her dream, the carriages in the museum come to life and collect people from the paintings to take them to a ball held outside of time, where people from different centuries meet and dance together. The author bragged in a note at the end that all the paintings and objets referenced in the story could be found in the museum, and, indeed, the descriptions of some of them are detailed enough that it's possible to identify the specific works. I'm not going to attempt to do all of them, but I'll give a few quick examples.
In her dream, Duchess is first taken up in a carriage by the Irish actress Margaret "Peg" Woffington (1714-1760), who is carrying a bird and birdcage as in the famous portrait of her attributed to Jean-Baptiste van Loo (1684–1745), shown below in both its original form and in a print based on it that makes it easier to see the birdcage. I was amused by the internal consistency of requiring the props from a painting to go with the dream-person:
"Why, don't you see it belongs to her; the bird-cage is in the painting; she can't come without it."
More about Woffington may be found at the Twickenham Museum website. The print is at the Illinois Library Digital Collections.
Once in the carriage, she finds herself inadvertently sitting on (or through?) the Earl of Rochester, "in his gorgeous crimson, with rich white sleeves and glittering breast-plate." This one is easy: Sir Peter Lely's famous painting of John Wilmot, second Earl of Rochester, c1677, still in the collection of the V&A:
In the throng of royalty and nobility on their way into the hall she sees Marie Antoinette "as she [was] painted by Drouais at seventeen", Peter the Great "with a little black page", and the painter Thomas Gainsborough's "two young daughters in old-gold dresses", all from recognizable works. Gustav von Mardefeld's miniature of Peter the Great with a black page, c1720 and Marie Antoinette, Queen of France, in a court dress, by François-Hubert Drouais, c1773, are in the first row below, followed by Thomas Gainsborough's The Painter's Two Daughters, c1758.
There are quite a few more, but that's enough time digging around on the V&A website for now. On to the dancing, or at least some movement!
Duchess is at a bit of a loss at times:
"I have never been to a real grown-up party," said Duchess, humbly. "But then Marjie and I have been to children's dances..."
But she remembers her dancing lessons at least to the extent of making a curtsey that sounds much like the nineteenth-century style I described long ago, extending one foot forward:
Duchess made as pretty a bow as she could to this smiling face, sliding the right foot forward and bending her head with as good an imitation of Miss Birch as she knew how. (Miss Birch was Duchess's dancing mistress. This graceful lady, who often lamented her pupil's want of deportment, might have been gratified could she have seen Duchess at this moment.)
This style is presented as in contrast to:
the courtly bows of the old school, and such curtsies as are not seen nowadays
I'm no expert on earlier curtsies, but I believe in that ladies' curtsies of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries were simple pliés.
There is a lot of curtseying in this story:
Duchess wondered the people's legs didn't ache with so many curtsies.
Then we get to some actual dancing, as a six-year-old Edward VI asks Duchess to dance a minuet, which is still the sort of thing a child would learn in dancing class in the 1880s as a sort of recital piece, though not something much danced at actual balls:
The little monarch bowed in answer to Duchess's curtsey, and asked her,
"If she would dance a minuet with him?"
"I'm afraid I don't quite know it. We only began to learn it last week, your Majesty," she said.
"But if I ask you, you must dance it," said his Majesty; and Duchess felt this was correct , as she had heard her father say that "the Queen" cannot be refused anything. So Duchess danced with the little scarlet boy, and all the people now were moving in measured steps to a slow and stately minuet. She wished she had leisure to watch all the different groups, but when one is dancing with a king one must give all one's attention.
Then by way of contrast we get a bit of country dancing, which by the 1880s would have been extremely old-fashioned -- the author is certainly leaning into the "people from another time" concept -- but actually includes a workable "up the middle and down again" figure:
They all began moving towards the stairs, but just then the stately minuet music changed into the merry strains of an old English country dance, and the dancers came whirling down the gallery.
Duchess felt herself torn away into the gay crowd surging round her. Up the middle and down again. She thought, "This is best of all," as she went flying with the rest. Sometimes her feet never touched the floor at all--it was a kind of gliding, flying motion,--and they never tired in the mad career. She hardly knew how long it went on...
There are still more curtsies to a whole collection of actual duchesses:
"Slide the right foot, bend!" seemed to sound from the lips of her dancing-mistress, but it came instead from the Duchess of Marlborough.
After taking tea, she finds herself taken away by a Dresden shepherdess figurine to a more rural dance party downstairs, with "silvery flutes and reed pipes" played by an assortment of porcelain figures come to life. Here all we get is setting steps and the implications of a "mazy" dance. Perhaps these are reels, alternating setting and heys?
The ladies had shady hats and garlands of flowers, and they set to little partners with crooks in their hands to the tune the flutes kept playing. Little white sheep and woolly lambs danced, too, led by bands of beautiful Cupid children. And Duchess and the little girl began to set to each other as the rest were doing--a mazy dance of white, and pink, and blue.
At last daybreak comes, the ball ends, and all the people vanish. Duchess wakes up to find herself asleep at the foot of the (replica) Apprentice Pillar. The story ends with the line,
And was it only a dream?
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The complete story of "A Dream Ball" may be read online at Hathitrust. If anyone is motivated to identify more of the individual works from which the people in the story are drawn, please leave comments with links!
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