Capering & Kickery

Susan de Guardiola, Social Dance Historian

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Author: Susan de Guardiola

  • The Way it Ended, 1855

    I came across this story in a California newspaper, The Weekly Placer Herald, and didn't find it particularly believable.  But it was not original to the Herald; the attribution at the end is to the Albany Dutchman, which seems to have been more of a weekly humor publication than a newspaper.  Per the Library of Congress's Chronicling America website, it described itself  in 1849 as "A weekly newspaper-devoted to fun, literature, good advice, women and other luxuries."  I don't have any way to check the attribution at the moment, as the Albany Dutchman doesn't seem to be online, but that fits with my impression that this is a tall tale, not an actual incident.  It nonetheless makes a light-hearted ending to my month of masquerades!

    In the story, two friends, Bob and Frank, lie to Bob's wife about his having to help a sick uncle.  In reality, they are sneaking off to a masquerade ball.  While Bob is a married man, Frank is "a roue, and as a matter of course is a great favorite with the ladies—roues always are." 

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  • A Louisville Masquerade, 1843

    Here’s a lively account of a jolly and slightly drunken masquerade held in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1843.  This account has a little of everything: costumes, bad puns, a bit about the dances, and the effects of alcohol on the revelers.  It’s too long a report to comment on every bit of it, but the entire thing is transcribed at the bottom of this post.

    The report starts out with a lot of philosophy about the joys of masquerades, but the first really useful bit is that as in A Few Friends, the unmasking is done at supper-time, which was probably around midnight:

    The unmasking at the supper table is often a great source of laughter and surprise, when it discovers the faces of numerous acquaintances who have been playing off their wit and raillery against each other all the evening, under their various disguises. 

    All sorts of people attended masquerades, which is part of what made them scandalous.  In Kentucky, at least, this mixing was not to be feared, though I suspect the upper classes might have differed on this point:

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  • Professor Webster’s Masquerade Party, 1876

    On March 18, 1876, the Morning Herald of Wilmington, Delaware, published a short blurb covering a recent “masquerade party” given by one Professor Webster at the Dancing Academy Hall.  Unusually, the newspaper coverage says nothing about the costumes other than that there were enough of them to “have exhausted a first class costumer’s establishment, and have taxed the ingenuity of an artist.”  Instead, we get an actual dance program, consisting entirely of quadrilles, Lanciers, and glide waltzes, and accompanied by names which might be masquerade costumes, though I’m not certain of that.

    Professor Webster was a long-time Wilmington dancing master – he was still teaching as late as June 4, 1899, when the Sunday Morning Star reported on the closing reception of his current series of dance classes (see about two-thirds of the way down the first column here.)

    Here’s the list of dances, in order.

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  • A Fancy Dress Party (from A Few Friends), 1864

    A Few Friends, by Korman Lynn, was serialized in nine parts in Godey's Lady's Book during the year 1864.  The serial doesn't have a lot of plot; it describes eight evenings of a group of friends gathering together to, for the most part, play parlor games.  It's great for anyone who wants to research mid-nineteenth century parlor games, which are described in elaborate detail, but the only section of any real interest to me is the final one, in which the friends gather for a fancy dress party.

    To pick up the story at this point, it is only necessary to know that the kind and generous Ben Stykes has been quietly pursuing the lively Mary Gliddon from the beginning of the story, though a certain Mr. Hedges, a young man from Liverpool, is also interested in her.

    Even a single part of the story is too long for me to transcribe here, but I'll quote the costume descriptions, some of which are detailed and unusual, and the resolution of the romance.

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  • Early Foxtrot: The Minuet Turn

    Keeping with the foxtrot theme, here's one more little sequence for foxtrot or one-step from Edna Stuart Lee's Thirty Fox Trot Steps (New York, 1916).  Despite its overt simplicity, it actually manages to present a minor reconstruction issue!  As for the name…well, to be perfectly honest, I see absolutely no connection here to the minuet, any more than I do with Newman's Minuet Tango.  There seems to have been some concept of "minuet" in the 1910s which I have completely failed to grasp.

    The gentleman's steps are given; the lady dances opposite.  The dancers begin in normal ballroom hold, the gentleman facing forward along line of dance and the lady backward.

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  • Early Foxtrot: The Pavlowa Extension

    For no reason other than habit, June is always foxtrot month for me, and despite the general shutdown of dance classes, I’m lucky enough to have a convenient partner at hand for experimentation with new variations.  So let’s look at yet another of the many step-sequences described in Edna Stuart Lee’s Thirty Fox Trot Steps (New York, 1916)!

    The Pavlowa Extension was, of course, named for the famous ballerina Anna Pavlowa (Pavlova), who toured America in the mid-1910s and dipped into social dance choreography with a music-composition contest resulting in a trio of dances published in The Ladies’ Home Journal in early 1915.  She (or her ghostwriter) and (supposedly) members of her troupe also offered opinions and suggestions about dancing the one-step, Boston, and foxtrot.  This variation, however, is not among those even indirectly associated with Pavlova.  It probably was merely named in her honor, or perhaps was inspired by a characteristic movement in her dancing.

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  • Mr. Palmer comes of age, Yarmouth, 1831

    Moving a bit forward in time, the coming of age ball of Mr. Samuel Palmer, junior, on Tuesday, March 1st, 1831, was accorded detailed coverage the following Saturday, March 5th, in The Norfolk Chronicle and Norwich Gazette.  The family seems to have been a prominent one, since they convinced then-Mayor Edmund Preston to lend them a hall and the whole town to deck itself out in celebration of their son's birthday.  And, of course, they were wealthy enough to throw a ball for several hundred guests.  Piecing together public records, I am reasonably certain that the birthday boy's full name was Samuel Thurtell Palmer (c1810-1850), whose parents were probably Samuel and Susanna (Thurtell?) Palmer.

    Most of the article was, as usual, devoted to lengthy lists of guests and their costumes, but there were some interesting tidbits here and there.  The transcriptions below include all of the article with the exception of the lists that just named the attendees and their outfits.

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  • Early Foxtrot: Quick Dips

    Ah, June, when one turns one's thoughts (and feet) to…weird little foxtrot variations! 

    This time around, let's look at a pair of steps, or rather step-sequences, from Edna Stuart Lee's Thirty Fox Trot Steps (New York, 1916) that both involve quick dips.  These are actually ever-so-slightly harder to do than the usually run of walks, trots, glides, and two-steps that make up a great deal of the 1910s foxtrot repertoire.  Lee noted that the first of these, The Coney Island Dip, is "very exhilarating and excellent exercise for the lungs."

    The gentleman's steps are given; the lady dances opposite.

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  • An Incident of Parisian Society, 1885

    …or, at least, a story about an incident.  I don’t have any way to prove that it actually occurred.  But true or not, the story illustrates something I’ve been noticing about fancy dress balls over the course of the last month.  The story was published in issue #40 (March, 1885) of The Nassau Literary Magazine, which was and is associated with Princeton University and is fully indexed online.  The author was John Cass (J. C.) Mathis, Princeton class of 1886, the author of twenty-eight pieces for the magazine from 1884 to 1886.  These appear to have included fiction, non-fiction, and poetry, so it’s hard to say from his publication record whether this story was memoir or fiction.  I lean toward thinking it was the latter, but even as fiction, it’s an interesting example of what was seen to be realistic at the time.

    The story was supposedly related to Mathis by a friend who had just returned from a tour of Europe.  While there, this nameless friend and become close to Victor, son of a prominent family.  It was ball season in Paris, between New Year’s and Lent, and Mathis’ friend was invited to a fancy dress ball at the home of Victor’s mother, Madam de Brissac.  Apparently masks were worn as well as costumes.  Details are given only of one: a lady in Spanish costume with whom Mathis’ friend was quite taken:

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  • A Fancy Dress Ball, Singapore, 1884

    Originally posted in substantially similar form on February 11, 2011, at Historical Fancy Dress.

    As can be seen from my other posts about fancy dress and masquerade balls, newspapers from the eighteenth century well into the twentieth often published lists of the costumes worn by the guests.  The lists were often provided in advance of the actual event, so it’s possible not all of the costumes worked out, as anyone who’s ever tried to finish a costume at the last minute before a ball will understand.

    The costumes were evidently more important than the dancing; while lists of outfits are routine in these writeups, full dance programs are rare and any information at all is not very common.  This apparently held true even halfway around the world.  The excerpts and costume lists below are from a fancy dress ball held by British expatriates in Singapore (!) in 1884.  The sole mention of dancing is the opening quadrille.

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Capering & Kickery

Susan de Guardiola, Social Dance Historian

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