Susan de Guardiola, Social Dance Historian
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Since early 19th century (“Regency”) dance is one of my particular specialties, I get many questions that boil down to either “what did Jane Austen dance?” or “did Jane Austen dance _____?” So let’s see what I can do for a general answer.
I can divide things loosely into three categories: what we know she danced, what she might have danced, and what she didn’t dance.
Ever so often I come across the oddest little novelties. The Rock’n’Cha is a conga-line type dance which was discussed in the January, 1958 issue of Dance Magazine. The cha-cha was first introduced in the 1950s, and it seems to have spawned some weird group variants (Cha-Cha Choo-Choo Caboose, anyone?) The notes for this dance were sent to the magazine by Chicago resident Louise Ege, who attributed them to Grace Hansen, Dance Coordinator and Professional Consultant for the Chicago YMCA and head of the ballroom committee of the Chicago National Associate of Dance Masters. Mrs. Ege claimed that Chicago teens loved the dance, with it even having “replaced the Bunny Hop in their affections.” I’m not sure what this says about either the taste of Chicago teens in early 1958 or the accuracy of Mrs. Ege’s observations of contemporary teen culture.
The most popular “animal dances” of the early 1900s appear to have been the Turkey Trot and Grizzly Bear. But the F. Leslie Clendenen’s compilation manual Dance Mad (St. Louis, 1914) offers a pair of one-step variations attributed to London dance teacher Walter Humphrey, who apparently found inspiration in the hopping of Australian marsupials. I’ve never found these variations in any other source, so it’s not clear to me how widespread they ever were. I would also have placed them a bit earlier, maybe 1908-1910, as by 1914 the animal dance fad was already well past and the smoother, more elegant style of Vernon and Irene Castle was making the one-step acceptable in respectable ballrooms. It’s possible that Mr. Humphrey and/or English dancers in general had not quite caught up with the latest American dance fads, or that Clendenen was not as fussy in compiling his book as its subtitle, “The Dances of the Day,” suggests.
For both variations, the dancers both face line of dance. It’s not clear whether they should retain joined hands in front or open up fully. I find the latter more graceful, but how much of a priority grace should be while hopping around a ballroom imitating a marsupial is debatable. Those wishing to study wallaby technique in detail may consult this National Geographic video this video of a wallaby hopping across the Sydney Harbour Bridge. (Edited 11/19/2025 to replace vanished video with a new one.)
On the lighter side of dance research…
There’s plenty of silliness in historical dance manuals, ranging from mythological origins of dancing in general to apocryphal stories about the origins of particular dances. But none of that makes me laugh quite so much as a couple of lines in Foulsham’s Modern Dancing, by Maxwell Stewart, published in London around 1925 and ambitiously subtitled “A guide to everything the dancer old and young, skilled and unskilled, wants to know.” That was rather optimistic of Stewart; this particular dancer wishes he had included a lot more detail about some of the moves he described. But the following has got to be one of the most risible lines I’ve ever found in a dance manual.
The simplest description of the racket waltz is that it is the step of the one-slide racket converted to waltz time, with the extra beat of music per measure added to the initial slide. Edna Witherspoon, in The Perfect Art of Modern Dancing (1894), gives it the alternate title “The Society” and notes that “if thoughtlessly executed, it is a most ungraceful and unattractive dance.” Allen Dodworth, in Dancing and its Relation to Education and Social Life (1885), adds that “The racket, in this accent, is that unfortunate dance known as the “Society,” and is the medium through which not a few show an entire absence of good taste in motion.” Honestly, it’s not that bad! It does not seem to have been quite as popular or well-known as the galop–time rackets I described earlier this summer, but it is an easy dance that works well to brisk waltz music.
Line dances don’t really get all that difficult, but there are a few longer ones with more complicated and less repetitive step sequences. One of these is the Line Hustle. These instructions are taken from Carter Lovisone’s The Disco Hustle (1979) and claim to be “the original form used as the basis for all variations of the Line Hustle.” I would take this claim with a grain of salt, since Lovisone’s book came out several years after the dance’s first wave of popularity in the mid-1970s.
This version of the Line Hustle is a fifty-two beat dance. My favorite music for it is Van McCoy’s 1975 hit, “The Hustle,” a snippet of which is included below:
The song is available on several different compilations, including The Hustle & The Best Of Van McCoy
Among the moves described by Vernon and Irene Castle in their Victor Records for Dancing mini-manual (1914) are a trio of moves that are essentially box steps or fragments thereof: a so-called cortez (a.k.a. sentado or syncopated step), a double cortez, and a left-turning waltz. The rhythm is specified as QQS: three steps and hold. These make a nice set of variations to throw into basic walking-trotting sequences and two-step sequences when dancing a 1910s-style foxtrot.
Over a year ago I discussed some of the earliest walking and trotting patterns found in the earliest sources describing the foxtrot. Among other moves, I touched on the gliding series of chassé steps given in the two sequences in F. L. Clendenen’s Dance Mad (St. Louis, 1914). The sideways glides were done in quick-quick rhythm for each slide-close. The two sequences were:
1. SS-SS-QQQQ-QQQQ twice, followed by four glides (step-closes) QQQQ-QQQQ
2. SS-QQQQ, followed by four glides QQQQ-QQQQ.
The man turns his left side toward the line of dance and the dancers execute a series of four sideways “step-closes” (QQ) along the line of dance. No turn is involved; the first part of the sequence (walking and trotting) restarts on the first foot moving along the line of dance as usual.
Reading this morning’s headlines about events in Alaska, it seems the moment to post this little French sequence dance, which can also be used to vary an early twentieth-century two-step. I’ve found this sequence in only one source: La Danse, by [George] Washington Lopp, published in Paris in 1903 as part of a two-book compendium. The smaller part (forty-five pages to the two hundred-plus of La Danse) of the compendium is a brief manual of etiquette and costume written by J. Chéron.
Mr. Lopp seems to have been an interesting character, an American expatriate and former Chicago dancing master whose partnership in a Parisian musical conservatory went extremely sour, resulting in lawsuits, lockouts, and a “very tempestuous scene” with one of the patronesses of the conservatory, who insisted on performing a concerto she had composed. Apparently the piece was so dreadful that the audience
was unable…to endure the entire infliction, and most of those present incontinently left after the first movement had been half finished.
Combining the one-slide rackets and three-slide rackets previously described creates an interestingly varied dance which is referred to by the prominent late-nineteenth-century dancing master Melvin B. Gilbert simply as the Racket, with no further descriptor. The unadorned term is used by other writers to refer to several different variations in both 2/4 and 3/4 time, however, leaving us with unwieldy labels such as Allen Dodworth’s “Alternating the One Slide and Three Slide to Galop.”
Whatever one may call it, the sequence is not difficult once both the one-slide and three-slide rackets have been mastered. Conceptually, one simply alternates two bars of one with two bars of the other to build an eight-bar sequence. For the one-slide racket, two bars will be moving to the left and right (in whichever order); for the three-slide racket, two bars means moving either to the left or to the right. So sequences may be built as follows: