Capering & Kickery

Aunt Nellie's Diary, 1849

Louisa May Alcott is one of those authors I enjoyed much more as a child, when the more treacly moralizing elements of her most popular books flew right over my head.  As an adult, I find it harder to tolerate, an opinion that Alcott evidently shared.  So I'd only ever revisited one of them -- Little Women, of course -- for its dance references.  But I was nonetheless quite intrigued to read last month that a newly-discovered early story fragment by Alcott, dated 1849, when she was only seventeen, and containing a masquerade ball scene, would be published in the next issue of Strand Magazine, dated February-May 2020 but being released, no doubt for pandemic-related reasons, in late June.  I promptly ordered a copy, which finally turned up in the mail this week.  

As noted, Aunt Nellie's Diary is only a fragment, around nine thousand words, and ending, literally, in mid-sentence: "I begged and prayed she would..."  The story is set up fully, however, and the general direction is clear: the orphaned Annie and her friend Isabel come to stay with Annie's Aunt Nellie, along with the handsome Edward, who is recovering from illness.  Annie is gentle and innocent; Isabel is both colder and more flirtatious.  Edward is too good to be true.  Isabel is interested in Edward, but he is clearly smitten by Annie. It seems obvious that they would have ended up together, while Isabel likely would have repented of her less-than-perfect ways and wound up with the fiancé she had jilted before the story began, who reappears dramatically at the masquerade ball just before the fragment ends.  This is very like far too much of the other nineteenth-century women's fiction I periodically wade through looking for dance references, though even at seventeen, Alcott is a noticeably better writer than most.

Diary of a Journey to England, 1761-1762

On November 22, 1902, The New York Times announced the discovery, translation, and publication of the travel journal kept by Count Frederick Kielmansegge on his visit to England in 1761-1762 for the coronation of George III.  The diary was discovered and translated by his great-granddaughter-in-law Philippa, then-Countess Kielmansegg (the spelling of the family name varied over the years).  The opening paragraph of the article may be seen at left; click to enlarge.  The complete article may be found online in The New York Times Archives.

Friedrich Graf von Kielmansegge (1728-1800), a lawyer and administrative official, and his brother Karl Rudolf August von Kielmansegge (1731-1810) were part of a prominent Hanoverian family (the Holstein/Hannover Kielmansegges) and second cousins once removed of George III through their grandmother, who was the illegitimate half-sister of George I, the first Hanoverian king of England.  Their family name variously spelled as Kielmansegg, Kielmansegge, and Kielmannsegge, but since the diary was published in English using the spelling "Kielmansegge", I'll keep to that version here.

The coronation was the brothers' excuse to travel, but Kielmansegge was an enthusiastic tourist and roamed all over England taking in the sights, which he described at great length.  He also socialized extensively and attended balls given by royalty and nobility in London as well as in other towns he visited.  The diary is a fascinating document in general, well worth reading, but the major attraction for the dance historian is that it contains useful information about the practice of dance in England in the mid-eighteenth century.  I have not read the original, which does not seem to be available to the public; I am dependent upon the English translation.  But I see no reason for the Countess to have edited or bowdlerized the dance information and therefore regard it as reasonably reliable.

Love's Provocations, 1855

Love's Provocations; being Extracts taken in the most Unmanly and Unmannerly Manner from the Diary of Miss Polly C-- is a comic novel published in 1855 by an English clergyman writing under a pseudonym (cover image at left; click to enlarge).  After some of the painfully earnest and unintentionally hilarious (to a modern reader) Victorian novels I've read for dance research, it's a relief to read one that was actually intended to be funny.  As a bonus, it also has more interesting and valuable dance information than most of the more serious ones!

Cuthbert M. Bede was the pen name of Edward Bradley (1827-1889).  He wrote a number of novels and short pieces for many different publications (notably, The Illustrated London News and Punch) as well as constructing acrostic puzzles.  Biographical information and more about his writing career may be found on his Wikipedia page, but The Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature (1940) provides a much more complete bibliography of his books and confirms the 1855 publication date for Love's Provocations.  

The novel is the story of the romantic tribulations of "Polly", who is madly in love with one Walter Vernon, much to the dismay of her protective parents and her brother Fred, who consider him -- accurately -- to be a scoundrel.  The title of the book is a play on The provocations of Madame Palissy by Anne Manning (1807-1879), which is explicitly referenced by Polly as the inspiration for her journal.  She claims not to have read it; I skimmed it, and there doesn't seem to be any thematic connection.  Madame Palissy's provocations were rather more serious, so the appropriation of the term by Polly is just more evidence of her general silliness.

Polly is abetted in her clandestine love affair by her friend Madge, whose brother Joseph is also in love with Polly.  She is also being courted by an older friend of her father's.  Walter, meanwhile is also flirting heavily with the Madder Brown sisters, Rose and Hyacinth.  "Rose Madder Brown" is a joking reference to the red dye rose madder, one of Bradley's many plays on words.  Others include "a castle in Ayrshire" (castles in the air) for Walter's imaginary wealthy family, and the dancing master "Signor Pussigutti", a reference to catgut, from which violin strings were made.  Dancing masters were often violinists as well, and played for their own dance classes.  The plot is about what you'd expect: Polly plays her suitors against each other and generally acts like a shallow and narcissistic idiot.  She ends up planning to elope with Walter, only to be thwarted by her devoted family.  It's full of over-the-top, buoyantly fake, melodrama:

I saw the gentlemen interfere, and take Mr. Joseph away ; and I thought that I could do no less than go into hysterics. So I sank on the couch, and began to go into them ; but Walter, instead of at once coming to support me through them (as naturally I intended him to do), left me in the most provoking manner, and went out of the conservatory; to attend to his own nose, I suppose. I then, of course, came-to very quickly...

This was after a confrontation between suitors disintegrated into the very drunk Joseph hurling oranges at Walter.  Other amusing scenes involve Walter's wig: long, poetic black locks with which he is covering -- horrors! -- bright red hair, and a moment in a boat when, after being miraculously saved from the incoming tide, Walter and Polly retreat to opposite ends of the boat to be comprehensively seasick.

Interestingly, considering it was written by a clergyman, after Polly is saved from Walter and abandoned by her other suitors for her fickleness, there is no scene of religious repentance and subsequent happy ending, nor does she waste away and die.  She just remains, for the nonce, unmarried and, apparently, unrepentant.

On to the dance material.

The Natural History of the Ballet Girl, 1847

The Natural History of the Ballet Girl (London, 1847) is one of a series of "Social Zoology" books written by the humorist Albert Smith, author of The Physiology of Evening Parties, which was quoted from in my earlier post about an article on the utility of the polka in flirtation.  I was expecting this to be some sort of satire, but though it is often witty, it actually seems to be a fairly realistic look at the life of a ballet girl in the London theatre in the mid-nineteenth century.  As Smith stated in the Preface: 

Should any Gent imagine, from the title of this little book...that there is anything in it which might, with propriety, exclude it from the drawing-room table -- added to the commonly-circulated notions of the class we are about to write of -- then is that Gent mistaken...

In other words, there are no naughty opera dancers here, just respectable, hard-working dancers.  Smith makes rather a point of this in a late chapter in which he describes the hardworking ballet girl at home with her iron preparing her gown (which she has likely made herself) for a ball:

If you were to take her by surprise on the morning of a ball, you would find her lodgings converted into a perfect miniature laundry, and you would possibly see her "getting up" the dress in which, at night, she intends to be the belle of belles.  And the chances are the has made it herself...

Smith lived and studied in Paris, so his frequent comparisons of London ballet girls to hard-working Parisian grisettes might be drawn from his own experiences as a student there.

The Morrisons, 1863

I came across Margaret Hosmer's novel, The Morrisons: a story of domestic life (1863), in my endless quest for dance references in nineteenth-century fiction.  Almost four hundred pages later, I have a few new citations, the highlight of which is a mention of two women waltzing together, and a growing distaste for storylines that treat dying of consumption (tuberculosis) as a character-building experience.

According to Deidre Johnson's useful website 19th-Century Girls' Series, which catalogues said series and their authors, only basic biographical facts about Hosmer's life are known: she was born Margaret Kerr in 1830, raised in Philadelphia, married Granville Hosmer and had at least one child, bounced back and forth between Philadelphia and California several times, worked in schools, published novels and short fiction for both children and adults, and died in 1897.  The website's full biographical listing for her, from which these details are taken, may be found here.  I am not enough of a fan of her writing to have done any further research on her life.

The Morrisons was Hosmer's first novel.  It is generally listed as having been published in 1863 while she was living in Philadelphia.  I didn't look hard for an 1863 edition; the one I read was from 1864.  An 1868 edition is available online as well.  The setting is vague, both in place and time.  The city where the Morrisons live is somewhere between New York and the South.  Given the author's roots, I suppose it to be Philadelphia; the neighborhood names (West Park, Oak Hill) would make sense for that city.  There is no mention of the Civil War.  Characters visit "the South" without incident and temporarily-hired black servants make brief appearances.  The dresses are not described in detail, other than being bulky enough to make loading the women into carriages a chore.  My best guess is that it is meant to take place in the late 1850s.

The Morrisons are an Irish-American family, a widowed mother with two daughters, a son, and an elderly uncle, all living on the charity of the mother's relatively wealthy niece, Bess Saunders, whom all expect to marry the son and thus solidify their position.  It's a twisted sort of Cinderella story, since the Morrisons themselves are, for the most part, lazy spendthrifts, while the saintly Bess not only supports them (to the point of mortgaging her house and selling her jewelry) but also does all the housework as well.  It's clear from the novel that the Morrisons are not the best of society, but Bess, heiress of her successful father, is wealthy enough that they have servants and need not work for a living.  The uncle has been in business and traveled extensively, but lost most of his money and now lives modestly with his family. 

I suspect that the family being explicitly Irish would have signaled much more strongly to the nineteenth-century reader than it does to me, but the idea that most of the Morrisons are stereotypically charming and somewhat disreputable wastrels comes through pretty clearly.

Gone with the Wind (novel), 1936

I was a young teenager and knew exactly nothing about historical dance when I first read Margaret Mitchell's famous novel Gone with the Wind (1936) several decades ago.  Rereading it recently, I was almost too distracted by the nauseating racism and the ridiculously sanitized portrayal of slavery to pay attention to the dancing.  

Many words have been written about how problematic Gone with the Wind is from a historical perspective, and I won't rehash those issues here.  But I do want to talk about the dancing, which is surprisingly accurate for a novel coming out of an era when dance history as a discipline was in its infancy.  This commentary applies only to the novel; I haven't seen the movie in decades either, though I will try to rewatch it sometime soon and see what I think of the dancing on film.  

I haven't done a lot of reading on Mitchell, but even the basic information available online reveals a few pertinent details about her life.  She was a debutante in Atlanta in the 1920s, and apparently quite a flirt.  She is said to have performed the notorious Apache dance at a 1921 ball, including a kiss with her partner, thoroughly shocking Atlanta society.  (Young, Elizabeth. Disarming the Nation: women's writing and the American Civil War. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999. p. 243.)

As a child, she had access to firsthand accounts from relatives of the years of the Civil War and the following Reconstruction era, and for her few years in her twenties she was a journalist, writing feature stories for The Atlanta Journal.  These experiences could have given her the knowledge and research skills to write accurately about the dancing of the mid-nineteenth century, which is not always the case in historical fiction.

And, to my surprise and pleasure, the dancing in Gone with the Wind is actually within the bounds of historical possibility for the 1860s and 1870s.  In this post, I'll go through the significant dance references in the novel.  

All quotations are from the online edition at the University of Adelaide (Australia), which has no page numbering.  I'll give chapter references, and the exact quotes can be found by searching the text.

"Pioneer dance" in Iowa

The Lyon Campaign in Missouri: Being a History of the First Iowa Infantry was written by Eugene F. Ware as a memoir primarily of his three months of military service in 1861 during the early days of the American Civil War, though the first several chapters cover life in Iowa in the preceding decades.  It was published in 1907, and while parts of it were based on Ware's journals, I believe the discussion of dance found in one chapter to be more what Ware remembered in 1907 than a contemporaneous account.  I don't regard it as reliable documentation for details of dance from 1861, but I feel reasonably confident that the broad strokes are accurate.

Before going into what Ware had to say, let me give a little background.  

The 1st Iowa Infantry operated for about three months, from mid-May to mid-August, 1861, and fought in Missouri, including the Battle of Wilson's Creek, under the command of General Nathaniel Lyon.  Before that, however, during the mustering and training, Ware and his fellow soldiers had access to civilian pursuits, and Ware was invited to a ball.

In 1861, Iowa was a frontier state, right at the border where states gave way to territories.  This is very obvious on the map below (click to enlarge) of the United States at the beginning of the Civil War (source: Maps, Etc.).  Iowa is right in the middle, where pink (Union states) meets orange (territories).

Ware called the dances he discussed "pioneer dances", which reflected this aspect of Iowa's status. 

German immigration also figures prominently in Ware's recounting.  That's a huge topic (covered in some detail here), but the most critical point is that in the 1840s and 1850s, almost 1.5 million Germans immigrated to the USA (see the chart here) and became a significant part of the expanding cities and settlements of the northern USA from Pennsylvania westward.  Naturally, they brought their culture, including dance and music, with them.

Journal of a Residence in America, 1835

Finding the mention of dancing a Kentucky Reel in the actress Fanny Kemble's first memoir, Journal of a residence in America (Paris, 1835), inspired me to do a careful reading of the entire book to look for other dance references.  

American dance manuals for the 1820s and 1830s are relatively scarce, and sources like diaries and letters are in any case superior since they describe what was actually done, rather than what dancing masters wanted done.  Kemble's memoir, based on the daily journal she kept during her travels, adds an extra dimension.  As an Englishwoman raised in France, she can comment not only on what she danced in America during her visit but also on how it differed from practices on the other side of the Atlantic.  The Journal covers 1832-1833, and it was published only a few years later, so it is less subject to the vagaries of long-term memory than some of her later memoirs.

Although the Journal is more than three hundred pages in print, reading it turned out to be no chore.  Kemble was an excellent writer, despite using all the typical verbal curlicues of the nineteenth century, and her observations on American society and her experiences as a traveling actress are often keenly interesting.  Her blow-by-blow description of a disastrous death scene in a performance of Romeo and Juliet is one of the funniest theatrical anecdotes I've ever read, and her comments on American politics are still relevant today.  Her observations about the divisions in the nation and the likelihood of war between the north and south were surprisingly prescient.  I highly recommend the Journal as entertaining reading for anyone interested in theatrical history or in American society in the early 1830s.  The entire Journal in one volume is online at the Internet Archive.

Here, however, I am going to concentrate on Kemble's references to dance.

Among the People of British Columbia, 1903

Canadian author Frances Elizabeth Herring (1851-1916) was born in England and immigrated to British Columbia in 1874.  In addition to publishing six novels, she was also at various points a teacher and journalist, as well as an active community volunteer and the mother of eight children.  A detailed biography, from which this information is drawn, may be found online at the Dictionary of Canadian Biography website.  A blog devoted to her and her descendants provides some interesting further reading here.  I nicked the photo at left, taken in the 1870s, from one of their posts.  

I'm not wildly interested in Canadian colonial history or Frances Herring herself, but I did come across Herring's second novel, Among the People of British Columbia: Red, White, Yellow, and Brown, published in London in 1903, while digging around for dance references in literature.  The entire novel is available on Google Books.  Herring's novels focused primarily on characters like herself, white women colonists in far western Canada.  While they are loaded with racist stereotypes and language which make for unpleasant reading today, they are still an interesting window into the customs of a British colonial population in the early twentieth century.  

As usual, I'm going to talk only about the dance scenes in this novel.  More specifically, since the dances of Native Americans/First Nations are far outside my area of study, I'm going to focus on how she depicts the dances of the colonists.  As she says in the preface, "The social life speaks for itself, and is as we live it now."  The now in question appears to be around 1900; the novel ends with a marriage performed in the August of that year.  

I can't say much about the plot, because it's pretty thin: Agnes and Phil are in love.  Their marriage and anticipated departure for San Francisco end the book.  Among the People of British Columbia is much less a traditional novel than a collection of vignettes, based in part on Herring's own experiences.  I imagine her books were popular more for this travel-stories aspect than for their dramatic plotting. 

Among the People of British Columbia features two balls, a Caledonian Ball and a Children's Ball, and some informal dancing here and there.  There's not a lot of dance information overall, but there are a few interesting tidbits.

A Ballroom Repentance, 1882

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.

Book Review: Twirling Jennies

I was recently given a copy of this brand-new book on the social dance history of Lowell, Massachusetts, as a gift, perfectly timed for a spate of long-distance travel.  Twirling Jennies: A History of Social Dance (and other mischief) in the City of Spindles 1820-1920 (Takoma Park, MD: Misenchanted Press, September 2015) was written by dancer-researcher Ruth Evans, with her husband Charles Worsley as co-researcher.  I've met the two of them a few times at balls and festivals; they're beautiful dancers and lovely people.  I'd seen the book's promotional website and was quite excited to get to read it.  

I should note that this was a gift from a family member, who bought it in the normal way, rather than a free review copy.

In general, Twirling Jennies well repaid my anticipation.  It is not a book of dance reconstructions, though there are discussions of steps and figures here and there, or an academic work.  It is popular history with more technical detail than average that puts social dance in context over the course of a century in a specific community.  And it does a splendid job of it.  Evans takes you through the history of Lowell from its founding and effectively places its famous mill girls and other inhabitants into the social and physical settings in which they danced.  Some chapters focus on particular types of dancing while others move outward to discuss the city's ballrooms, trolley parks, and factories and their pertinence to dancing.  A chapter on the city's old dance halls, now (alas!) mostly vanished or converted to other uses, could be used as a guide for an interesting walking tour of Lowell.  

Misery in perspective, 1806

It's always helpful to put one's problems in perspective.  It's downright amusing to watch a writer of 1806 put the minor woes of people of early-nineteenth-century England in perspective. 

James Bereford devotes an entire book to this theme in The Miseries of Human Life, a satirical work that still holds up rather well today. 

To quote the review which appeared in the Supplement to La Belle Assemblée, or, Bell's Court and Fashionable Magazine, for the Year 1806:

It is a raillery of those minor miseries, those petty disappointments, those minute obstructions of comfort which constitute the character of life, and occasion many to imagine themselves as superlatively miserable as those who are suffering under objects of more dignity and magnitude.

Perspective.  Right.

Book Review: A Dance Through Time

I received a copy of Jeremy Barlow's A Dance Through Time: Images of Western Social Dancing from the Middle Ages to Modern Times (Bodleian Library, 2012) as a Christmas gift from a friend.  I know (of) Barlow primarily through his excellent recordings of sixteenth and seventeenth century dance music as the leader of the Broadside Band.  I've read only a few of his many articles and books, but I trust his scholarship and consider my copy of his edited edition of the music from the eighteen editions of Volume I of Playford's The Dancing Master, The Complete Country Dance Tunes from Playford's Dancing Master, 1651-c.1728, invaluable for working with Playford-published country dances. 

A Dance Through Time combines Barlow's interest in dance and music imagery with the collection of Oxford's Bodleian Library and Ashmolean Museum, with stunning results: a sturdily-bound trade paperback printed on heavy, glossy paper containing forty-nine full-color images of dance ranging from illuminatons from the margins of medieval manuscripts to photographs of twentieth-century ballroom dancers.  A number of them are completely new to me.  Barlow offers commentary throughout on the depiction of dance and points out intriguing similarities across the centuries in the representation of varying styles of dance and the social class of the participants. 

Unsurprisingly, given Barlow's expertise in early music, the book is much stronger on illustrations of medieval and Renaissance dance than on eighteenth and nineteenth century dance, but that makes it all the more useful -- I have far fewer images from the earlier eras.

The commentary is aimed at a general audience and, as it covers at least eight centuries of dance, necessarily only an overview of the topic, but I found it useful and interesting.  I do think Barlow occasionally goes a bit too far in regarding images as depicting a particular dance rather than being symbolic illustrations of dance in general, but he is clear enough about when he is speculating.

The one complaint I have with the presentation of the images is that some of the larger ones are printed across two facing pages, meaning that the centers of the images are partly lost by the way the pages are bound.  I would have happily settled for smaller reproductions that I could see all of.  Happily, his index of illustrations includes the locations of the originals, so tracking them down would be easy enough.  And the index offers intriguing hints of the riches the Bodleian has to offer.

I highly recommend A Dance Through Time both for dance researchers and for anyone who enjoys historical dance. 

Shop for yourself:

 

Book Review: Vernon and Irene Castle's Ragtime Revolution

I recently enjoyed reading Vernon and Irene Castle's Ragtime Revolution.  This is not the fantasy-romance of the 1939 Astaire & Rogers film, The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle, nor does it spend as much time on their actual dance accomplishments as I would have liked.  The author is a silent film aficionado, and the book focuses more on the Castles as celebrities and stars of theater and film than it does on the specifics of their influence on dancing.  (She devotes a fifteen-page appendix to a filmography, but dances are not even listed by name in the index!)  That said, it adds a great deal of interesting background and thoroughly debunks the entire misty romantic myth of the Castles in favor of a more realistic portrait of their marriage as affectionate but later primarily a business relationship.  From hints that Vernon might have been bisexual to Irene's affairs to their impending divorce at the time of Vernon's death (so that he could marry another woman), this book carefully puts back in as much as can be reconstructed of what Irene Castle left out of her own books, My Husband (1919) and Castles in the Air (1958).  Those interested in the off-the-dance-floor escapades and accomplishments of the Castles and their associates will find it absolutely fascinating.