It’s always interesting to find a roughly contemporary version of a classic dance that is recognizably the same dance…but not quite the same.

I generally use Thomas Wilson’s version of “Sir Roger de Coverley” as my default version for the Regency era, mostly because it was the first one I encountered.  But it was not the only version of the standard figures in the Regency era, even leaving aside the standard country dances and the other whole-set dances (such as the very odd one I described here) set to the same tune.  The version published in Platts’s popular & original dances for the pianoforte, violin &c., with proper figures. Vol. 3, no. 25 (London, 1811) is almost precisely contemporary with the version Wilson was publishing from at least 1808 (in An Analysis of Country Dancing) onward.  The description has three notable differences, one of which makes me want to seriously reconsider how I teach and perform the dance.  I’ve transcribed the description at the bottom of this post for those who want to see for themselves.

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Wrapping up my little series on extended-Regency-era oddities, let’s talk about an unusual version of the English finishing dance, Sir Roger de Coverley!  This is one of the rare dances where tune and dance are so tightly associated that it’s reasonable to give the dance the tune name.

I discussed a typical Regency-era version of the classic Sir Roger de Coverley figure long, long ago.  Since then, I’ve accumulated a number of other versions of the figure with the same characteristic elements: opening figures performed on the long diagonals followed by whole-set figures that end with the original top couple progressed to the bottom.  I’ve written up a couple of later nineteenth century versions here and here.

Now, this is not to say that there were never any other, more typical, country dance figures set to the “Roger de Coverley” tune.  In its earliest appearance with dance figures in the ninth edition of Playford’s The Dancing Master, published in 1695, it is printed with a normal progressive figure, completely unrelated to the later dance.  One hundred and thirty years after that, a different figure, very generic-Regency, was published with it in Analysis of the London Ball-Room (printed for Thomas Tegg, London, 1825).  Never underestimate the willingness of music publishers and dancers, to recycle a tune.

But there’s one set of figures I’ve found printed with “Sir Roger de Coverley” which is a real oddity:

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Reading onward in Thomas Fessenden’s Original Poems (1806), what should turn up but another poem about dance, even lengthier and more detailed than “Horace Surpassed”!  “The Rustick Revel” is less impressive as a poem, being made up entirely of rhyming couplets of utterly regular rhythm, but it’s even thicker with dance references.  As Nathaniel Hawthorne said in his biographical sketch of Fessenden:

He had caught the rare art of sketching familiar manners, and of throwing into verse the very spirit of society as it existed around him; and he had imbued each line with a peculiar yet perfectly natural and homely humor.

Hawthorne was referring to a different poem, but it could easily serve for this one as well.  Among the highlights are the very calculated invitation list, the squire calling a dance, people messing up the figures, and trying to get out of paying the bill.

Once again, I’ll give the entire poem in bold with my own commentary interspersed in italics.  Fessenden’s own footnotes have been moved to the end.

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“Horace Surpassed” (lengthily subtitled “or, a beautiful description of a New England Country-Dance”) was published by the American author Thomas Green Fessenden (left) in his 1806 collection, Original Poems.  Fessenden (1771-1837) was, according to the biographical notes here, a lawyer, poet, farmer, journalist, newspaper editor, and member of the Massachusetts legislature.  He was born in Massachusetts, educated at Dartmouth, and spent most of his life in New England.  His original fame as a poet grew from the 1803 work “Terrible Tractoration”, a satire about physicians who refused to adopt a quack medical device.  (Yes, really!)

In his spare time, Fessenden evidently liked country (contra) dancing, and his poem is a cheerful look at the characters of rural New England society: agile Willy Wagnimble, clumsy Charles Clumfoot, graceful Angelina, etc.  The “New England Country-Dance” in the subtitle should be understood as referring to a social evening, not to an actual country-dance.

A rather catty review quoted the poem at length

not because it is superiour to the rest, but as a fair specimen of the work, and it describes an amusement which is “all the rage.”
 — The Monthly anthology, and Boston review. (July, 1806)                     

Fessenden topped his poem with a quote from Horace’s Odes.  “Iam satis terris nivis atque dirae” (“Enough of snow and hail at last”) is the opening line of “To Augustus, The Deliverer and Hope of the State” (1.2).  This particular Ode concerns the disastrous overflowing of the Tiber, possibly as a punishment of the gods for the ill deeds of Rome (notably, the assassination of Julius Caesar), with Augustus as its hoped-for saviour. An 1882 translation of the Ode may be found here.  I must confess that I cannot detect any thematic connection between it and Fessenden’s poem, so I’ll chalk it up to Fessenden’s ego and desire to be recognized as a poet.

The full original text with my best approximation of the formatting is in bold below, with a few comments of my own interspersed in italics.  In the absence of page breaks, the footnotes have been moved to the end.

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One of the critical elements of serious dance history is cross-checking what the dancing masters says in dance manuals against the evidence we have — if any — of what people actually did.  Those two things aren’t always the same.  Dancing masters generally explain what people ought to be doing, sometimes interspersed with lengthy complaints about what people are doing instead.  Both rules and complaints are useful guides, depending on whether one wants to strive to dance well and politely by period standards, or dance badly and rudely, as no doubt happened plenty in practice.

But the very best evidence comes from the letters and diaries of people who actually lived in the relevant era.  Here’s a great example of how a letter supports something that dancing masters wrote about in the Regency era: people of the same gender dancing together.

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Going beyond simple rudeness in the ballroom, here’s a wonderful account of a French-American culture clash turned violent at a ball in New Orleans on January 23, 1804.  Aside from showing what people of that era would fight over and how hair-trigger tempers were in New Orleans in particular at that time, it also usefully documents some ballroom dance practices of the era.  Slowly piecing together such tidbits eventually allows me to draw larger conclusions.

I’m not going to explain the whole background of the Louisiana Purchase, which transferred an enormous swathe of North America from French to American control in 1803, but it is worth noting that the formal transfer of New Orleans itself took place on December 20, 1803, only a month or so before the incident described.  There is a suggestion earlier in the article that feelings were running high among the French in the wake of (perceived?) American disrespect during the replacement of the French flag with the American one.  There had already been a “slight misunderstanding” at a previous assembly on January 6th.  The fight on the 23rd is a small example of the sort of cultural conflicts that would be a problem in New Orleans society for decades afterward.

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I’ve recently been reminded by some discussions on a mailing list that there are plenty of people who don’t really have much grasp of the social context of dance in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century or that a ball could be a much more complicated and socially perilous event than just a bunch of folks getting together and having a nice time dancing.

Here’s an interesting example of rudeness on the dance floor wielded as a social weapon.

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