Capering & Kickery

Susan de Guardiola, Social Dance Historian

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Category: Fancy Dress/Masquerade Balls

  • No “Secesh”, 1862

    On January 25, 1862, a dramatic little story appeared in a column in The Philadelphia Inquirer, “The New York Letter”, which covered news from New York City.  The United States was eight months into the Civil War against the Confederacy (formally, the Confederate States of America, or C. S. A.), and New Yorkers were on the alert for Confederate spies, or “Secesh” (secessionists).  So it was quite alarming for a gentleman to notice, in a paint shop,

    several suspicious looking bundles, boxes, etc., marked “C. S. A. Sutler’s Department,” “C. S. A. Medical Department,” etc.

    He reported the items to the police, and detectives were duly assigned to watch the shop, where, on the evening of January 23rd (going by the date of the column), they noticed someone leaving the premises,

    enwrapped in a long cloak and scarf, carrying the suspicious bundles under his arm

    Suspicious indeed!  The detectives followed him to a house, which he and dozens of other cloaked men entered.  Was it a secret meeting of spies?  Smugglers?  Terrorists?   Police surrounded the house, but after sending one policeman inside to reconnoiter, they abruptly retired from the scene.

    Why did they leave?  And what does this have to do with dance, anyway?

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  • Brain Fever, 1840

    Ah, sweet October, which I generally devote to discussion of fancy dress and masquerade balls, weird cotillion figures, and similar frivolity!

    I have two words to start off the month in the proper spirit:

    headless quadrille

    Specifically: 

    The first couple is Anne Boleyn and Louis XVI.  They are facing Lady Jane Grey and Marino Faliero (a 14th century Venetian Doge).  Marie Antoinette and Charles I make up the first side couple, facing the Earl of Essex, dancing alone. 

    In case anyone missed the connection, all of these people were beheaded.  

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  • A Masquerade in Montana, 1899

    And…it’s back to masquerades, fancy dress balls, crazy cotillion figures, and other fun for the month of October!  First up: a Christmas masquerade ball in Montana in 1899.

    Hefferlin Opera postcardThe Degree of Honor masquerade ball was held on Christmas night at the Hefferlin Opera House in Livingston, Montana, the elaborate building at right in the postcard photo at left; click to enlarge.  At this time, the Degree of Honor was the ladies’ auxiliary of the Ancient Order of United Workmen, a post-Civil War “fraternal” mutual benefit society providing insurance, burial policies, etc, to working-class men.  In the late 1890s, the Degree of Honor was said to have had 40,000 members nationally.  It later spun off into a separate organization and existed independently until 2017.

    Livingston itself was tiny at the time, having been founded as a cluster of tents at a future railroad stop in 1882.  Even today, its population is under ten thousand people (per the 2020 census); at the time of the ball, it was probably only around a thousand.  This puts into perspective its description as “largely attended” in the coverage of the ball in the social column of The Anaconda Standard on Sunday, December 31, 1889: seventy-five couples following the leaders of the march.  For a town of that size, that is actually quite impressive, and the coverage noted that the event succeeded both socially and financially.

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  • 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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  • 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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  • 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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  • A Calico Ball, British Columbia, 1885

    As described by Lucie Armstrong in The Ball-Room Guide (London and New York, c1880):

    The Calico Ball is a fancy ball at which the dresses are made of calico.  Sateen, chintz and velveteen are allowable, and any other material which is made of cotton.  The invitation, of course, states the nature of the ball.

    It really seems to have been primarily about the fabric rather than any costume theme, though obviously some costumes will work better when made out of cottons than others.  She goes on to make some suggestions.  For ladies: a dairymaid, a charity girl from St. Giles’, or a Dresden shepherdess.  For gentlemen: a Maltese peasant, Albanian costume, Saxon dress, or an Italian peasant.

    The anonymous author of Masquerades, tableaux and drills (New York, 1906) added more details:

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  • The Hewitts’ Plant Party, 1898

    Originally posted in substantially similar form on September 24, 2010, at Historical Fancy Dress.

    Jumping forward in time, from The New York Times on February 18, 1898 comes a full description of a very successful themed fancy dress event: a "Plant Party".  The ladies were asked to dress in some "representative" costume, while the gentlemen were expected to appear in ordinary evening clothes and were given something like a vegetable boutonniere at the door.  Supposedly, this was copied from something that Louis XVI did it at Versailles.  I'd certainly like to see a description of that!

    Sadly, very little information is given about the dancing: there was some, informal, after supper, and with no cotillion.

    No full list of costumes was published, but there are some excellent examples at the end of how the ladies trimmed their gowns to match the theme.

    I've transcribed the entire article below.

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  • Mrs. Walker’s Masqued Ball, 1804

    Jumping from the mid-eighteenth to the early nineteenth century:

    I first came across a description of Mrs. Walker's Masqued Ball as it was published in a Philadelphia journal, The Port-Folio, on January 19, 1805, with a credit to the The Morning Post, a noted London newspaper which famously covered the social activities of the upper classes in Regency England. 

    For several years, I had the article filed under the date 1805, but with a suspicious note attached because the outdoor party described (with a hostess concerned about the possibility of the heat being "oppressive") didn't sound likely to have occurred in January, even in England.  I still haven't found the original Morning Post article, but I did turn up a shorter version of the same description (minus all the costume information) that was published in The Lancaster Gazette (of Lancaster, England, not Lancaster, Pennsylvania) on Saturday, July 14, 1804, with one critical word present:

    on Wednesday se'nnight         [emphasis mine]

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  • Un jeu d’échecs (a game of chess), 1810

    Another themed quadrille described by Laure Junot, the Duchess of Abrantès, was the “game of chess” danced, or at least presented, at a masked ball in Paris in the February of 1810.  The quadrille was also described in her Memoires de Madame la duchesse d’Abrantes, which were published and republished in multiple volumes in a variety of editions.  The French text below was taken from an 1837 fourth edition published in Brussels, which may be found online here.  A contemporary (1833) English translation is online here, but it is not a close enough translation and omits some lines, so I’ve done my own, with reference to it.

    Junot spent more time in her memoirs complaining about the costumes and rehearsal time required for this quadrille than she did on the actual performance, but from her description, it seems like very few of the pieces (dancers) actually got to do much, unless perhaps they danced as they entered the board.  But what little she describes does mention steps, and the costume descriptions give us a fairly good idea of how the dancers must have appeared: vaguely Egyptian pawns with tightly-wrapped skirts and sleeves like mummies and sphinx-like hairstyles, knights like centaurs with horse rumps made from wicker, rooks wearing wicker towers, and fools (bishops) in caps with bells.

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  • A Fancy Dress Ball, Saratoga, 1847

    Another costume-heavy description of a fancy dress ball was published in The New York Herald on August 17, 1847, in the social column “The Watering Places” on page two.  The ball was held at Congress Hall of the United States Hotel in the summer resort town of Saratoga Springs, New York, on August 14, 1847.

    Sadly, no information is given about the dancing, though the writer does mention the generous size of the hall, one hundred and fifty by fifty feet, and the beautiful decorations, featuring flowers and greenery plus “miniature flags of every nation which supports a navy” hanging “just above the heads” of the dancers.

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  • A Fancy Dress Ball, Roxbury, 1827

    It’s October, and time once again to devote some attention to masquerade and fancy dress balls and other excuses to wear unusual costumes in historical ballrooms!

    On January 3, 1828, The New York Mirror: A Weekly Gazette of Literature and the Fine Arts, published a description of what was supposedly the first fancy-dress ball ever held in New England, held at Norfolk House in Roxbury, Massachusetts, on “Wednesday last”.

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  • Prince Leopold’s Birthday Ball, 1859

    One of the most charming descriptions of a fancy dress ball in my collection is that of the event held at Buckingham Palace in honor of the sixth birthday of Queen Victoria's youngest son, Prince Leopold, on April 7, 1859.  This was a juvenile, or children's, ball, but, as we know from descriptions of the dancing lessons given to Victoria's children, the level of dancing skill even at young ages was considerably higher than one would expect from children today.  That said, it's not clear to me whether the youngest children really danced all the dances or whether that was left to the older ones, or perhaps the parents.

    The description I have was printed in The Albion, A Journal of News, Politics and Literature, on April 30, 1859.  The Albion was a weekly New York newspaper that covered British matters extensively and was read by expatriates.  The description was probably copied directly from a London newspaper.

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  • A Masked Ball in Heidelberg, 1840s

    A lengthy, lively description of a masquerade in Heidelberg may be found in Meister Karl’s Sketch-book, by the American humorist, journalist, and folklorist Charles Godfrey Leland, who described the book in his Memoirs as

    …an odd mélange, which had appeared in chapters in the Knickerbocker Magazine.  It was titled Meister Karl’s Sketch-Book.  It had no great success beyond attaining to a second edition long after; yet Washington Irving praised it to everybody, and wrote to me that he liked it so much that he kept it by him to nibble ever and anon, like a Stilton cheese or a paté de foie gras; and here and there I have known men, like the late Nicolas Trübner or E. L. Bulwer, who found a strange attraction in it, but it was emphatically caviare to the general reader.  It had at least a style of its own, which found a few imitators.  It ranks, I think, about pari passu with Coryatt’s “Crudities,” or lower.  (p. 206)

    The Sketch-Book (1855) was a fictionalized travel journal based on Leland’s experiences studying and traveling in Europe as a young man.  In the preface, he explained that it had been written primarily between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five, which would have been from 1840 to 1849.  Leland spent three years during this period studying in Heidelberg, Munich, and Paris.  He mentioned the various masked balls in Heidelberg in his Memoirs:
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  • Newport Fancy Dress Ball, 1850

    The final fancy dress of the Newport summer season of 1850 occurred on Wednesday, September 4th.  It was covered by The Boston Herald on September 5th (“Grand Fancy Ball at Newport”, p. 4) and more extensively by The New York Herald on September 6th (“The Grand Fancy Dress Ball at Newport”, p. 1).  The bulk of the coverage was devoted to lists of attendees and their costumes, as is typical for fancy dress balls, but there are some other tidbits of useful information as well.  The New York Herald article is extremely lengthy, so I have not transcribed all of it.  The article from The Boston Herald is quite short, but not nearly as interesting.

    The ball was held at the rebuilt Ocean House, the original of which had opened in 1844, burned down, and been rebuilt.  This Ocean House was not the same as the modern Ocean House in Newport.  A different hotel by the same name opened in 1868, was demolished in 2005, and then rebuilt again in 2010.

    At the RhodeTour website, Dr. Brian Knoth writes about the first two Ocean Houses, with specific mention of the 1850 Fancy Dress Ball:

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Capering & Kickery

Susan de Guardiola, Social Dance Historian

Email Susan

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