Capering & Kickery

Susan de Guardiola, Social Dance Historian

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Category: Fancy Dress/Masquerade Balls

  • 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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  • 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

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