Research on social dance history does not always involve direct work on specific dances, and occasionally I get diverted to detective work on related historical mysteries in different fields – music, language, biography, etiquette, publishing history, and more. Over the last few weeks, I have pursued a successful quest for some pages missing from an 1840s work by Charles Durang. The process of locating these pages illustrates some of the frustrations of working with 19th century sources and the care needed in studying them.
In her delightful overview of 19th-century dance and etiquette, From the Ballroom to Hell (paid link), Elizabeth Aldrich states that Durang (1796-1870) was a dancer at the Bowery Theatre who later taught dance in Philadelphia with his daughter Caroline and published at least four dance manuals. I started looking for a copy of Durang’s The Ball-Room Bijou and Art of Dancing as part of the research for a particular set of quadrilles and rapidly found myself in the midst of a publication puzzle.
