Plain and Fancy Dancing
Preserved inside Albert Eames’ copy of the Standard Fifth Reader is a folded handbill. It advertises “plain and fancy dancing,” taught by an itinerant dancing master, Mrs. Bates. Dancing wasn’t far removed from school in the mid-nineteenth century. Both were enterprises of social enrichment.
As Elias Howe’s 1866 manual, American Dancing Master and Ball-Room Prompter, put it:
“The improvement that is made by young persons in attending a dancing school is truly astonishing. Those that have not before had the advantages of mixing in genteel society, and were bashful, awkward, and whose whole appearance was perfectly ridiculous, would, after attending but a single course of dancing lessons, acquire such an ease of carriage and graceful deportment as to scarcely be recognized as the same persons. They acquire such confidence in themselves, and such polish to their manners, as to feel at ease and competent to take part in any company or society into which they may be thrown.”
Howe’s manual includes a mind-boggling five hundred dances. Here’s my dance card: the original lancers’ quadrilles, Caledonia quadrille, sleigh-ride quadrille, drawing-room polka quadrille, Lady Walpole’s reel, money musk, new century hornpipe, steamboat quickstep, Down East breakdown, rural felicity, Baden-Baden polka, and the new cushion dance.
Mrs. Bates’ “plain and fancy dancing” likely referred to line (contra) or square (quadrille) dances popular in the countryside and the new partner dances imported from Europe, especially the scandalous waltz. Mrs. Bates dared not speak its name on the handbill. The waltz put couples in close contact, which two-hundred years earlier was cause for consternation among the Puritan clergymen, especially Cotton Mather. Notorious for his role in the Salem Witch Trials, earlier he saw the devil’s work in dancing. In 1684 he wrote a pamphlet entitled An Arrow Against Profane and Promiscuous Dancing Drawn out of the Quiver of the Scriptures, which railed against the dangers of “mixt” dances that brought men and women together.
Even in the seventeenth century, colonial Americans argued that dancing trained young people in proper comportment. The dance floor gave them a place to practice social graces. But, for Mather, such attention to appearance and the outward display of manners was a deceitful and frivolous distraction from love of the divine. The Colonials won out, in spite of Mather’s protestations, and dancing was a popular pastime, even sanctioned by the state during the Revolutionary period.
In Howe’s American Dancing Master, the concerns of the Victorian era are each neatly mapped onto dancing etiquette. From the first invitation to the choice of dress, arrival at the ball-room, and attitude on the floor, a public dance was society in microcosm. The procedures for each of these events are as complicated as any of the five hundred dances.
Howe included a long essay on etiquette, which was attributed to Mrs. Nicholas Henderson. She advised:
“In requesting a lady to dance, you stand at a proper distance, bend the body gracefully, accompanied by a slight motion of the right than in front, you look at her with complaisance, and respectfully say will you do me the honor to dance with me, or shall I have the pleasure of dancing with you, will you be pleased, or will you favor me with your hand for this or the next dance, remaining in the position you have assumed, until the lady signifies her intention, by saying, with pleasure, sir, or I regret I am engaged, sir, you may then request to see her card, or to be pleased to name the dance for which she is not engaged, and after having made the necessary arrangements you politely bow, and withdraw.”
Mrs. Henderson’s rules of engagement include everything from how to take one’s seat in a carriage on the way to the dance to the proper response to perceived slights on the dance floor.
The Eames books contain dozens of such accidental archival treasures, from scraps of silk taffeta to cut-out portraits. The handbill was hastily folded and filed in the pages of the reader. Does this mean that Eames valued the invitation to dancing lessons and took care to preserve it? Or, just that he forgot about it and casually passed over it during his remaining months at school?
Albert Eames was the ideal student for Mrs. Bates’ dancing school. He was about to be “thrown” into society, as he well knew. The fly leaf bears a verse written in pencil:
Oh soon will our school days be o’er
And we all together shall meet no more.
So attend to your lessons while you can
For you soon will take your place as a man
Ashland, Jan 8th, 1864
The conflict between Victorian sentiment and boyish impulse appears as one turns the page to discover a scrawled inscription that mimics Eames’ hand-writing:
A.W. Eames
“Silly” and also a “Fool” -
He seems already to have taken Mrs. Henderson’s advice in the American Dancing Master:
“Neither in the ball-room, nor in any other public place, be too ready to take offense. If an intentional insult should be offered, the presence of ladies should make your notice so slight, that none but the aggressor should be aware of it;”
Eames replied to his would-be aggressor:
“I’ll remember that!”
And, by dint of his accidental preservation of the handbill, I’ve remembered it too.
