Christmas time 1798 saw Jane Austen attending an assembly ball in Basingstoke. “There were twenty Dances & I danced them all, & without any fatigue,” she boasted afterwards in a letter to her sister Cassandra. Both “fond of dancing” and good at it, the novelist was not unlike so many of our Georgian forebears, for whom dancing was a huge part of social life. In cities, small market towns, spas and seaside resorts, so many of their leisure hours were spent on the dancefloor.
Dancing’s sheer sociability was its biggest attraction. Whether it was a relatively humble “harvest frolic” – like the one Sally Gunton, a maidservant in a Norfolk parsonage, had permission to stay out all night for in 1801 – or a grand ball in a London mansion like Mrs Beaumont’s in May 1814, which had two bands providing music and supper served on silver plate, dancing brought people together in shared entertainment; one of few activities that men and women could enjoy together.
The mainstay of any formal ball was the country dances, where partners stood facing one another, in two lines formed long-ways down the room. They encouraged social interaction, usually involving all of the participating couples meeting each other at least once; plus a period of literally ‘standing up’ together, waiting for their turn to perform. The length of a dance depended on how many joined in, but to be on the dancefloor with one partner for 30 minutes or more was not unusual – ample time to chat, both with them and other couples who were standing nearby.
Fellow dancers might be old friends or new acquaintances. Balls, especially the public assembly balls in purpose-built rooms and local inns that genteel country-dwellers like Austen attended, were an excellent way to extend your social circle, typically drawing in people from within a 20-mile radius, too far for regular visiting. And people of guaranteed respectability, too, since few outside the rising middle classes could afford the tickets – 5s for a whole winter season, or 2s 6d a ball at Southampton’s Dolphin Inn in the 1790s.
The potential for meeting new people made ballrooms easily the best place to go looking for love. And, since it was the most socially acceptable way for a young, single woman to spend time one-to-one with a man, dancing was vital to courtship, offering an almost unparalleled opportunity to chat and flirt. The close proximity to a member of the opposite sex, with eye contact and hands touching, was also a rare – and thrilling – chance to feel physical attraction.
Learning to dance was therefore considered essential for members of the leisured classes. Both men and women were given lessons in their childhood, and maintained their competence through constant practice. For although little skill was required to perform the steps of the country dances (or the cotillions and quadrilles that were other staples of the Georgian ballroom), remembering the different patterns to be traced across the floor in each, and the combinations of taking and crossing hands, rising on tiptoes, twirling and clapping, made it a complicated venture – especially as new dances were constantly being invented. For example, it’s been estimated that more than 25,000 dances were created in England between 1730 and 1830.
Sedate as they might look, the country dances were physically as well as mentally demanding: the sister of one sporting viscount noted in 1809 that he was keeping his weight down for the hunting season “by dancing most perseveringly” at every opportunity. Ladies, for whom there were few socially approved forms of exercise, appreciated balls for the same reason.
They could certainly be a good workout: starting at 9pm or 10pm, there were usually three to four hours of dancing before a break for supper, and at least two more afterwards, with fashionable ball-goers rarely retreating home before 5am. In a room that blazing candles and a crush of people made “so hot that you could roast a chicken!”, as one wit put it, dancing every dance as Austen did was no mean feat.
In fact, balls were not dissimilar to modern nights on the town; ballrooms were noisy with ceaseless chatter, and alcohol flowed freely. Not all dancers turned up sober, either. At one ball in Chichester during the 1802 Goodwood races, “many a dancing man” was seen “rolling about like a porpoise in a storm” owing to his earlier indulgence.
Of course, the behaviour in polite society was never as free – nor the capering as energetic – as among the working classes. Their jigs and reels at festivals, hiring fairs and on feast days prioritised “exertion and agility”. Dancers shouted, swapped hats, stole kisses as they galloped down a set, and jigged with arms around each other’s waists, as well.
Only with the waltz did something similar to the latter invade upper-class British ballrooms, in the opening years of the 19th century. It came as a shock – and not just because of its physical intimacy and seemingly blatant sexuality (“hands… may freely range in public sight” lamented even the libertine Lord Byron). Many felt that dancing lost its social benefit since dancers became a solitary unit, turned inwards and focused only on each other, and conversation was now secondary to movement.
However, the headiness of spinning around the room in someone’s arms proved hard to resist, and it was fast-paced ‘couples’ dances’ that kept the Victorians on their feet. The polka, spreading to Britain “like a contagion” in the 1840s, attracted men, particularly, with its hectic motion that required partners to clasp each other tightly.
Along with other imports like the mazurka and the galop, the polka was danced – and adored – across the class divide. The genteel retreated behind closed doors, but working people increasingly went out – to gin palaces, ‘shilling dancing-rooms’ and civic halls, whose ‘Cinderellas’ (balls that ended by midnight) were a haunt of respectable shop-workers and waitresses seeking a spouse.
But the pastime so beloved by the Georgians fell behind the beat in the latter 19th century, less popular than the entertainment at pubs and music halls, and declining in high society as men cast off their dancing shoes. Only the arrival of infectious new music and wildly modern moves from the USA would put the spring in social dancing’s step again.
