Abstract
Up until the nineteenth century, British social dances had been strictly regulated by aesthetic codes and specific etiquettes. This paper will examine the medical, journalistic and aesthetic debates on waltzing that emerged at the end of the eighteenth-century in Britain. I will argue that these debates were a response to a crisis in social and sociable relations. We have to read the intrusion of waltzing in a highly volatile political context: waltzing was intricately linked to revolutionary France. Engravings published in the early nineteenth century would indeed satirize this connection by portraying the female waltzist as a corpulent Jacobin woman with a firm hold on her scrawny partner, thus suggesting a two-fold anxiety: that of the erosion of traditional social and sociable values but also a dread of revolutionary absorption by the continent. Moral causes went hand in hand with political effects.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 1.
The “official” introduction and approval of waltzing in Britain is usually dated to 1812 by dance historians, the year the waltz was first seen at Almack’s, then the most fashionable of assembly rooms (Richardson 1960, 63).
- 2.
See Black (2010, 177) on the perception of British travelers to Europe.
- 3.
They were known as the King’s German Legion, “a force of predominantly exiled Hanoverian soldiers who formed an important part of the British Army’s European resistance to Napoleonic France” (Wishon 2011, 190).
- 4.
“The way spectators and dancers interact is redefined. Dancers are no longer on stage. The elements of this dance are less related to the group as a whole. The individualized couple is its own reference, self-centered and freed from standardized and choreographed connections with other dancers and spectators. […] Dancing becomes a privatized affair. […] What used to be geometrical balance, proportion and structure, and which found its metaphorical equivalent in courtly forms of dance and commerce, in particular with the Minuet, is now integrated in the body of the dancer, dancing in the world.” (author’s translation)
- 5.
“With his malformed right calf and ankle, Byron was able to fence, box, ride, walk and above all, swim. But running was difficult for him—and dancing impossible. Castlereagh was a better dancer than Byron would have been, but the poet is never recorded as even trying it. One of his most anguished adolescent experiences was watching his beloved Mary Chaworth dance with other Nottinghamshire youths. Sour grapes may indeed therefore be part of the motivation behind the poem [Waltz: An Apostrophic Hymn].” (Cochran 2009, 1)
Bibliography
Beddoes, Thomas. 1803. Hygëia, or, Essays Moral and Medical on the Cause Affecting the Personal State of Our Middling and Affluent Classes. 3 vols. Bristol: J. Mills.
Black, Jeremy. 2010. The British and the Grand Tour. London: Routledge Revivals.
Byron, George Gordon N. 1821. Waltz: An Apostrophic Hymn. London: W. Clarke.
Childers, William. 1969. Byron’s ‘Waltz’: The Germans and Their Georges. Keats-Shelley Journal 18: 81–95.
Cobbett, William. 1968. Cobbett’s England: A Selection from the Writings of William Cobbett, ed. John Wesley Derry. London: Folio Society.
Cochran, Peter. 2009. Waltz. Accessed March 23, 2020. https://petercochran.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/waltz.pdf.
Darwin, Erasmus. 1794. Zoonomia or, the Laws of Organic Life. 2 vols. London: J. Johnson.
Foucault, Michel. 1980. Power/Knowledge. Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon. New-York: Pantheon Books.
Griggs, Earl Leslie. 1975. Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Volume 1: 1795–1800. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Hess, Rémy. 2013. La valse: un romantisme révolutionnaire. Paris: Métailié.
Hogarth, William. 1772. The Analysis of Beauty. London: W. Strahan.
Howard, Skyles. 1996. Rival Discourses of Dancing in Early Modern England. Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 36 (1): 31–56.
Katz, Ruth. 1983. The Egalitarian Waltz. In What is Dance? Readings in Theory and Criticism, ed. Roger Copeland and Marshall Cohen, 521–532. New York: Oxford University Press.
Knowles, Mark. 2009. The Wicked Waltz and Other Scandalous Dances. Jefferson: McFarland & Company.
McGann, Jerome. 2002. Byron and Romanticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Moore, Thomas. 1831. Letters and Journal of Lord Byron: with Notices of his Life. Francfort: H.L. Brönner.
Raikes, Thomas. 1856. A Portion of the Journal Kept by Thomas Raikes, Esq., from 1831 to 1847. 2 vols. London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans.
Richardson, Phillip J.S. 1960. The Social Dances of the Nineteenth Century in England. London: Herbert Jenkins.
Walker, Donald. 1836. Exercises for Ladies Calculated to Preserve and Improve Beauty and to Prevent and Correct Personal Defects Founded on Physiological Principles. London: Thomas Hurst.
Wilson, Thomas. 1816. A Description of the Correct Method of Waltzing, the Truly Fashionable Species of Dancing. London: Sherwood, Nelly, and Jones.
———. 1822. An Analysis of Country Dancing. London: T. Craft.
Wilson, Cheryl A. 2016. The Arrival of the Waltz in England, 1812. In BRANCH: Britain, Representation, and Nineteenth-Century History. Accessed March 23, 2020. http://www.branchcollective.org/?ps_articles=cheryl-a-wilson-the-arrival-of-the-waltz-in-england-1812.
Wishon, Mark. 2011. Interaction and Perception in Anglo-German Armies 1689–1815 (Ph.D. Thesis). University College London.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2021 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Page-Jones, K. (2021). “The English can’t waltz, never can, never will”: The Politics of Waltzing in Romantic Britain. In: Domsch, S., Hansen, M. (eds) British Sociability in the European Enlightenment. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52567-5_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52567-5_8
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-52566-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-52567-5
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)