Jane Austen For Dummies (20 page)
Read Jane Austen For Dummies Online
Authors: Joan Elizabeth Klingel Ray
Practicing the Politics of Dancing
In This Chapter
Defining dancing as the dating game
Dancing your way into love
Knowing how to dance (and what to do if you don't)
I
n Austen's day, young people did not date in the way we think of dating. So when young people of the gentry, the only social class that concerns Austen, were looking for a fun-filled evening â and a possible spouse â dances were the best places to be. Attending dances was the primary way for young people to meet and get to know each other socially. In fact, even if a young lady was interested in the young gentleman whose family were lifelong friends of her family and who resided at the neighboring estate â an estate that was many miles across the field! â dancing was the occasion where she could actually hold his hand for several minutes! Pretty hot stuff, yes? (For more information on the gentry, the class that interested Austen and to which she belonged, see Chapter 2.)
Austen enjoyed dancing, and so do the characters in her books. Austen wrote to her sister, Cassandra, about her grand plans to attend dances and the dances she'd already attended. Her letters to Cassandra included the names of her partners and descriptions of their looks, personalities, and dancing abilities. After all, one of them might end up being her marriage partner, so she may as well give her only sister a full report about a young man who might someday be Cassandra's brother-in-law!
The ability to dance â and to dance well â was a social requirement in Austen's day. Whether you were a male or female dancer, finding yourself with a partner with two left feet usually meant two things:
The partner with whom you were dancing wasn't really genteel.
You would likely write that partner off as a potential spouse.
The exception to the second bullet, of course, was if your partner was swimming in money, you were really desperate, or you were a gold-digger â in which case, Jane Austen would never cast you as a hero or heroine. But interestingly enough, Jane Austen's heroines never married for money, but they never married without getting a piece of the pie, either. Even though Austen's characters married for love, they were still realistic.
This chapter familiarizes you with the customs and rules of dancing in Austen's day. Dances could be public or private, formal or informal, and people attending these soirees had certain expectations about what would occur and how to behave.
Children of the gentry were taught how to dance the latest steps so they could participate readily in social dancing as they grew up. Dances in Austen's day were either informal or formal.
Informal dances were spur of the moment ideas that occurred when a musician and enough dancers gathered for home entertainment. But wherever young people gathered to dance, the event was an opportunity to meet new friends, dance with old and new friends (and even siblings), and initiate or continue a romantic relationship.
Impromptu, informal dances at home were both family evening entertainment and social events and were more characteristic of country life than city life in Austen's day. While city dwellers could find evening entertainment outside the home at such places as the theater, opera, or even the circus, country families had to make their own after-dinner fun, especially in the winter, when weather problems meant staying home.
Keep in mind that even though Londoners might look down on impromptu after-dinner dancing at home, these occasions weren't country hoe-downs. Country gentry families still dressed for dinner and had great fun dancing after the meal. For guests who weren't dancing, watching was enjoyable. And for those who didn't care for the dancing at all, cards and other games were always available at the other end of the drawing room. A popular card game requiring no prowess, just luck, was “lottery tickets,” which engrosses Lydia in
Pride and Prejudice
(1:16). (Using a deck of cards, lottery tickets involved the players' betting on and receiving random cards; they bet with “fish,” similar to little poker chips but fish-shaped.) See “Amusing the Non-Dancers: Finding the Card and Tea Rooms” later in this chapter.
Having a spontaneous dance involved just the right ingredients:
Someone to play the music
⢠A willing pianist-mother
⢠The wallflower, keyboard-playing sister
⢠The violinist-servant
A room with enough space to dance
Plenty of willing friends and family
After that, you'd just roll up the rug and voilà ! The sudden thought of an evening of dancing became a reality.
Formal dances, requiring advance planning, took two forms: private balls and public balls (also called assemblies). Because a gentry lady would never settle for a formal ball in a dingy location, formal balls occurred in varied locations:
Assembly rooms:
Large ballrooms located in buildings built for that purpose; market towns and cities had such rooms.
Ballrooms in country inns
(like
Emma
's Crown Inn): The size and elegance of these venues varied depending on the size of the village, market town, or city.
Large rooms in home or country homes:
Because large houses usually had formal ballrooms or lovely rooms large enough to serve as ballrooms, their owners or residents hosted formal balls (evidenced in
Pride and Prejudice
with Mr. Bingley and Netherfield Park, and in
Mansfield Park,
when Sir Thomas hosts a ball). (For more information on the splendid country houses of Austen's day, see Chapter 11.)
Jane Austen, being a member of the gentry, attended all types of formal balls, allowing her to write about them knowingly. (For information about the term
gentry,
see Chapter 2.)
When the owner of a large country house decided to host a private formal ball, the first step was creating the guest list and sending out invitations. But how did you get on that guest list? Knowing the
right
people and being in the
right
circle of friends, just as it helps today, helped the people in Jane Austen's time get invitations to desirable events.
The party host normally sent invitations to families with young ladies and gentlemen, knowing that their parents would consider the ball a wonderful place for their marriageable daughters and sons to meet and further their acquaintances. But the ball's guest list also included whole families with interaction for all the guests â old and young.
Invitations had to be sent early enough to give the guests sufficient time to prepare to attend, which usually suggested that an invitation to a formal ball, private or public, meant that young ladies participated in new experiences:
Buying a new and fashionable dress made with fabric and patterns from the nearest market town or city
Securing fashion accessories such as new shoes and shoe ornaments
Getting their hair done professionally or by a maid who had hairdressing talent to save the expense
Young men â depending on how vain they were â also made preparations for attending balls. But mostly, they had others take care of the arrangements:
A gentleman's butler or “man” had his suit, shoes, and gloves in order.
The groom or stableman made sure the carriage or horse was ready.
In only one of Austen's works does the man actually take care of getting ready himself:
Catherine; or The Bower.
The young man in this story spends over half an hour doing his hair. In fact, the average gentleman, himself, needed to be sure of doing only one thing: ask the lady of his choice for the first dance. If he didn't, he risked losing that dance to someone else. The men sure had it easy, wouldn't you say?
When attending a private ball, the evening usually had a certain schedule:
8:00 p.m.:
Evening began
Private balls began in the evening around 8:00 p.m. and usually began with mingling and dancing to the music of several string players. Sometimes the host went so far as to hire musicians from a nearby city. And if he really wanted to impress his friends and neighbors, he might even have musicians from London, the capital of the nation, as well as the capital of fashion and taste.
Tradition held that the gentleman who danced with the lady just before supper joined her at the supper table. This time gave the couple more opportunities for talking, flirting, and being together. For example, during the formal ball at Mansfield Park, Fanny suspects that Henry Crawford inquires “about the supper-hour . . . for the sake of securing her [Fanny] at that part of the evening” (MP 2:10). Henry is leaving nothing to chance: Having opened the ball as Fanny's partner, he'll time his
second dance
with her to be just before the supper hour so he can sit with her at the dining table. (Read more about the two-dance rule in the aptly titled “Observing dancing etiquette”
section later in this chapter.)
12:00 a.m.:
Supper served
Now this might seem late. But they ate a hearty breakfast around 10 a.m.; morning lasted until around 3 p.m., and they ate a multicourse dinner anywhere between 5 p.m. and 7 p.m. â perhaps a bit earlier than 7 p.m. on the night of a dance that began around 8 p.m.
A sit-down supper was traditionally offered to the guests at a private, formal ball. (Curious what items were popular fare? See the “What's for supper?” sidebar.) The importance of the supper was social as well as nutritional
3:00 a.m. to 4:00 a.m.:
Head home
Jane Austen herself enjoyed dancing at private balls, mostly held in the large country homes of friends. For example, she danced at Manydown Park (home of her good friends Catherine and Alethea Biggs) and Ashe House (home of the Austens' good friends the Lefroys). At one winter ball held at Ashe, the 20-year-old Austen danced and flirted with her friends' Irish nephew, Tom Lefroy, who aroused her romantic interest. (For more on Tom Lefroy, Jane Austen, and her letters, see Chapter 3.)