Dance Etiquette Then and Then

After the success of the Michaelmas Dance, I was fired with enthusiasm to work towards the restoration of the best of British social behaviour.

One of the spurs was the confession, by yet another young Polish man, that he had expected to find "the English gentleman" when he first came to Britain. "The English gentleman" seems to be a legend of some sort in northern Poland, and although I am not myself English I'm frightfully embarrassed that he is now so hard to find. 

He still exists between the covers of Mrs Humphry's Manners for Men, which was first published in 1897. I have obtained a facsimile edition published in 1993 and found it greatly entertaining. The British middle classes flourished in the 19th century, and they seem to have had great opportunities for upward social mobility, thus necessitating such books to tell them how to get on in upper-middle class society. (Mrs Humphry is acid about the morals of those the next rung up, the aristocrats.) 

Mrs Humphry also wrote Manners for Women, which is very interesting and improving while not repeating the material to be found in Manners for Men. More on Manners for Women anon. I'll just say that Mrs Humphry thought that young ladies in the 1890s had unprecedented freedom and were bicycling towards a glorious future. 

The chief interest for me in Manners for Men is gentlemanly behaviour at balls, and I am delighted that the young men who came to the Michaelmas Dance measured up rather well.  

"The etiquette of a ball-room is not difficult to acquire, and yet there are thousands of young men going into society constantly who flagrantly fail in it," sighs Mrs Humphry. "Their bad manners are conspicuous. They decline to dance unless the prettiest girls in the room are 'trotted out' for them, block the doorways, haunt the refreshment-room, and after supper promptly take their leave. Could any course of conduct be in worst taste?" 

"No," says Mrs McLean, thinking of the 163 spanakopita triangles she baked on the afternoon of September 29. "That is pretty bad." 

"The delight of the average hostess's heart is the well-bred man, unspoiled by conceit, who can always be depended upon to do his duty," continues Mrs Humphry. "He arrives in good time, fills his dance card before very long, and can be asked to dance with a plain neglected wallflower or two without resenting it. He takes his partner duly into the refreshment-room after each dance, if she wishes to go, and provides her with whatever she wishes. Before leaving her, he sees her safe at her chaperone's side." 

Needless to say, he also claims his partner for the next dance when it begins, not halfway through. 

"The truth is that society demands a never-ending series of self-denying actions from those who belong to it, and the more cheerfully these are performed, the more perfect are the manners," says Mrs H, leading Mrs M to contemplate that 6% of the adult male population of the British Empire would be killed or die of wounds or war-related disease within 25 years of the book's publication. 

Where is the British gentleman? Under Flanders Fields, dear Rafał. 

But nobody knew that in 1897, so let us cheer up. Back to Mrs. Humphry.

Our preceptress says that young men must learn to dance before going to dances. (I am overseeing the waltzing end of the business, and ceilidh dances are very often taught as they are happening.) When they arrive at the dance, young men are to find the local version of me.

At a private ball the guest enters and greets his hostess before speaking to any one else. She shakes hands with him and passes him on to some one to introduce him to partners, perhaps her husband, perhaps her son. With this beginning he will probably get on very well and may half-fill his card, and he should take care to do so at once, for at some balls the nice girls are immediately snapped up and engaged for even the extras before they have been twenty minutes in the room.

Note, by the way, that in 1897 (as chez nous in 2023) men too had dance cards. If a man found himself "high and dry," he went to the "gentleman of the house" and asked to be introduced to another young lady---which custom is very kind and practical, by the way. 

I think one of the most awkward things about any social event is not knowing what to do, or who to go for help. I remember one particularly awful wedding at which I fled to the bathroom at intervals to remove my fixed smile. This is also an argument for mixed-generation events. The older men and women, whose lives are settled, paths clear, and nerves relaxed, should keep an eye on the younger ones--their futures still a yawning abyss of unknown possibilities--and make sure they are all dancing or enjoying a nice conversation. 

Back to Mrs H. 

"In asking a lady to dance, it is usual to say, 'Will you give me this waltz?' or 'May I have this barn-dance?'  ," she says. "Some young men say, 'Would you like to dance this? Come along then!' but such a form of address is suited only to intimates. When the dance is over, and the partner left with her friends, the man says 'Thank you,' bows, and leaves her."

For some reason, Mrs H doesn't give corresponding advice to women, but I know perfectly well that the only acceptable answers to 'Will you give me this waltz?'  are "Yes," or "I'm sorry: I have promised it to someone else."

"Thank you, I'd rather sit this one out" may be true, but it sounds rude, and unless you have a heart condition or have hurt your foot in the last dance, you really shouldn't say that. However, I think you could atone for your non-dancing sin by adding "... But please do ask So-and-So, as I am sure she would love to dance." 

Fearful of becoming ridiculous, I thought I should also read an etiquette book from 1962, the year before the Deluge. But The Pan Book of Etiquette and Good Manners is comparatively sad and its only treatment of dances is in a chapter called "The High Life," which was surely closed to most people anyway. Sarah MacLean's (no relation) description of Debutante Balls seems calculated to avoid provoking class envy:

The ancestral home may have been turned into a lunatic asylum or a tourist curiosity, death duties and income tax may have slashed the family income so that capital will have to be sold, but Caroline still 'comes out'.

And poor Caroline had to get to know and be accepted by the "best people" and find a husband among the men who had gone to the "right" schools, had the "right" accent and the "right" connections. She had to do a "full season"--going to up to 7 dances a week--and now that everyone was comparatively poor, the whole thing was frantically organized by "Mums," some of whom clubbed together to put on a single "coming out" dance for their daughters.  

There was still a problem in 1962 with young men only wanting to dance with the prettiest girls, and the author--now definitely writing anthropology instead of giving advice--reports the following:

Changing Partners: As there is rarely any break in the music, this is a tricky operation. It's all done at the bar. You suggest a drink to your partner and at the bar you give him the slip for someone else. Ideally that is. But at the beginning of the season a girl who still knows very few young men may well find that it's her partner who suggests the drink and who nips off with someone else, leaving her alone with her glass of milk and her asparagus sandwich. 

Her only chance of picking up another partner is to remain where she is. As one deb says: "If you take refuge in the ladies, you're sunk. It needs a lot of courage to come back when you haven't got anyone waiting for you. And if you subside on to a little gilt chair on the edge of the dance floor, everyone can see that you've given up all hope. The best you can do then is to persuade one of your girl friends to keep you company."

Best people. 

I was somewhat cheered to see that dances in Scotland were kinder to young ladies, for Mrs Sarah MacLean says that all the debutantes hope "to get asked to some of the Scottish dances in September."

These have the advantage from the deb's point of view that dance cards are still used. Embarrassing thought it may be to show a blank card when the first man asks to see it, a girl does know where she is. She can always take refuge in the ladies' cloakroom when she hasn't got a partner and emerge when she has. 

In  Mrs Humphry's books there is no talk of hiding in the ladies' cloakroom--or anywhere. The impression I got was that it was a lot more fun to be an upwardly mobile middle-class man or woman in 1897 than a sprig of the decaying gentry in 1962. No wonder the Swinging Sixties happened. 

Naturally I will have to do more research, but so far I am confirmed in my belief that what we need to restore is not the best of our civilization from before Vatican II but the best of our civilization from before World War I.