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  • Society Dancing: Fashionable Bodies in England, 1870–1920 by Theresa Jill Buckland
  • Cheryl A. Wilson (bio)
Society Dancing: Fashionable Bodies in England, 1870–1920, by Theresa Jill Buckland; pp. x + 247. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, £50.00, $90.00.

How did the staid Victorian waltz give way to the raucous ragtime and salacious tangos of the post-World War I ballroom? This question underpins Theresa Jill Buckland’s Society Dancing: Fashionable Bodies in England, 1870–1920, which charts the changes in dance styles and fashions across the turn of the twentieth century. Buckland argues that this period is particularly rich for dance history studies because of the increasing democratization of the ballroom along with significant changes in gender roles and expectations. Buckland contextualizes her analysis of dance within broader social and cultural transformations: “In the process of investigating how people moved on the dance floor, I hope that new light may be shed on questions of movement and modernity that may then reverberate across other genres of dance, as well as illuminating further the social and emotional lives of those who danced” (4).

There has been little serious scholarship on historical dancing. As Buckland remarks, “The sphere of the social has largely remained the Cinderella of dance studies” (13). One reason for this distinction, she suggests, has been the traditional separation of stage (read: professional) and social (read: amateur) dancing. Yet, as she points out, until the twentieth century, such distinctions were blurred; social dances were inspired by stage performances and vice versa. More recently, social dance studies has benefitted from the rise of feminist studies and the revision of historical narratives, although Buckland rightly takes issue with much of the contemporary work in so-called [End Page 531] body studies, describing it as “non-specialist literature” that “tended to avoid close attention to the dance itself” and located its arguments “in the static rather than the moving body” (15). Buckland’s own analysis acknowledges and draws on earlier work in gender studies, body studies, and dance historiography. She draws the bulk of her material, however, from historical sources, including dance manuals, letters and diaries, and periodicals—the latter of which furnish many of the nineteen illustrations that help readers to visualize the various dances.

Society Dancing has three sections: “Society Dances,” “Fashioning Gentility,” and “Modern Moves.” Across these sections, Buckland puts forward an historical argument, calling attention to the transitional nature of the period and frequently positioning the dances of the early twentieth century against their Victorian predecessors. The opening section of the book establishes the world of the Victorian ballroom; the second focuses on players in that scene, including dance teachers and debutantes; the third addresses post-1901 trends in dancing and the effects of World War I. Each section within this loosely chronological framework has six short chapters—a neat symmetry that ballroom dancers and teachers would doubtless have appreciated. However, this combined chronological and thematic organization, while more complex and interesting than a straight historical overview, can be disorienting and lead readers to overlook historical distinctions.

One of the central figures in Society Dancing is the dance teacher, whose reappearance throughout the book embodies changes in both dancing itself and the social implications of ballroom practices. Dance teachers, like many other Victorian professionals, existed in a social hierarchy, ranging from those who taught the children of aristocrats and royals to those who organized practice balls for working-class Londoners. Buckland describes the way in which a course of dancing might also include calisthenics and—with a proper nod to Charles Dickens’s Mr. Turveydrop—deportment. She also chronicles the process of apprenticeship undergone by prospective teachers, the formation of professional societies such as the British Association of Teachers of Dancing (founded in 1892), and the development of dance pedagogies. Particularly interesting in this section are the anecdotes from the letters and diaries of pupils and teachers that detail the rigors of dance instruction. Like many other aspects of the dance world, however, dancing classes changed considerably as the nineteenth century waned. The increasing popularity of new, less complicated dances—many of which were imports from the Americas—rendered formal instruction unnecessary...

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