Dance and Sociability in the Long Eighteenth Century

Hillary Burlock, Ian Newman, Mark Philp

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2026
• eBook ISBN: 9781350498938
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early Modern History
• Index: History

This collection challenges the dominant understandings of 18th-century sociability by placing dance, and the training and movement of the body, at its core. Rather than thinking of dance and music as peripheral ornaments to the complex business of Enlightenment society, it highlights them as important vehicles for the development and dissemination of the ideas and practices that shaped people's social, emotional and intellectual worlds.

Exploring the relationship between dance and sociability, and the development of both through the long 18th century, chapters in this collection span different practices in England, Scotland, colonial America, the West Indies, Germany, the Low Countries and Norway. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, they argue that dance, which was entangled with concerns about touch, dress and bodies, was integral to the ways in which 'enlightened sociability' was understood, performed and accepted.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: ‘Je ne sais quoi’: The social implications of grace and ease
• Chapter 2: Open to the world: Polite masculinity and the turned-out body
• Chapter 3: ‘Hopping in London’: Genre and the representation of Regency dance in Austen and Egan
• Chapter 4: Dance lessons: Making young people genteel in eighteenth-century Norway
• Chapter 5: Dance at home in Georgian England
• Chapter 6: William Bodley Francis: An English performer and dancing master in early America
• Chapter 7: Sociability and hidden connections: The ballet stage and ballroom in the long eighteenth century
• Chapter 8: ‘German’ vs. ‘Viennese’: Notes on the social and conceptual history of waltzing in the German-speaking world
• Chapter 9: From the Louvre to the waltz: Changing relationships within the couple dance
• Chapter 10: Courting a dancing court in waiting: Winning hearts and minds in Brussels: Embodying a restoration monarchy (1815–30)
• Chapter 11: Women waltzing at Almack’s: New freedoms and constraints
• Chapter 12: Music and dance in Edinburgh’s polite society as seen in the journals and letters of British and French travellers, 1784–1804
• Chapter 13: La Tumba Francesa: The dance event and the social club
• Selected Bibliography
• Index