Page-Jones, Kimberley. "'The English can’t waltz, never can, never will': The Politics of Waltzing in Romantic Britain." In British Sociability in the European Enlightenment: Cultural Practices and Personal Encounters, edited by Sebastian Domsch and Mascha Hansen, 127-146. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021.


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.