I was thinking today that I first came across properTanzkarten at the May 2022 Order of Malta Ball in Edinburgh. However, I suddenly remembered that I had seen them as a child in my grandmother’s scrapbook. This particular grandmother came from money, and if the scrapbook is anything to go by, she had a lot of fun before the Crash of 1929.
Dance cards first appeared in Europe in the 18th century and became wildly popular in 19th century Vienna. They are now, I’m told by Wikipedia, collectibles, and I certainly collect them after our ticketed dances. This is mostly to retrieve the pencils (which cost us 50 pence each–atrocious), but also to give the cards back to their owners as souvenirs. (To assist in this, I have added “This card belongs to ….” to the template.)
A dance card is a rectangular piece of thin cardboard folded in half like a greeting card. The front normally has the name and date of the dance, the inner section has a list of the dances and a place for dance partners to write their names, and the back can supply other interesting information: the names of the committee and/or the musicians, for example.
Now, I understand that a blank dance card can be an intimidating thing. The heroine of Rosamund Lehmann’s 1932 Invitation to the Waltz is horrified to discover 24 blank spaces on her “programme” as her aristocratic hostess calls it. (She is very relieved when six dances are booked.) However, I’m told they do help men ask women to dance; the most important thing is for the hostess/organiser to explain what they are for and then to order the gentlemen to go forth and reserve dances. The most diffident of men cannot help but be swept along in the general male stampede–at least, that’s how it looks to me from my post by the microphone. [N.B. Our events are only 3.5 hours long, and so we have only 14 dances.]
After his dance card is full, the challenge is for the gentleman to remember what his partners look like. If at a loss, the clever thing to do is to ask the hostess or some other person-in-the-know to point out the lady named on the card. Then this person can discreetly (reminder to self) bring the partners together.
In her delightful Manners for Men (1897), Mrs Humphrey instructs upwardly mobile gentlemen on ballroom etiquette. Gentlemen to the manner born were of course taught all this stuff by osmosis and thus didn’t need such books. However, social mobility was such in 1897 that “there are thousands of young men going into society constantly who flagrantly fall” in ballroom deportment. Mrs Humphrey supplies her readers with a model gentleman:
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. He arrives in good time, fills his card before very long, and can be asked to dance with a … neglected wallflower or two without resenting it.
There is a lot more in that vein, only Mrs Humphrey’s world included refreshment-rooms and chaperones, and these do not much feature at Edinburgh dances. Her stricture that a man who sits out one dance must immediately find his partner when the next one starts does indeed apply today, however. Oh, and then there is this very good advice:
At a private ball the guest enters and greets his hostess before speaking to anyone 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.
Fact.
Mrs Humphrey also orders young men to learn how to dance before going to a dance. Fortunately, our dances are in Scotland and thus principally involve ceilidh dances, which are all explained and called, and the International Standard Waltz, in which I offer lessons several times a year, donations gratefully accepted. I also illustrate it from the stage or the front of the hall, so no-one need despair.
Perhaps my next post will dedicated to learning the waltz. For the present I will just add this Wiki photo of a wonderful dance programme in created the form of a fan:
Look at that lovely (albeit dull) pencil. I bet it didn’t cost 50p back in 1887.