EDWARD SCOTT: THE LAST OF THE ENGLISH DANCING MASTERS

Dance Research

Volumn 21, Issue 2, 2003, Pages 3-35

  Buckland, Theresa Jill ^a  

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EID: 30944452297     PISSN: 02642875     EISSN: 17500095     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.3366/3594050     Document Type: Article

References (102)

1. For a summary historical review of the dancing master see the entry in the International Encyclopedia of Dance (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). A particularly helpful resource, which provides online source material drawn from Europe and North America, is the website of the Library of Congress American Memory, Dance Instruction Manuals ca. 1600–1920 (special consultant, Elizabeth Aldrich): http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/dihtml
2. For example, the literature devoted to figures such as Isadora Duncan and Ruth St. Denis and to the Ballets Russes. Publications which have looked beyond theatre art dance during this period such as Linda J. Tomko’s Dancing Class: Gender, Ethnicity, and Social Divides in American Dance, 1890–1920 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999) have focused on progressive aspects of dance practice in relation to societal changes.
3. This article is part of a larger-scale study devoted to dance and society in Victorian and Edwardian England.
4. For brief detail on Louis Hervey D’Egville, see the obituary notice in The Dancing Times (January 1928), 534, 536. He and his family of the mid to late nineteenth century are the subject of an article that I am currently preparing.
5. A point made by A. H. Franks in his Social Dance: A Short History (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963), p. 140. Richard Ralph is the first to consider Scott as the last of the dancing master apologists, see his The Life and Works of John Weaver (London: Dance Books, 1985), p. 142.
6. Insight into the royal family’s involvement in dancing can be gleaned from A New and Most Excellent Dancing Master. The Journal of Joseph Lowe’s visits to Balmoral and Windsor (1852–1860) to teach dance to the family of Queen Victoria, edited by Allan Thomas (New York: Pendragon Press, 1992). More general background on the involvement of royalty in nineteenth-century social dance and the contexts of performance in society can be found in the classic work by P. J. S. Richardson, The Social Dances of the Nineteenth Century (London: Herbert Jenkins, 1960) and in A. H. Franks, Social Dance: A Short History, chapter VI.
7. This, of course, was not a new phenomenon and had been the subject of satire from Molière’s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme of 1670 onwards to the early 1800s. There was a long European tradition of written guides on correct behaviour for aristocratic milieux, beginning in the sixteenth century with Baldassare Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier, Stefano Guazzo’s Civile Conversation, and Nicholas Faret’s L’Honnête Homme ou L’Art de Plaire, all of which enjoyed frequent reprinting and reproduction. I am grateful to Professor Margaret McGowan for elucidating this point. See also Richard Ralph’s discussion of dance as a social art in his Life and Works of John Weaver, pp. 122–8. What is new in the nineteenth century is the comparatively rapid acceleration and accessibility, through cheaper printing, of advisory conduct literature to meet the needs of a growing British middle-class, keen to ‘better themselves’. This phenomenon has become a focus of attention for cultural and literary historians in recent years. For analytical over-views of advice on polite behaviour in the nineteenth century, see Andrew St George, The Descent of Manners: Etiquette, Rules and The Victorians (London: Chatto and Windus, 1993), Marjorie Morgan, Manners, Morals and Class in England, 1774–1858 (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan, 1994) and Linda Young, Middle-Class Culture in the Nineteenth Century: America, Australia and Britain (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).
8. See Leonore Davidoff’s pioneering study of ‘high society’ in this period, The Best Circles: Society, Etiquette and The Season (London: Croom Helm, 1973), Hilary and Mary Evans, The Party that Lasted 100 Days: The Late Victorian Season (London: MacDonald and Jane’s, 1976) and Pamela Horn, High Society: The English Social Elite 1880–1914 (Stroud: Alan Sutton, 1992).
9. Edward Scott, The Set-Dancers’ Pocket Companion and Guide (London: Scott & Co. [1894]), copy in the Bodleian Library.
10. Letter, The Dancing Times, February 1915, p. 172.
11. Biographical details from birth certificate, Edward Scott, 28 November 1852, St. Anne Westminster, Strand, census returns Fulham, 1861, death certificate, William Crambrook, 12 July 1864, Fulham, Kensington, will and letters of Administration, 1 February 1879.
12. Sussex Daily News, 24 March 1937, 3.
13. See comments in Michau, Madame D’Egville, Treatise on Deportment, Dancing and Physical Education for Young Ladies (London: T. C. Newby, 1861).
14. Scott, ‘Valsing as Influenced by Fashion and as a Distinctive Movement’, The Dancing Times, December 1925, 329–35 (p. 329). Carlo Blasis, The Code of Terpsichore, translated by R. Barton (London: E. Bull, 1830).
15. Edward Scott senior’s timber business ceased to be advertised in London trade directories after 1854 and his occupation is next recorded in the 1861 census as that of clerk. His death certificate of 5 August 1864 lists the fifty-four-year old as clerk to a timber merchant.
16. Rate books for Elton Villa record William Crambrook’s widow, Elizabeth, as the head of the household. The last date of her appearance in these rate books is March 1867. Elton Villa was a substantial property according to maps of the time. The house with garden was of unknown date but was demolished to make way for the Town Hall in 1888 (Charles James Fèret, Fulham Old and New (London: The Leadenhall Press, mdcccc, vol. 11, p. 221)). Elizabeth Crambrook is listed at 247 Essex Road, Islington in street directories and her daughter, Mary Ann Scott, and grandson, Edward, are recorded as resident with her at this address in the 1871 census.
17. Marriage certificate, St. Matthew’s Church, Islington, 4 January 1876.
18. Charles Field and family continued to live at the music and dancing academy as evidenced by census returns and directories until at least the 1890s. Field is most often referred to in the records as a professor of music, but accomplishment in both arts was a well established feature of the profession. His birth place is known from the 1871 census returns.
19. The Stars and Stripes Quadrille and the dance card are held in the British Library together with some of his other music compositions.
20. Bryan Isaac, The British Association of Teachers of Dancing Brief Review of One Hundred Years (BATD, 1992), p. 3. I am grateful to the BATD for generously providing me with a copy of this text.
21. Census returns, Islington 1871 and Brighton 1881.
22. The Dancing Times, September 1921, p. 207.
23. International Encyclopedia, entry on Espinosa family. Léon Espinosa trained at the Paris Opera.
24. In Lilly Grove, Dancing, The Badminton Library of Sports and Pastimes (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1895), p. 423.
25. (P. J. S. Richardson), ‘Round the Classes’, The Dancing Times, February 1913, 303.
26. Page’s Brighton Directory, 1883, census returns 1881, 1891, and Scott’s son’s birth certificate. Scott is still listed as a lithographic artist working at 182 Upper Thames Street, in Kelly’s London Directory of 1883 but he is also recorded as a teacher of dancing in Brighton in the same year. This apparent discrepancy may be explained by the gap between preparing copy and publishing dates.
27. The connections between London and Brighton are well illustrated in the journal of the same name published in the 1880s. The title and coverage was changed from just Brighton in the issue of 16 December 1886 to ‘appeal to men of the world in the most catholic sense of that phrase, and to whom, as a consequence, Brighton is but a pleasurable suburb of the Metropolis’ (p. 2). In any case, strong links had been in evidence since the days of the Regency (see Venetia Murray, High Society: A Social History of the Regency Period 1788–1830 (London: Viking, 1998) and for the later period, Antony Dale, Fashionable Brighton 1820–1860, 2nd edition (London: Oriel Press, 1987)). A twice weekly arrivals list of the royalty, aristocracy, gentry and celebrities was published from the 1860s and both local and some London-based newspapers carried London-Brighton rail timetables. For notices of the Brighton season later in the nineteenth century see The Brighton Courier of Fashion, published in the 1870s and fashionable press such as The Queen, London and Brighton, The Lady’s Pictorial and Vanity Fair.
28. John George Bishop, Strolls in the Brighton Extra-Mural Cemetery, first and second series 1864–7 (Brighton: Fleet and Co., Brighton Herald office, 1867), first series, June 1864, p. 15. I am grateful to Keith Cavers for providing me with this reference. As noted earlier, the Michau/De’Egville families will be considered in greater depth in another article.
29. See Keith Cavers, ‘“Some Talk of Alexander”: James Harvey D’Egville and the English Ballet 1770–1836’, unpub. MPhil thesis, Department of Dance Studies, University of Surrey, 1994.
30. Precedents in the nineteenth century are of course the treatises of Thomas Wilson on country dances and the quadrille. The Polka of 1845 is in fact a translation from the original French of Eugène Coulon.
31. Without the first edition, it is impossible to be exactly sure of the changes referred to by Scott in his preface. There are 20 pages of adverts for music in the second edition. My knowledge of the earlier edition and its publication date is in part due to the collection of press cuttings, ‘What the Press Says’ by Scott himself. I am extremely grateful to his granddaughter, Miss Gillian Booth, who most generously loaned me his original compilation to consult at length. Both surviving copies of the second edition are attractively produced with gold embossed lettering on the cover (the New York Public Library copy is red, that of the British Library, blue).
32. For the growth in literacy and reading habits in the nineteenth century, see Richard D. Altick, The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800–1900 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1957).
33. A. H. Franks, Social Dance, p. 140 refers to his literary style as ‘pompous and circumlocutory’, a charge with which I would agree in certain instances where Scott is not dealing directly with how to perform various figures and movements.
34. Page 35. Copy in British Library.
35. Dancing As It Should Be (London: Pitman [1886]), pp. 44–5. Copy in British Library.
36. Grace and Folly; or Dancing and Dancers (London: Ward and Downey [1887]), p. v. Copy in British Library.
37. Page’s Brighton Directory of 1884 lists Scott as still active at 19 Powis Square and at Compton Terrace in 1885. The Graphic, 24 January 1885 notes his address as Compton Terrace. 6 Compton Terrace was re-named as 17 Compton Avenue c.1890 (census returns and internal evidence from one of Scott’s publications [1890]). Plans for permission to extend this property with ‘an additional room to rear’ are dated 3 June 1884, Brighton and Hove City Planning Office.
38. Pages 14–16.
39. See the useful discussion by Richard Ralph, Life and Works of John Weaver, pp. 128ff. on the significance of ancient sources for the dancing master apologia tradition in the eighteenth century and Weaver’s seminal use of such sources and subsequent writings.
40. The Chorolistha, an entirely New Round Dance (London: Francis Bros & Day [1889]); new edition by Francis Day and Hunter [1890]; band parts published in Boosey’s Supplemental Military Journal, April 1890; The Dreamland Chorolistha (London: Francis, Day and Hunter [1890]). All copies held in the British Library. The name of the dance was adversely commented upon in The Weekly Times, 8 September 1889, copy in Scott, ‘What the Press Says’, p. 7.
41. Dancing Times, December 1924, p. 283.
42. The Versa, Brighton: The Author [1890]; also published by Francis, Day and Hunter [1891]; The Accommodation Quadrille (London: Francis, Day and Hunter, 1893); The Roundabout (London: J. B. Cramer, New York: Edward Schuberth, 1895); The Spring Dance (London: Hutchings and Romer [1898]).
43. The Waltz at a Glance (London: Francis Bros and Day [1888 – dated from press reviews]), copy in Bodleian Library, Oxford; Dancing as an Art and Pastime (London: George Bell, 1892); Dancing, All England series (London: George Bell, 1894).
44. Dancing and its Relations to Education and Social Life (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1885).
45. Dancing as an Art and Pastime, p. 131. ‘Arry and ‘Arriet were not invented by Scott. They would have been immediately identifiable to his middle-class readership as a stereotypical young Cockney couple, through cartoons in the satirical magazine, Punch.
46. With regard to the likelihood of ‘Arry and ‘Arriet’s being able to dance in the position shown in the photograph, I am grateful for discussion following my paper presented at the annual conference of the Society for Dance History Scholars: ‘Embodying Refinement in Late Victorian and Edwardian Society: The Principles and Edward Scott’ (Temple University, Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, June 2002) and at my research seminar, ‘Dancing Gentility: Social and Theatrical Dance Techniques in late Nineteenth Century England’, presented to the Department of Dance, University of Surrey, Roehampton, May 2003.
47. London directories: 1896–1897 at 103 Victoria Street, Westminster (Scott appears to be in partnership with Madame Rose Talma, teacher of dancing in 1897); 1898 at 13 Harrington Road, opposite South Kensington railway station, and at 128 Cromwell Road from 1899–1903. There are no listings for this latter address in 1904 and 1905 which makes the exact date of Scott’s departure from London premises difficult to pinpoint.
48. I am grateful to Mary Clarke for her kind permission to consult P. J. S. Richardson’s copies inscribed by Edward Humphrey at the Dancing Times offices, London.
49. ACC 5376/50/1, East Sussex County Record Office. I am grateful to Philip Bye, senior archivist, for location of this reference.
50. See F. M. L. Thompson, The Rise of Respectable Society: A Social History of Victorian Britain, 1830–1900 (London: Fontana Press, 1988), pp. 168–76, for an insightful discussion on class, occupation and house rental/purchase in the later nineteenth century.
51. See Who’s Who and Where: The Illustrated Year Book of Hove, Brighton: The Robinson Printing Company, 1907, pp. 116–17, which refers to Scott’s ballroom as ‘a very fine apartment, covering the entire first floor’ and includes a photograph. Copy in Hove Reference Library. I am grateful to local historian, Judy Middleton, for drawing this reference to my attention and to the present occupiers of Rochester House (now the Tim Jones House), for permission to view the original plans for 1893, Hove Town Hall.
52. Page’s Brighton Directory. My next tracing of Aylwin Emily Scott is at 5 Ivy Road, Cricklewood in 1917 (will). Their second child, Lalage Mabel (born 1885) was married from here in 1919 (marriage certificate) and Aylwin Emily Scott was resident at the same address until her death. Scott’s elder son, Harold Edward became a professional pianist, including in his repertoire the jazz and ragtime which his father so abhorred (information on his career from Gillian Booth).
53. Death certificate. Marriage certificate, 18 May 1932.
54. Birth certificate.
55. Scott, ‘What the Press Says’, p. 9. ‘A Spanish dance by Miss Parks in costume’, Brighton Gazette, 17 January 1895; ‘Miss Patience Parkes, a pupil of Mr Edward Scott, was very loudly cheered for the graceful Spanish dance, which she gave as arranged by her tutor.’ Brighton Guardian, n.d. Both clippings headed ‘Notice of Entertainment in the Dome’ by Scott.
56. I have not been able to trace a birth certificate for Scott’s second son, Bernard, who was some seven years older than Stella Alice (information from Gillian Booth). Stella Alice appears in a number of Scott’s publications (for example, All About the ‘Boston’: A Critical and Practical Treatise on Modern Waltz Variations (London: Geo. Routledge and Sons, New York: E. P. Dutton, 1913); Dancing Artistic and Social (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1920); Dancing Times, September 1924, p. 1145; Dancing Times, August 1925, p. 1161). Both she and her mother assisted Scott in teaching, perhaps one of the last comparatively high profile examples being his guest class on ‘Old Court Dances’ taught for the Operatic Association of Dancing four years prior to his death, The Operatic Association Gazette, no. 12, August 1933, p. 8.
57. Dancing Times, November 1894, p. 6. It is possible that Crompton was a rival. Certainly most of Dancing was written by himself or pupils, but Scott’s name does not appear in the correspondence even, although he was an avid letter writer to the press about standards of dancing.
58. Dancing Times, January 1898, p. 2 and February 1900, p. 9.
59. Scott’s first article in The Dancing Times appears in November, 1910 (pp. 31–2). Not surprisingly, his subject matter is the waltz. Richardson’s portrait of Scott can be found in The Dancing Times, February 1913, pp. 303–4.
60. See, for example, the Sitter Out (aka Richardson), The Dancing Times, October 1914, p. 5.
61. These values were not of course peculiar to Scott but represent continuity of bodily decorum and grace which has its roots in the aristocratic court of Louis XIV. See Sarah R. Cohen, Art, Dance, and the Body in French Culture of the Ancien Régime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), for a discussion of aristocratic and professional bodies. The je ne sais quoi of the French aristocrat is, by the nineteenth century, despite Anglo-French relationships, considered a vital ingredient in the make-up of the English gentleman. These values will form part of a future consideration on dance and English masculinity and will be related to other writer/teachers on dance in nineteenth century England.
62. The Morning Post, 17 January 1899.
63. For an overview of these introductions see the firsthand experience in Richardson, The Social Dances of the Nineteenth Century, pp. 118ff. and pp. 145–6.
64. See S. Dickie, ‘The Origins of the ISTD’, Dance Now, vol. 1, no. 1, Spring 1992, pp. 58–61 (p. 61); specialist organisations include the Cecchetti Society founded in 1922 but later assimilated into the ISTD and the Operatic Association of Dancing (later to become the Royal Academy of Dancing, now the Royal Academy of Dance), established in 1920.
65. See Alan D’Egville, Adventures in Safety (London: Sampson Low [1937]), pp. 154–7.
66. Brighton Herald, 14 October 1911, p. 3.
67. The ABC of Dancing, in All Branches (London: H. J. Drane [1901]) (copy in the British Library); Dancing (London: George Bell, 1905) (copy in Royal Academy of Dance Library); How to Dance (London and Melbourne: War, Lock and Co. [1909]) (copy in the British Library); The New Dancing As It Should Be (London: George Routledge, 1910) (copy in the British Library); Dancing (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1911) (copy in Royal Academy of Dance library). Scott’s own press cuttings collection is strangely silent for reviews, apart from those of his novels, during this decade.
68. The Marvellous Experience of John Rydal, London: Langham and Co.; A Romance of Three, London: Greening and Co., 1907; Thorns, London: Erskine MacDonald, 1915. (Copies of all in the British Library.)
69. ‘What the Press Says’, undated press cutting, p. 171.
70. Daily Chronicle, 7 January 1914, in ‘What the Press Says’, p. 171.
71. See, for example, his views in Dancing Artistic and Social, pp. 140–1.
72. See correspondence in The Daily Telegraph, 3 February 1913, 13 February 1913, also unidentified material in Scott, ‘What the Press Says’, pp. 84–5; Louis H. D’Egville, ‘Real Progress in Dancing’, The Dancing Times, October 1923, pp. 95–6 (p. 96) It should be remembered that other notable figures in dance of the period, such as Isadora Duncan and Cecil Sharp, were opposed to musical and kinetic influences from African-American traditions.
73. Quoted in Social Dances of the Nineteenth Century, p. 117.
74. See, for example, Brighton Herald, 1 October, 1910, The Lady’s Pictorial, Christmas number, 1910, The Lady, 7 December 1911, The Morning Post, 10 February 1912, Brighton Herald, 22 March 1913, Brighton Society, 29 October 1914, Brighton Society, 15 April 1915, Sussex Daily News, 21 December 1916.
75. ‘What the Press Says’, pp. 90, 93.
76. Dancing in All Ages, London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1899.
77. Lilly Grove, Dancing, London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1895. Lilly Grove was the wife of anthropologist, Sir James Frazer.
78. Drid Williams, Ten Lectures on Theories of the Dance (Metuchen, New Jersey and London: Scarecrow Press, 1991), pp. 26–32.
79. ‘An anthropologist looks at ballet as a form of ethnic dance’, first published in Impulse, edited by Marian Van Tuyl, San Francisco: Impulse Publications, 1969–70.
80. See, for example, ‘The Prince and Mrs Fitzherbert’, Brighton Herald, 7 November 1925; ‘Dancing in Shakespeare’s Day’, Dancing Times, December 1922, pp. 233–6.
81. I am currently preparing a study of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries’ revival of historical dances in England whose proponents included Nellie Chaplin, Cecil Sharp, Ardern Holt and Alice Cowper Coles amongst others. Crompton (known as ‘Minuet’ Crompton at one point) had a troupe of revivalist dancers who gave exhibitions at balls, parties and in the theatre. Belinda Quirey quite rightly was a severe critic of nineteenth-century theatrical versions of the minuet – see her comments in May I Have the Pleasure? The Story of Popular Dancing (London: BBC), pp. 57, 60–3. To a nineteenth-century historian of dance, however, such a phenomenon, despite the obvious misrepresentation of an earlier age, is in itself worthy of scholarly investigation.
82. See Gaston Vuillier, A History of Dancing from the Earliest Ages to Our Own Times, from the French of Gaston Vuillier, with a sketch of dancing in England by Joseph Grego (London: William Heinemann, 1898), pp. 346–60. The fancy dress balls were clearly a widespread fashion in European and North American Society at the end of the nineteenth century.
83. See, for example, R. M. Crompton, Theory and Practice of Modern Dancing (London: Willcocks and Co. [1891]), pp. 84–5 (copy in the British Library); also The Perfect Art of Modern Dancing (London and New York: Butterick Publishing, [1894]), pp. 56–7 (copy in the New York Public Library). For a brief but informative comment on other examples see Elizabeth Aldrich, ‘The Writing of Dance History’, http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/dihtml/diessay9.html
84. See, for example, Margaret Rolfe’s reminiscences of the late 1870s, Sarah C. Woodcock, ‘Margaret Rolfe’s Memoirs of Marie Taglioni: Part 1’, Dance Research, vol. vii, no. 1, Spring 1989, pp. 3–19 (p. 17). Also Sandra Noll Hammond, ‘The “Gavotte de Vestris”: A Dance of Three Centuries’, Society for Dance History Scholars, 7th Annual Conference, 1984, pp. 47–52.
85. See Scott, Dancing in All Ages, pp. 164ff.; ‘The Minuet’, The Dancing Times, December 1918, p. 75 and letter to the Dancing Times, November 1920, p. 115. For reference to his library work, see his obituary notice, Brighton Gazette, 27 March 1937, p. 28.
86. For developments on the other side of the Atlantic, see Julie Malnig, Dancing Till Dawn: A Century of Exhibition Ballroom Dance (New York and London: New York University Press, 1992), pp. 1–17.
87. Pages 31–3.
88. All About The ‘Boston’: A Critical and Practical Treatise on Modern Waltz Variations (London: Geo. Routledge & Sons, 1913), p. vii.
89. Dancing Artistic and Social, revised and enlarged edition (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1920), p. 126.
90. Ibid., p. 143.
91. ‘Will the Boston Live?’, Dancing Times, November 1910, pp. 33–4 (p. 34). On the differences between the Boston and the Waltz of this period, see P. J. S. Richardson’s excellent firsthand summary in A History of English Ballroom Dancing (1910–45) (London: Herbert Jenkins, [1946]), pp. 18–21. Richardson’s role in developing the English styles of ballet and ballroom cannot be over-estimated and an evaluation of his contribution to national developments across dance is long overdue. For an early scholarly appreciation of Richardson’s part in establishing British ballet see Beth Genné, ‘P. J. S. Richardson and the Birth of British Ballet’, Society of Dance History Scholars, Proceedings 5th Annual Conference, 1982, pp. 94–101.
92. A History of English Ballroom Dancing, p. 44; The Dancing Times, October 1914, p. 5. The latter journal is an invaluable source for description and debate surrounding the introduction of new social dances and their control. See also Victor Silvester and Philip J. S. Richardson, The Art of the Ballroom (London: Herbert Jenkins, 1936), especially pp. 11–64 and more recently, James J. Nott, Music for the People: Popular Music and Dance in Interwar Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 148–90.
93. A History of English Ballroom Dancing, p. 46. Scott was certainly present at the third conference and indeed demonstrated the waltz; see ‘Our Third Informal Conference of Teachers of Ballroom Dancing’,The Dancing Times, June 1921, pp. 725, 727 (p. 727). In the same issue, however, Richardson in his guise as ‘The Sitter Out’ comments that ‘it will be always exceedingly difficult to reconcile the out-look of the old style teacher with that of the modern school’ (p. 702). Richardson’s vision to marry the virtues of both new and old was to be extraordinarily productive and far reaching.
94. Dancing for Strength and Beauty (Renascent Dancing): A Critical and Practical Treatise (London: Allen and Unwin, 1921); ‘A New Book on Dancing’, The Dancing Times, January 1922, p. 377; Richardson erroneously refers to the title of this book as Dancing for Health and Strength. The book received wide critical appreciation as Scott’s press cuttings collection demonstrates.
95. The ABC of Dancing (London: Drane’s [1923]), copy in the Bodleian Library; Three Hundred Hints on Modern Dancing: Recreative and Theatrical (London: Allen and Unwin, 1923); copy in the Bodleian Library; Better Ballroom Dancing (London: Eveleigh, Nash and Grayson [1926]), copy in the Bodleian Library. The latter was re-issued [1934] (London: Grayson and Grayson), copy in the New York Public Library.
96. ‘The Late Mr Edward Scott’, The Dancing Times, June 1937, p. 347.
97. The titles of a number of his books reflect this. He also included chapters on solo and ornamental dances and stage dancing. Some of the ideas and material raised here have been essayed in conference papers presented at the 2002 annual conference of the Society for Dance History Scholars, op. cit. and ‘Will You Walk a Little Faster? Aspects of Dancing the Quadrille in Late Victorian and Edwardian Society’ (University of Limerick, June 2003).
98. As epitomised in the title of Millicent Hodson’s publication, Nijinsky’s Crime against Grace: Reconstruction Score of the Original Choreography for ‘Le Sacre du Printemps’ (New York: Pendragon Press, 1996).
99. Margaret Rolfe’s memoirs cited in Sarah Woodcock, op. cit., p. 17, relate her depression at realising ‘the enormous gulf between professionals & amateurs’.
100. Alan D’Egville, Adventures in Safety, pp. 153ff.
101. See David Cannadine, The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy (London: Papermac, 1996), chapter 8.
102. Major changes to high society became manifest in the 1880s, following the agricultural depression. It was the invasion of the greatly moneyed which led to the decline of the select aristocratic few as leaders of fashion and other social factors, such as growing diversity in leisure opportunities, contributed to a lack of interest in dancing by this social group. By the time Richardson was dancing in London in the 1890s, he could point to ‘the aristocracy who danced so indifferently’ and the emergence of the middle classes as better dancers. See Richardson, The Social Dances of the Nineteenth Century, p. 116 and A History of English Ballroom Dancing, pp. 14–16.