Cheryl A Wilson. Literature and Dance in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Jane Austen to the New Woman. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009. ISBN: 9780521519090. Price: US$94.00/£50.00

This recent addition to the Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture series explores the cultural and textual uses of social dance in nineteenth-century Britain. If its author, Cheryl Wilson, had claimed only to bring the under-analyzed topic of dance to our attention, the study would have opened up new territory; the countless dance scenes in nineteenth-century fiction notwithstanding, ballroom and social dance has been largely overlooked in literary studies until quite recently. Wilson, however, aims to do more than merely fill a gap, proposing instead to “provide a model of intertextuality” (173) that enables new ways of reading nineteenth-century literature, primarily fiction. If it succeeds only partially in that goal, it is wholly successful in its mastery and use of an unfamiliar archive that will help us grasp the importance of social dance in nineteenth-century literature and culture. Before turning to literary texts that feature dance in various ways, Wilson uses her first two chapters to discuss the culture of nineteenth-century social dance. Focusing first on the ubiquity of dancing instruction, Wilson considers the ambiguous role of dancing masters in polite society (Mr. Turveydrop from Bleak House is a memorably satiric example)—ambiguous, she argues, because they “destabilize[d] the gender norms of the ballroom” and because they “challenged class restrictions [by] embodying geographic and social mobility as they moved around the country and among social groups” (23). In an especially fascinating section of this initial chapter, Wilson analyzes a range of dancing manuals. By mid-century, she explains, when social dances had become less complicated, manuals began to supplant dancing masters as the most important source of instruction. Novices and experts alike had many choices—manuals with titles like Ballroom Dancing Without a Master (1872) and The Way to Dance: A Book which Teaches the Art of Dancing Without a Master (1890)—to teach themselves new dances. Some of these manuals were small enough—only two inches high in some cases—to tuck into a handbag or pocket, enabling novitiates to refresh their lessons even as a ball was in progress. Wilson devotes her second chapter to a discussion of Almack’s, the prestigious, exclusive London dance club that was run by a board of aristocratic women called the “Lady Patronesses.” Although Almack’s endured for almost a century (1765-1863), its heyday was during the Regency, when the considerable power of the Lady Patronesses extended beyond the ballroom to highly influential social and political circles. As one of the Lady Patronesses, for example, Lady Palmerston exploited her close connections to two Prime Ministers—she was Palmerston’s wife and Melbourne’s sister—to inveigh on current events like the Reform Bill of 1832. Lady Sarah Jersey, another Almack’s Patroness, became a prominent supporter of Queen Caroline during the trial, an event that became something of a “woman’s cause” for her and other aristocratic women. According to Wilson, Almack’s became a site where fashionable women could wield an unusually strong degree of influence beyond traditionally feminine spheres, thus illuminating the significance of dance to the operations of nineteenth-century society on a wider scale. Even as Wilson opens up new material in these initial chapters, she also begins to lay her methodological groundwork and to explain the principles that will drive her literary analysis in chapters to come. Her goals are ambitious. Wilson argues, first of all, for the centrality and importance of dance in nineteenth-century culture, a position that is reflected in the many dance scenes we all know from Regency and Victorian novels. If I am at all typical as a literate, twenty-first-century reader, I can recognize the topical importance of such scenes without perhaps fully understanding their significance—in large degree, …