This ain’t no Hokey Pokey, that’s for sure

I’m writing a ballroom scene for Book Two.  I had my assistant do some research on dances in Regency era balls.  Of course, you all know my assistant is Kelli from these pages don’t you?  Well if you didn’t, you do now.  That’s one of the things I’ve been doing to keep myself on track with writing.  Instead of allowing myself to get lost in the research by getting sidetracked and spending hours on something that should only take a couple of minutes because I find one interesting thing after another, I have Kelli look it up for me.

It’s been working brilliantly.

She sent me an email with the names of the dances I was looking for and a little bit about each one.  Unfortunately, this paragraph was written at the bottom of her very informative email.

Numerous instruction manuals survive from the Regency era. Several by Thomas Wilson are in the US Library of Congress online collection. The Scotch Reel is described by Francis Peacock, whose manual is also available in the LC collection.

This was not good.  Guess where I went. 

I’d never been to the Library of Congress website.  I have no idea why.  The Library of Congress sounds like heaven to me.  Well, it’d be heaven if they let you have coffee drinks and cupcakes, but I’m betting that’s frowned upon in that establishment.  I have been to Washington DC and I’ve always regretted my time there was too brief to visit the Library of Congress.  I’m sure my uncle would have taken me had I requested it.

So, the next best thing is their website.  It’s not the most user friendly site, but I figure it out and lo and behold, there were the very books from the above passage.  Really.  All of the pages from those books written in 1810 and 1815 have been scanned in..  It’s awesome.  The only frustrating thing is that you really can’t print the manuscripts.  You can print page by page and I guess if you were really patient, but why bother?  That’s what a library is all about right.  I can bookmark it and return anytime I need to.

So I started tooling around in the pages of these books and learned a lot.  I learned that these dances were really freaking complicated.  Thank God the people of the highest social circles had nothing else to do because learning these dances would take forever.  No wonder they had dance masters.   And speaking of forever, one of the Quadrilles outlined in the books could last for over an hour.  An hour!  What if you had to pee?  What if you didn’t like your partner?  The whole thing just sounds dreadful to me.

Here is a random page.  If that was me in position as Lady A you can be certain all hell would have broken loose. There would have been scowling all around and “That Miss Bright” would never be invited back to the good parties again.