Stone dancers in the city: the 'ballet girl' and the nineteenth century public imagination

In an 1857 exhibition of the models for the new Wellington Monument, critics were shocked by the veritable ‘invasion’ of stone dancers featured on the majority of the proposed designs. At once a debased, disgusting rabble and an object of voyeuristic fascination, by the mid nineteenth-century London newspaper accounts increasingly drew attention to the figures of the ‘ballet girls’ as a social entity outside the theatre. Rather than being confined to the theatrical stage, contemporary accounts of ballet girls mapped these dancers onto the streets of London and into visible aspect of everyday city life, including public transport and civic buildings. This paper will investigate how the rhetoric behind the common parlance term ‘the ballet girl’ takes its place in the growing contemporary phenomenon of urban culture, amidst political and nationalist grievances, and alongside the concept of the urban crowd. Moreover, it will seek to demonstrate how the public imagination continually reconfigured the role of dancers in everyday society outside of the theatre and beyond their dancing days.

Author
Sophie Horrocks
Author affiliation
English National Opera