Dancing: Assembly Rooms in 18th-Century Essex

The 18th century saw a marked increase in the provision of leisure activities for the comfortably-off in provincial towns – theatres, concert rooms, booksellers and circulating- libraries and, not least, assembly rooms for dancing. The leading inns in urban centres and on coaching routes were enlarged by the addition of long rooms, and buildings were erected to provide new and attractive dancing rooms with the necessary card rooms and refreshment facilities. There were subscription series of assemblies, balls put on for their own benefit by dancing masters and musicians and balls on occasions when members of county gentry families came to town for races week, assizes week or a Handel festival. Assembly rooms were erected and run either as a commercial proposition by inn keepers and the developers of spas or by committees of local gentry intent on improving the facilities in their neighbourhood. The provision of assembly rooms in Essex illustrates the general popularity of social dancing at this period and the variety of venues adapted or erected for the purpose. Olive Baldwin and Thelma Wilson have written extensively on 17th and 18th-century singers and theatre performers for musical periodicals and for New Grove and the Ox ford Dictionary of National Biography. They edited facsimile editions of the complete songs of Richard Leveridge (1997) and of The Monthly Mask of Vocal Music, 1702-1711 (2007). Recent articles and papers include ‘Nancy Dawson, her hornpipe and her post humous reputation’ (RECTR, 2015), ‘Dancing the Hornpipe in The Beggar’s Opera’ (Ox ford, April, 2018), ‘Reading the Accounts: Dancers at Lincoln’s Inn Fields Theatre in the season of 1726-7’ (Oxford, April 2019), Watching the Maskers: Masquerade Dances in the London Theatre (Oxford, via Zoom, 2020), ‘A Hundred Years of the Funeral Procession and Dirge in Romeo and Juliet (Theatre Notebook, forthcoming, 2022) and ‘Mistresses of Dancing-schools in Edinburgh, 1755 to 1814 (Historical Dance, forthcoming). The 24th Oxford Dance Symposium ‘Dancing in Town and Country’ New College, Oxford, 19 & 20 April 2022.