Here Today, Gone Tomorrow (until next week): The Curious Life of Mr Christopher Towle, Dancing-Master

Christopher Towle (1741 - 1786) followed his father’s profession as a dancing-master but did so along a quite different trajectory, leaving his native county of Staffordshire to set up boarding schools for ‘genteel young ladies’ in Coventry’s High Street and Oxford’s Pennyfarthing Street, the latter establishment being run by his elder sister Hannah. For parts of the year however he abandoned his own school and took to the road for circuits of dance tuition, assemblies and balls held in a swathe of market towns from Warwickshire to Bedfordshire, sometimes advertising the events beforehand in the local press. This paper looks in particular at two of his advertisements and the context in which they were issued: one for 1770 which outlines an exhausting round of public assemblies in local halls and inns; and another for 1783 which lists and attempts to justify the vast curriculum on offer at his Coventry school. Its outrageous claims were described by the poet William Cowper as ‘extravagantly ludicrous’ and worthy of a lunatic, while Towle himself was later referred to by one journalist as ‘that eccentric though rather illiterate artist’. Jennifer Thorp has a particular interest in the dance of royal court and public theatre in England from the late-seventeenth to the late-18th centuries. Her publications have included studies of dance in London opera 1673-1685, and of Anthony L’Abbé’s early London years, 1698- 1715. She has contributed to, and co-edited with Michael Burden, a study of The Works of Monsieur Noverre translated from the French, 1783 (Pendragon Press, 2014), and With a Grace not to be Captured: Representing the Georgian Theatrical Dancer (Brepols, 2021)