Today is release day for Last Dance in London, a fun, steamy Regency, first in my new Rakes on the Run series. Meet Jasper Ashton, London’s most irreverent bachelor, and Julia Sudbury, a brazen beauty with a penchant for playing Robin Hood. She’s enough to make a cocky rake wish he were safely married!
Available in Ebook and Paperback. Get your Copy!
You won’t find any dance cards at the balls attended by Jasper and Julia. Why, you ask? Because it is set in 1814! In all of my research, I cannot find any evidence they had dance cards that early in the century. Sorry, Bridgerton (although I loved every minute of the first season). The reason is simply that the dances were longer, the quadrille and cotillion and whatnot, and there were far less of them during an evening, usually no more than five long dances. It was easy to keep track of who you were dancing with. As the dancing changed in the mid-century, the dances were shortened, and there were as many as eleven with a meal wedged somewhere in the middle, creating an all-important dinner dance. If you were partnered during the dinner dance, then you were escorted by that person into the dining room or wherever the meal was being served.
Regardless, one’s Regency chaperone often kept track of your dances for you, even if simply for posterity’s sake so you could discuss it later with your girlfriends. She wrote them down in a little booklet. In fact, dance “cards” were mostly booklets, and they were popular in Europe for many decades before making their way to Britain in the 1830s.
Here are some images from later in the century, featuring an exquisite dance fan with matching peacock-blue pencil attached from 1887, and a dance booklet from 1884, and another booklet and fan from the early 1900s.
