8.1 Regency Era
The expression Regency dance today refers to the dances in vogue in England in the period from approximately 1790 to 1825, even if the actual Regency in the British Kingdom lasted only from 1811 to 1820. The beginning of the Regency, in fact, it is conventionally equated with the Act of Parliament of 1811 which awarded the Regency of the Kingdom to the eldest son of King George III due to his father's mental illness.
The decade of regency of the future George IV was marked by the Napoleonic wars in Europe and by a particularly lively cultural climate at home. With the nascent Romantic movement, novelists such as Jane Austen and Walter Scott, poets such as Lord Byron, John Keats, William Blake and William Wordsworth, artists such as John Constable and William Turner established themselves in this period.
A particular phenomenon of custom, in England as in the France of the Restoration, was dandyism, from which the Prince Regent George himself and his court of libertine gentlemen, more involved in worldly life than in the government of the country, did not escape. The dandies were the elegant men whose behavior was inspired by Lord G.B. Brummell, considered the arbiter of London elegance.
Their display of elegance in their manners and dress was accompanied by forms of exasperated individualism, ironic detachment from reality and rejection of bourgeois mediocrity. The dandy stood out in his clothing for an exaggerated attention to detail: he wore long trousers, blue jackets and tailcoats for the evenings; the new attention to the personal hygiene of gentlemen is due, among other things, to the abandonment of unhygienic wigs. Victorian historian Thomas Carlyle defines the dandy as "a man whose trade, office and existence consists in wearing clothes." With his lifestyle, his attitude and his refined elegance, the dandy intended above all to distance himself from a mass that he despised and whose egalitarian principles he did not share. In the England of those years, the growing well-being produced by the industrial revolution contrasted with the social degradation caused to the working class by the same mechanization that had so much improved the income and style of the small and medium bourgeoisie.
In Georgian times, dancing was considered an essential "skill" for both women and men, including the military, not only for the pleasure of dancing, but to acquire elegance and poise. Young people from good families had to know how to dance, and dancing was part of their education especially in view of major social events.
As happened among the nobles of previous centuries, in upper middle class families the children were taught by the dance master and even some schools provided dance courses, an activity that had a place of honor in social life.
The privileged classes gathered in public halls and private homes, or outdoors, when the weather permitted, to dance the night away. Dance parties were often planned months in advance and had hundreds of guests. In the large residences of the wealthy classes and in country houses, balls were an opportunity to show off wealth and prestige so much so that the most prominent families competed to host the most coveted event of the season, but small dance parties were improvised in any private living room simply by moving the furniture and having someone play the piano.