Christmas time 1798 saw Jane Austen attending an assembly ball in Basingstoke. “There were twenty Dances & I danced them all, & without any fatigue,” she boasted afterwards in a letter to her sister Cassandra. Both “fond of dancing” and good at it, the novelist was not unlike so many of our Georgian forebears, for whom dancing was a huge part of social life. In cities, small market towns, spas and seaside resorts, so many of their leisure hours were spent on the dancefloor.
Dancing's sheer sociability was its biggest attraction. Whether it was a relatively humble “harvest frolic” – like the one Sally Gunton, a maidservant in a
