When the Waltz Was New

1916

I have a letter in my possession written by a friend to my great-grandmother in the year 1817, at Christmas time, in which the lady expresses her grave disapproval of the "modern" tendency toward rapid dancing. The paragraph runs as follows:

"I was yester evening at your Cousin Betty's, where I was much struck with the new fashioned dances, which seemed, to me at any rate, to be out of keeping with the propriety and modesty which we look for in young ladies of our class. I can only regret the disappearance of those 'mazurkas' and 'gavottes' as well as the 'minuets' and hope that these new dances or 'valses,' as I think they are named, will quickly disappear from respectable society." —Letter in London Telegraph

—Stevens Point Daily Journal, Stevens Point, Wisconsin, July 29, 1916, page 3.