Issue 760: Devisor
- Object
- The New Waterloo Reel (Dance)
- Submitter
- Maureen Daniel
- Assigned to
- Anselm Lingnau
- Priority
- Normal
- Disposition
- Fixed
- Description
-
You quote the deviser as Robert Owen. Book 26 says it is from the New Lanark Collection of Robert Owen. I have been in touch with New Lanark Heritage Centre and Lanark Library where all the Archive material from Robert Owen is held and they cannot trace any dances. Robert Owen was himself a dancer and the children of the mill workers were taught country dancing but they have no evidence to indicate that The New Waterloo Reel was given to the Society from a Collection of Robert Owen and this is the first indication that I have seen to suggest he wrote the dance. I feel that it is very unlikely but cannot verify this
Previous Actions
- Date July 29, 2015, 9:23 p.m.
- User Anselm Lingnau (anselm)
Assigned changed to »anselm« (previously »None«)
Disposition changed to »Fixed« (previously »New«)
You’re probably right in that Owen wasn’t the actual author of the dance – he just sponsored the publication of the book that contained the dance. I wouldn’t worry too much about the observation that there are no dances among his archived papers; I’d suspect that somebody else prepared the actual book and Owen just endorsed it with his name and/or funded its publication. The Lanark archive people should probably look for a bill from the printer rather than a set of dance instructions.
This is a problem we have with many of the dances from the 17th to 19th century. For example, many people like to think of “Playford” dances as the dances written by Mr Playford the famous dance teacher. It turns out that Mr Playford (or more exactly the Mr Playfords who were in charge of the Playford book over the years) was a publisher and bookseller and dabbled in music to some degree; he was not a dance teacher himself, nor in the actual business of making up dances. It was just that he had found that publishing dance books was a lucrative niche (since people enjoyed dancing but publishing a book of dances hadn’t occurred to anyone else at the time), and he got the dances from who knows where. Many of the old dances in the database are from manuscripts named after their compilers or publishers and it would be very difficult to weed all of those out.
Having said that, I set the “author” of this dance to “Unknown” and have added an explanatory note to the “Extra Info” tab. If we wanted to do this right we would allow a link from a dance to its “source” which would be another publication in the database. In the case of the The New Waterloo Reel the source would be a publication called “The New Lanark Collection” with – for the time being – just this one dance in it, “Robert Owen” as the publisher, and 18xx as the publication year (if we had a publication year, which we apparently don’t). Other dances would link to Playford’s Compleat English Dancing Master, or Thomas Wilson’s books, etc. This would be a major piece of work.
- Date July 29, 2015, 9:56 p.m.
- User Unknown
New issue submitted