Tripping the Light Fantastic of Regency

“It was the last time when a man was expected to dance as well as he could duel; it was the last time men’s formal clothes could be red, or blue, or bottle green, before they went black; it was the age of Coleridge and Wordsworth, Keats, the Shelleys, and Byron; Walter Scott and Jane Austen.”

So wrote John F. Hertz. He had invited me to the 11th Annual Assembly of Friends of the English Regency, to their grand ball at which “I shall teach dancing,” he wrote.

Anyone who uses “shall” receives my full attention, so I went to meet this gentleman who “should be happy to teach the Half-Poussette” and whose wife “is a devilish good whist player.” The man who pressed the dance program in my hand at the Pasadena Hilton was half the age I expected as were the rest of the Regency friends; most hovering round about the age of 30 and all 70 or so of them turned out in the satin breeches, Empire dresses or velvets of the Regency period, roughly 1811 to 1820.

Best looking in the stocking-legged category was Marjii Ellers who came as Peter Marriot. “But that’s all right” (for her to come as a man), Elayne Pelz said, “because Peter Marriot turns out to be a lady” in Georgette Heyer’s book “The Masqueraders.”

Georgette Heyer is why most of these people are here. “She is the Mozart of the romance novel,” Hertz wrote of Heyer’s three dozen books of historical fiction set in the Regency period. “She is a master of verisimilitude, and almost never serious. No wonder we love her.”

“Very precise of language,” Ren Boxerman said of Georgette Heyer’s work.

Ellers agreed: “Nothing out of character, all language of the period. One book used six different types of slang, each appropriate, in ‘My Lord John.’ ”

“No, a different book,” Boxerman said.

“Well, another one then,” Ellers said.

What Heyer character is Boxerman, I asked. “I’m no one significant,” she said. “I’m the Kern County public librarian--of fiction, what else? This is the one time in the year I wear a dress. Most of the time I’m on my knees in the library.”

Sheila Taylor, in a straw hat, with gloved hands folded on her blue skirt, is here because she got the Regency disease early from her mother who collected Heyer books.

While we talked Hertz demonstrated why open-back chairs came in (to accommodate coattails), told us that Empire dresses were in and powdered wigs out, and returned to conduct the line dances at the other end of the ballroom: The Black Nag, Want of Management, Childgrove, Oxford Flowers, the Congress of Vienna.

Pelz, who wears a green velvet so dark it is almost black--”like trees in the night,” said friend Lois--taught Regency dances at the science-fiction world conference in 1979 at the Brighton Pavilion.

It seems there is a great affinity between science-fiction buffs and the Regency period--”because science-fiction people like to dress up and Regency is the best period to dress up,” Pelz said. “We have Regency dances at science-fiction conventions.”

Somehow we are discussing the Hobbes cartoon. “How did we get on Hobbes?” I asked.

“We free associate really well,” said Boxerman, who has just given me an exhaustive history (as all good librarians are wont to do) on cigarillos, snuff and the Empire dress.

Two white-faced people are straight from a Beardsley drawing; Adrian Butterfield, in gold-braided red and green is Marshal Marat direct from David’s painting, the dancing velvets are absorbing flashes from the crystal chandelier.

Who is the president, who organizes all this?

There are no official officers, members or dues, Hertz said. “We just assemble.”

Assemble is one of the many Regency words meaning a party. Another is ridotto. The Georgian Society with Friends of the English Regency are having their Second Annual Ridotto (“a weekend of abandoned frivolity to take place during the Little Season”) this September in Albuquerque. And they’ll be dancing--Horatio’s Fancy, Orleans Baffled, an Easy Competence, Hole-in-the-Wall--I shouldn’t wonder.