Early on in my Regency history career, I believed dance cards were a thing but the only primary sources I could find were from the 1870s. Nowadays, that would send alarm bells off for me. But it didn’t. And even the wiki on dance cards suggests that, although in Britain called a ball programme or ball book, they existed as early as the 18th century.
After seeing the most recent Bridgerton and scrutinising the masquerade scene, I recoiled instinctively at the use of the dance card. I remembered reading a debunk of them a few years ago, maybe by Donna Hatch (https://donnahatch.com/dance-cards/) or maybe more recently this article (https://historylizzie.co.uk/2024/07/15/did-women-actually-use-dance-cards-at-regency-balls/). But I naturally wanted to do my own dive into the historical record.
I am so grateful a Regency Reader turned me on to Google Ngram a few years ago, because when I am doing a “fact or cap” type exploration, particularly about cant, its the first place I look. Unsurprisingly, there were no mentions of “dance card” until the mid-19th century. So I went looking everywhere – scholarly research, newspaper archives, book archives, etc. No mention of “dance card” popping up during the long Regency, except one mention from a collection of plays published in 1836 (Collected Plays. (1836). United Kingdom: (n.p.).).
The wiki mentioned ball programme and ball book, so I looked into that.
Ball programme was usually the run of show or list of activities, an entertainment agenda of sorts. Not a little notebook a genteel young lady wore on her wrist for young men to scratch their names into, reserving a dance.
Ball book I found plenty of primary source mentions of, particularly in the middle Regency era, but usually in reference to Assembly Room rules and etiquette:
Thomas, W. T. (1818). The visitors’ new guide to the spa of Leamington Priors and its vicinity, by William Thomas Moncrieff. United Kingdom: (n.p.).
Hertford Mercury and Reformer – Tuesday 14 April 1835
What is being to referred to as a ball book is a list of subscribers to the Assembly rooms, not a list of dance partners.
Based on all this information, and the insightful points Donna Hatch makes about just how long dance sets were, I think it’s safe to say that 1) ball books or programmes were not the same thing as dance cards 2) dance cards were not common in Britain until closer to the Victorian era.
I present the information in this way, with my own fallacy, to say that dance cards are one of those details, like a Heyerism, that gets repeated enough in the pages of historical romance or on the screen that we start to believe it’s true. But the historical record does not bear it out in Regency Britain.
Dance cards were popular in the early 19th century in Vienna, and that is widely believed to be the origin that spread in popularity across the continent before travelling the shores to Britain closer to the middle of the 19th century.
So no, I do not believe the Bridgerton heroines would have danced with a dance card attached by ribbon to their wrists.
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Dance cards ae one of those errors that have been repeated so often, people disbelieve the correction. of course, few understand the type of dances that were customary, such as the waltz being danced within a limited space and not sweeping across the floor.