Book: Castle's Modern Dancing - 1914
Vernon and Irene Castle were world famous in their day and did a tremendous amount to popularize and, to some extent, civilize the "Modern Dances". They deeply disapproved of the less dignified faddish dances like the Bunny Hug or Grizzly Bear and counseled against shoulder wiggles and deep dips, though they never succeeded in eliminating them.
Their book "Modern Dances" was a best seller, and is a wonderful source on One Step, Tango, Waltz, Maxixe and other variations of the time. Much of this manual though is, like so many other dance manuals through history, devoted to etiquette, fashion and a moral and physical defense of dancing. In this abbreviated version, I have deleted all but the dance instruction. I do this not because I don't think the other stuff is useful and important, but because my server limits the size of documents I can upload, so I had to trim it down to make it fit.
If you want to read the full book, have a look on the "Internet Archive"
This PDF is via Google Books, which scanned the edition in the Stanford University Library. My particular additions include an OCR, so you can do a word search and the addition of a "Bookmark" table of contents that should allow you to jump to the section you desire.
| Attachment | Size |
|---|---|
| View the Book | 7.19 MB |