(Blog 5) Primary Documents

To attend a ball (particularly public assembly balls), one would have to pay for tickets or for a subscription of tickets for the entire season. This is a document from the 1811-1812 dance season at the Bath Upper Rooms. It shows the stipulations for purchasing a year’s subscription and how one can pay a little extra to have tea at each dance. Someone might purchase these if they were staying in bath for several weeks or months and planned on attending many of the dances. 

The next document is an invitation to Almack’s Assembly Rooms in London. Almack’s was a social club open between 1765 and 1871 on King Street, St. James in London. It was one of the first social clubs to admit both men and women. Eventually the rooms would host a variety of social events, including English country dances. Almack’s was the place to be in Regency London and so a voucher like this was a highly sought after invitation to society’s elite. This particular invitation was for Anna Elizabeth Grenville, Marchioness of Buckingham in 1817.