Trials, Troubles and Temptations in a Dangerous Era.

Nineteenth-century letters and documents reveal the hard reality behind those ethereal visions on the Victorian ballet stage.

They were visions of tulle and tarlatan tutus. Doe-eyed nymphs with tiny hands and tapering feet, surrounded by satin, ribbons, roses, and billowing skirts, they look out at us from the delicate pastel pages of nineteenth-century publications. They were the ballet girls of the Victorian era, the corps of ballets, operas, and pantomimes. They set and embodied ideals of femininity and grace in the flowering of the romantic ballet era, and they remain the criteria for judging today's female ballet dancers. While there has been outstanding technical improvement in dancers, the goal for every ballerina remains a seemingly effortless transcendence of gravity, as if a goddess has visited the earth, charmed us, then departed without leaving a footprint.

But there was a nightmarish side to this dreamlike ideal, and it occasionally surfaced in the popular press and in scholarly publications. Often the dancers themselves were responsible for the revelation. The following is a letter to the London newspaper The Era of December 16, 1877:

      Sir, Will you give me space in your valuable columns to show a few of
   the trials, troubles and temptations of those whose lot it is to belong to
   the ballet? In the first place it is not generally known that we have to
   practise for four to six weeks ... for which we get not a single
   penny-piece ... Surely the rehearsal time is the time we want money most to
   obtain food and other necessaries. As soon as the rehearsals are complete
   we have a night or two before the production of the ballet to go to the
   Hall or Theatre at twelve o'clock at night and rehearse until five or six
   o'clock the next morning ... No one has a good word for us, because the
   world does not know one-half of our trials and troubles, or they would have
   pity instead of disgust. Hoping that some kind friend will take up the
   matter and remedy the evils of the ballet in its present state, I enclose
   my name and address, and I subscribe myself,

Yours obediently, A poor ballet girl

The following week The Era ran this response:

      Sir--Seeing The Era of last Sunday, I beg to say it is true about
   rehearsals, and that is not all ... At this time of year we have to find
   everything for the Pantomime, as they say they can't afford to pay for
   them. So we must, or go. We mustn't speak out or we go at a moment's
   notice. Tights, shoes and muslin dresses take over one pound to pay for out
   of our money. We have to do all this for nothing. We have rehearsals from
   ten in the morning until five, then sometimes in the evening; and then you
   have your own dresses to make. What time have you except when you ought to
   be asleep? If you are five minutes late in the morning, you are fined, and
   at the same time you are starving, and have to depend on your landlord to
   let you run on a bit, or pawn all you have got, or do something else, and
   that is our lot in life. This is how us poor girls are treated that want to
   get an honest living, as I and hundreds more do. If the public did but know
   half our lot they would pity us, I think, and we might get a little more.
   If you think proper to publish this, or any of it, you would have the
   thanks of many poor girls, who would ever pray for your welfare.

Yours obediently, A ballet girl

Poor working conditions were only a part of the hard lot of these dancers. In Victorian England and in Europe ballet was not considered a proper vocation for a woman In 1853, a story called "The Ballet-Girl" appeared in Chamber's Edinburgh Journal. A character says, "We cannot have our nephew, Captain John Wentworth's shirts made by a ballet-dancer. It would be setting a young man far too bad an example." A "ballet-girlg" had this reply in The Era in 1858:

      Because we wear short clothes, and show our feet which the Almighty gave
   us, we are pitied by the most of our sex who sit in front of a theatre, and
   who are always very glad to look at us, although they do think badly of us;
   but I think if anyone will seriously consider for a moment, they will come
   to the conclusion that, taking us as a body, and considering the
   temptations to which we are exposed, we are not so bad as we seem to be.

Part of the prejudice toward ballet girls was due to the actions of young courtiers earlier in the Regency period. During intermissions these rich playboys paraded up and down the aisles (called Fop's Alley) and courted their favorite dancer afterward in the Green Room. The "protection" and gifts they offered the dancers were a way out of poverty. Although only a few women succumbed to this temptation, those few mined the reputations of the others for some time to come.

Another indication of the low status of the dancers was given in George Vandehoff's Green Room and Stage in 1865. Dancers were not allowed in the "first" green room--the one for "the corps dramatique proper, the actors and actresses of a certain position; the second, belonging to the corps de ballet, the pantomimists, and all engaged in that line of business--what are called the little people...."

The Victorian prejudice against dancers also stemmed from resentment about British dancers not being given the same status as European ballerinas. The Town had this to say about foreigners and female dancers in 1837:

      [I]n fact, it is next to an impossibility for an English girl to get
   engaged at the Opera in any other capacity than a mere supernumerary ...;
   and while thus engaged, she may be considered to be in an academy for
   whoredom, for the Italian Opera, behind the scenes, is a perfect seraglio
   for the use of the wealthy licentious ... Patrician patrons ... [who] seek
   but to put our English girls to the vilest uses....

Another problem was off-season unemployment. Year-round work was available to dancers in a good theater such as London's Alhambra, but others could find only infrequent and seasonal work, as in pantomimes, and had to hold jobs during the day as seamstresses or steel pin welders. Some returned to live with their parents or "had recourse to less reputable modes of obtaining a livelihood," wrote C. H. d'E. Leppington in The National Review in 1891. "It is only fair to add, however, that the appearance of the ballet-girls as they leave the theatre very much resembles that of any other body of young women leaving a respectable place of business."

Illnesses were common among the overworked and illfed dancers. They lived many to a room and shared meals, beds, and germs. Leppington wrote: "The corps of one large house has organized a benefit club for the help of its sick members." The girls would put in a small "subscription" of a few pence a week, and could withdraw a certain amount for a certain number of weeks, followed by half that amount if the illness or injury lasted longer.

Injuries became increasingly sensational around the middle of the nineteenth century after the method of stage illumination changed. Now the steady flame of gas jets bathed the stage in a softer light to enhance the nymphlike look of ballet dancers. Unfortunately the risk of a serious bum was also increased. Whirling motions fanned flames that spread to the dancers' full skirts, causing instantaneous, usually fatal conflagration.

Clara Vestris Webster was a British dancer of great promise. She was England's treasure, one of the few ballerinas during that period who could hold her own with the famous European talents. Her lineage of training went back through her father and his teachers to the court of Louis XIV. Her middle name was homage to one of her father's teachers, Gaetano Vestris. Young Clara had moved to top billing and rave reviews when her costume caught fire during a performance at Drury Lane in 1844. A stagehand tried to smother the flames with his body, and a doctor in the audience rushed onstage to tend to her bums, but she died three days later at age twenty-three.

Emma Livry seemed destined to become the next in a long line of great French ballerinas at the Pads Opera. In 1862, her tutu caught fire during a rehearsal, as she waited to make her entrance. A nearby fireman blanketed the flames, flipping her over to help prevent bums to her face. One paper reported that "the bums, although superficial, are dangerous on account of their extent." She suffered for eight months from her bums and died at age twenty.

A law had been passed requiring costumes to be fireproof, but the dancers disliked the heavy feel that the "carteronization" (named for inventor Jean-Adolphe Carteron) gave their costumes. "They say it spoils the color and set of their dresses," said one report. Livry was among those dancers whose refusal to wear costumes made of the inexpensive but weighty mixture was written into their contracts. In 1860, she had written to the director of the Opera:

      I insist, sir, on dancing at all first performances of the ballet in my
   ordinary ballet skirt, and I take upon myself all responsibility for
   anything that may occur. In the last scene I am willing to dance in a
   treated skirt, but I cannot wear skirts which will be ugly, or which will
   not become me. However, as I feel that the management is quite right to
   bring into force the proposed alterations, I will ask myself after a few
   performances, for a substitution to be made, provided that it will not
   spoil the effect of the costume, which is what I fear.

With best wishes, Emma Livry.

She was quoted as saying, "To be burned to death, that must be very painful. All the same, it is a fine death for a dancer." Livry became an idol for other dancers. Even though the use of "inflammable raiment" was to be enforced, Italian dancer Amalia Ferraris refused to have her skirts treated and said, "No, I would rather die like Emma Livry." A bust of Livry is in the Paris Opera. Scorched pieces of her costume are enshrined in a casket.

One Victorian poet wrote:

   There are perils dire, Which oft beset the Ballet Girl, and the worst of
   all is Fire! Most deadly of the deadly foes that threaten player folk, An
   enemy who never sleeps, whose power is ne'er broke, While of the groups
   Theatrical, the greatest risk who run Are lightly costumed
   Ballerines,--Escape for them there's none,

   A spark upon the muslin dry, then instantly it lights Into a flame, like
   lightning's flash, at sea, on summer nights, A blazing mass of agony, all
   maddened, quick they fly, Yet fly not from the enemy who dooms them thus to
   die That shrivels up the glowing limbs, and face and form, alas! Leaving of
   female loveliness a charred and calcined mass. Ah, happy if they die at
   once, and from Life's stage retire, Than linger on in torment from the
   all-remorseless fire.

Such concern was not universal. One landlord refused to release the body of a burned dancer until he had been paid for the damages caused to his bed and furniture from the three weeks she had spent dying. By 1868, so little progress had been made in preventing these painful injuries and deaths that the British medical journal The Lancet published an article entitled "The Ballet-Girl's Hardships: A Needless Fate":

      Have our readers ever reflected on the courage enquired in the
   ballet-dancer's profession? The risks she runs are hardly less frequent and
   far more formidable than those which the soldier of the line or the man o'
   war's man gets so much credit for facing. It is but one thing to take your
   chance of being sabred or hit by a bullet; but it is another (and to our
   mind) a much more terrible ordeal to pirouette in combustible gauze before
   the foot-lights, or, worse still, to be pinioned to an iron niche in some
   brilliant transformation scene, and to remain immoveably fixed to your
   precarious perch, amid a blaze of light and within leap of the flame from a
   thousand burners. Yet this is the experience which myriads of poor gifts
   have to encounter night after night that juveniles may be entertained and
   gawdy crowds amused....

Some patrons were indeed amused. One English nobleman is said to have attended every performance of ballerina Carlotta Grisi in La Peri. This ballet called for her to make a dangerous leap from a high platform into her partner's arms, and this voyeur did not want to miss the inevitable night when she would miss those arms.

Dancers' roles included standing on tiny iron perches, literally pinned to the scenery in some cases, to form a fitting tableaux for the stars. The tiniest were picked to "fly" across the stage, pulled by rotting ropes and riggings. In a performance in Paris starring Marie Taglioni, one of the greatest ballerinas of the romantic era, two sylphs on wires were caught midair for some time. The rigging had jammed, and the dancers had to be rescued by a stagehand who lowered himself on a rope to free them.

In Brussels, during a performance of Giselle, three dancers were waiting below stage on a counterweighted platform. A trapdoor in the stage above them was to open so that they could be raised as if from their graves. The stagehand lost control of the rope and the platform shot up into the unopened trapdoor, causing the dancers serious head and arm injuries.

Early accounts of dancers' training are sketchy. Many grew up in theatrical families, as did Clara Webster. Parents apprenticed their children to "training schools," which were under contract to theaters to supply children for pantomimes and dancers for ballets. Once a child was too old for pantomimes, ballet training was emphasized. Most of these children were poor and female. Young boys were sent to work as miners or chimney sweeps. The few men who grew up to be ballet dancers in that era were mere "porteurs"--lifters, carriers, and catchers. The shortage of males was not a problem. Women took over their roles, giving ballet an even more feminine image.

In one of the few references to dancers' training in the nineteenth century, Carlo Blasis told dancers in his Elementary Treatise upon the Theory and Practice of the Art of Dancing to "be as light as possible ... bound with a suppleness and agility which gives me the impression you are barely touching the ground and may at any moment take flight." This effect was to be achieved with a barre of 48 plies, 128 grands battements, 96 tendus, 12 rondes de jambe par terre and en l'air, and more.--to be repeated in the center as the lesson continued.

Such earthy work for doe-eyed pastel dancers. But neither the rigors of class nor the threats of catastrophe or onstage cremation swayed Victorian ballet girls from following their dream--to participate in the art of ballet.

Judith Hatcher, a dancer and teacher in Virginia Beach, Norfolk, and Williamsburg, has a B.F.A. and an M.A. in ballet.