Criminal activities were as much a part of life in the eighteenth century as today and affected most levels of society, including dancers. Whether the cases involved violence, theft, fraud, or worse, dancers were to be found among victims and perpetrators. In England, some of the cases which came before the Old Bailey and the Courts of Assize and Quarter Sessions provide clear evidence that dancers of low social status were automatically regarded as having criminal tendencies: one such dancing-master who committed several robberies, for instance, escaped the full force of the law the first time he was arrested by claiming that since he was a gentleman earning £300 a year he had no reason to steal; another dancer was arrested simply for his physical resemblance to a highwayman until proof emerged that he had been performing in a fairground booth at the time of the robbery. There was some reluctance among dancers who had witnessed crimes or could identify criminals to come forward with evidence, and that raises questions about why such people distrusted the law so much. Even respectable dancers might become victims of crime, as several at Covent Garden and the King’s Theatre were to discover when robbed, embezzled, even murdered. This paper looks at the murky world of crime and its frequent collisions with dancers in the long eighteenth century.
Jennifer Thorp