ABSTRACT
Even before Martin adopted the term ‘modern’, the word resonated within social dance communities. In The Modern Dance Tutor; or, Society Dancing (1878), John Freeman Davis, a Toronto dance teacher and composer, framed his description of the ‘latest fashionable dances’ (1878: iii), including the Rockaways and the Triune Glide, with lessons in decorum – a strategy perhaps designed to defend against allegations articulated in anti-dance tracts like W.C. Wilkinson’s The Dance of Modern Society (1869), which denounced contemporary ballroom dances and their ‘rythmic [sic] gyrations’ (23) as ‘immoral amusement’ (57) that transgressed Victorian mores.
