SEEDS OF DISCONTENT: DANCING MANIAS AND MEDICAL INQUIRY IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY BRITISH LITERATURE AND CULTURE

Abstract

I accepted his invitation; but having once begun to dance, he would on no account be prevailed on to cease. At last I grew uneasy. I fixed my eyes upon him with anxiety; it seemed to me as if his eyes grew dimmer and dimmer, his cheeks paler and more wasted, his lips shrivelled and skinny, his teeth grinned out, white and ghastly, and at last he stared upon me with bony and eyeless sockets.

—“The Dance of Death,” Blackwood's Magazine It is ill dancing with a heavy heart.

—George Eliot, Mill on the Floss