Tag Archives: Assembly Rooms

The Bachelors’ balls at the St Leonards Assembly Rooms

I recently watched on YouTube ‘The flirtatious Regency balls of Pride and Prejudice: having a ball’, an amusing attempt to recreate Mr Bingley’s private ball at Netherfield in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Balls provided a rare way for young people to flirt, chat, and touch each other without close supervision while dancing. It made […]

Henry Edward Lewis, mesmerist and phrenologist, St Leonards on Sea, 1857

Henry Edward Lewis was an entertainer who continuously toured the British Isles from 1850 until his death in 1857, lecturing and practising before paying audiences ‘mesmerism’ or ‘magnetism’ (both terms used for what we would call hypnotism) on local subjects. He also lectured on the subject of phrenology, the then popular art of deriving information […]