Broadside - Towle (Christopher). The present schools as Mr. Towle, teaches in for the year of 1783, as viz. Oxford, Coventry, Northampton, Daventry Woburn, Newport-Pagnell, Wellingborough, Wolston, and Hill..., Newport-Pagnell: Printed for B. Leverett, where every article of letter-press printing is reasonably performed, [1783], single-sheet broadside, ornamental border, slight wear where previously folded, margins trimmed close to border, generally in good condition, folio (35 x 21.2cm)Qty: (1)NOTESESTC T228549. One location only (British Library). This is the earliest recorded piece of printing from Newport Pagnell, Buckinghamshire, and the printer Leverett is otherwise unknown. A lengthy broadside handbill for an 18th century dancing master, asserting the value of dance to all branches of human achievement and offering instruction in virtually all the arts and sciences. Towle, based in Coventry but obviously itinerant, here offers tutoring by the fortnight or quarter. The key to life, in his view, is the ability to dance, "No man can be well prepared in any sort of genteel trades, professions, sicances [i.e. sciences], employments, servitudes, music, the army, or navy, unless they can dance exceedingly well; dancing will make make a man stand and walk, and look, and speak well; to be courteous, and civil, obliging, and complaisant, and genteel, and of a fine forgiving merciful disposition ... I have known and heard of persons who as been good dancers, to advance themselves from a Quirsiter to a Bishop, from a Private Man to a General, from a Cabinboy to a Admiral ... dancing gives a person a easy looking and speaking, to his superiors and inferiors, it takes off those slow and effeminately proud deluding look that some of the sectary make of ... in short dancing is the very greatest support to trades and manufactures of all sorts, and professions of every kind that can be mention'd, and all those sort of persons who has any thing to say against dancing are enemies to the whole community &c." Through Towle's training a boy of twelve can be brought to expertise with the gun and sword in 12 months, "he will prepare a person that must go to sea, to understand the use of the sails upon any sort of vessel, beginning at a scull or oar, up to a first rate man of war"; likewise he professes expertise in 20 musical instruments, and undertakes concerts, balls and assemblies on request. He will give instruction in "all sorts of English, French, Italion [sic], and Flemish, slow and quick dances", but prefers the English forms "The English dances that he teaches, is ten thousand times preferable to all the foreign-dances" and are useful "in the single-stick, quarter-staff, broad-sword, small-sword, wrestling, boxing, running, jumping, swimming, ringing, and horsemanship of all sorts, painting, drawing, stage-players of all sorts, music, surgery, in ev'ry circumstance of fraction and dislocation, &c." Christopher Towle's home establishment was a ladies boarding school in Coventry, where he offered "Needle-work, spelling and reading, at 12.l. 12.s. per year ... music, dancing, writing, French, and drawing, at usual prices to be paid for separately."
