1847 lithograph of a couple dancing a polka. The colored lithograph is titled “The Bohemian Polka.”
5 December 2022
[6-7 December 2022: verified the date of and expanded the transcription of the Holley letter, added the alternative etymology, & made other minor edits and corrections]
Where did this name for round spots of dye on clothing originate? And what, if anything, does it have to do with the dance in 2/4 time of the same name?
Polka is a Czech word for a Polish woman, and the common explanation is that the dance originated in Bohemia in the 1830s and is named in honor of the Polish military cadets who unsuccessfully rose up against their Russian occupiers in 1830-31. But militating against this origin story is that the polka appears in the titles of 2/4 time musical works as early as 1825. It appears as a title for a musical composition in 2/4 time in Pierre L. Duport’s 1825 Miss George Anna Reinagle Music Book for Fancy Tunes, a manuscript of dance tunes taught by Duport, who was a dance instructor in the United States. It seems likely that the word originated in Bohemia, but the dedication to the Polish cadets is after-the-fact.
An alternative explanation, labeled as “now discredited” by the Oxford English Dictionary for mysterious reasons, is that the name of the dance comes from the Czech pulka, meaning half, as in half-step.
The dance as we know it today was a popular sensation in Britain and the United States in the 1840s. The following appears in the London Times of 5 October 1843:
The band of the 1st Life Guards performed the following pieces of music during the banquet yesterday evening:—Overture, Scotch medley, Waddell; Pot Pourri, Russian airs, Labisky; Waltzer “Londoner Sarxon[?],” Labitsky; German air and pas redouble, composed by Her Royal Highness the Duchess of Kent; Serenade (Don Pasquale), Donizetti; Selections from Alma, Costa; Quadrilles (Les Druids), Dufrene; Polka, Labitsky.
Elizabeth Barrett (later to be married to Robert Browning) wrote the following in a letter dated 31 December 1843:
Harriet Martineau is quite well, “trudging miles together in the snow,” when the snow was, and in great spirits. Wordsworth is to be in London in the spring. Tennyson is dancing the polka and smoking cloud upon cloud at Cheltenham. Robert Browning is meditating a new poem, and an excursion on the Continent. Miss Mitford came to spend a day with me some ten days ago; sprinkled, as to the soul, with meadow dews. Am I at the end of my account? I think so.
And in the United States, Mary Austin Holley, an early Anglo settler of Texas, wrote the following in a 5 July 1846 letter referring to festivities at the St. Charles Hotel in New Orleans. (The OED incorrectly dates this letter to 1837.) The letter connects the dance with Poland, not Bohemia, but whether that is correct or if it is Holley’s assumption based on the dance’s name is unclear:
Judge Carlton & his daughter, Mrs. Hunt, & her children & some other devoted mothers ditto danced polkas—Colonel Tucker a hornpipe. […] As before everybody was at St. Charles.
[…]
It was announced that a Mr. Karponky & his scholars would dance the grand Polka. He is a Pole—has taught 3000 persons the Polka in these U.S.
[…]
Mr. Stuart told me he danced the Polka with Mrs. Mouton, she is a Washington lady & she [?] is beautiful, at Mrs. Busks [?] ball. The rage for that dance is wonderful. Mrs. Stuart says that the Polka teacher in London, also a Pole, makes more money than any body—that young & old learn. What a curious thing is fashion.
In an attempt to cash in on the popularity of the dance, any number of products and fashions were dubbed polka in the 1840s, including the polka hats, the polka pelisse, and the polka jacket, a tight-fitting women’s jacket popular in the nineteenth century. William Thackeray makes note of this style of jacket in this antisemitic passage:
Last Sunday I saw an Israelitish family of distinction ensconced in the poor little carriage—the ladies with the most flaming polkas, and flounces all the way up; the gent. in velvet waistcoat, with pins in his breast big enough once to have surmounted the door of his native pawnbroker’s shop, and a complement of hook-nosed children, magnificent in their attire. Their number and magnificence did not break the carriage down; the little postilion bumped up and down as usual, as the old horse when his usual pace.
Polka dots appear as part of this polka craze. The earliest references to polka dots that I have found are in newspaper advertisements. This one appeared in the Louisville Daily Journal on 18 April 1851:
JUST Received—
Paris printed Bareges;
Do do Silk Muslins;
Polka dot Tarleton;
Do do Swiss;
Printed Jaconet and Organdie Muslins.
The do is short for ditto, and indicates the words above should be repeated on this line.
And this ad appears in Philadelphia’s Public Ledger on 29 October 1852:
12½ CENT MOUS. DE LAINES.---J.
ARCHAMBAULT & SON, Northwest corner of
TWELFTH and MARKET Sts., will open, this morning—
100 pieces Polka Dot De Laines, at 12½, worth 25 cents.
100 pieces Paramattas, all colors, from 25 to 75 cents.
Sources:
Special thanks to K.T. Schwarz for finding the original Holley letter in the University of Louisville archives.
Advertisement. Louisville Daily Journal (Kentucky), 18 April 1851, 2. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
Advertisement. Public Ledger (Philadelphia), 29 October 1852, 2. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett.Letter (31 December 1843). The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, vol. 1 of 2. Frederic G Kenyon, ed. London: Smith, Elder, 1897, 161. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
“Court Circular.” Times (London), 5 October 1843, 4. Gale Primary Sources: The Times Digital Archive.
Hatcher, Mattie Austin. Letters of an Early American Traveller: Mary Austin Holley, Her Life and Her Works, 1784–1846. Dallas: Southwest Press, 1933, 86. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Holley, Mary Austin. Letter, 5 December 1846. University of Louisville Libraries: Archives & Special Collections, MAH-1846-07-05.
O’Conner, Patricia and Stewart Kellerman. “The Polka in Polka Dots.” Grammarphobia (blog), 2 October 2020.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2006, s.v. polka, n., polka, v., polka dot, n.
Thackeray, William (writing as “Punch’s” Commissioner). “Brighton.” Punch (London), 11 October 1845, 158.
Image credit: J. Brandard, 1847. Public domain image. Wikimedia Commons.