Chapter 3


Photograph

The Ballymulligan Polka, as danced at Mrs. Perkins’s Ball. London: Tolkien, undated.

The Ballymulligan Polka, as danced at Mrs. Perkins’s Ball (London, Tolkien, undated.)

Demonstrating –and capitalizing upon- the great success achieved by Mrs. Perkins’s Ball, this piece of sheet music “danced at Mrs. Perkins’s Ball” does not in any way give credit to Thackeray (nor is there any piece of actual music that appears in the book itself). Thackeray, perhaps, might have approved; in the original book, he wrote, “Though a quadrille seems to me as dreary as a funeral, yet to look at a polka, I own, is pleasant.”

f*EC85.T3255.Gz848k. Gift of Herbert L. Carlebach, 1957.