“Mr Kellom’s Scholar” : the career of John Topham
(Jennifer Thorp)

In the preface to his Art of Dancing, Kellom Tomlinson recalled one of his ‘scholars’, John Topham, as having ‘appeared upon the Stage with no small applause’ after only two or three years apprenticeship. The dances for this young man, which survive in Kellom Tomlinson’s manuscript Workbook, reveal him to have been a gifted dancer by 1716 and a fully-fledged teacher and virtuosic dancer by 1721. During the early 1720s he performed regularly with the likes of John Shaw and Hester Santlow Booth, two of the leading dancers at Drury Lane theatre, and his own performing career demonstrated a wide range of dance abilities, in serious and comic/grotesque roles, entr’acte dances and pantomimes by John Weaver and John Thurmond.

This paper looks at the career of John Topham, the dances which were created for him, and their place in the changing genres of theatrical dance popular in London during the second quarter of the eighteenth century.

Jennifer Thorp, Upton, Great Britain

Jennifer Thorp is the archivist of New College, Oxford, and also a dance historian and practitioner who specialises in dances for court and theatre of late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England and France. She has published extensively on various aspects of this subject, and also co-organises the annual symposia on eighteenth-century dance which are held at New College, Oxford.  Her interests range from dance in opera to the careers of dancing-masters as shapers of cultural life, and at present she has a particular interest in the careers of French dancers and dancing-masters working in London between c.1660 and c.1740.  As part of that interest she is preparing for publication a facsimile of the 1720 dance manuscript of  F. le Roussau, with a commentary on his London career.