BRITISH BOHEMIA:

THE BLOOMSBURY
GROUP
46 Gordon Square, London WC1, where
it all began…
Bloomsbury – ‘a state of mind’ 1

 …if Paris in the Twenties had Montparnasse, London had Bloomsbury. /…/ It was a
postal district, around the British Museum, mostly noted for bookshops & Georgian
terraces.

Bloomsbury, in fact, was a distinctive caste, though also a state of mind. It stood for
what was avantgarde & experimental, not just in writing & publishing but in sexual
relations, economics, painting, politics, philosophy, biography and interior design.

 Bloomsbury was amongst other things a shared social & family background, a web of
family relations, friendships, a network of complex sexual liaisons, an élite with a body
of agreed social and cultural assumptions and standards.

Malcolm Bradbury, The Modern British Novel

 9/30/11

Bloomsbury – ‘a state of mind’ 2

Essential to this was an “aesthetic “attitude to the world itself, which involved a
celebration of the “modern”. It helped to have read Walter Pater, who
emphasized the power of impressions and of “quickened, multiplied
consciousness.”

It was wise to have gone to Cambridge, perhaps been an “Apostle” there, and
certainly to have studied with or read the philosopher G. E. Moore.

Bloomsbury was unmistakably descended from the liberal, critical Victorian

intelligentsia, and knew its own cultural authority.

Malcolm Bradbury, The Modern British Novel

 THE SPIRIT OF BLOOMSBURY
 “The only society which comes to my mind is the ‘Bloomsbury Group’ which is composed of people of
high intelligence, great critical ability, economic independence and liberal opinions.

 Their enemies sarcastically call them ‘highbrow’ and impute sterility to them. This society, however, has
already produced Lytton Strachey, J. M. Keynes, Virginia Woolf (the poetic novelist with great talent),
Roger Fry (our principal art critic), Arthur Waley (the great Japanese scholar and translator), not to
mention other writers of the younger generation like David Garnett.”

 E. M. Forster, Interview to a Greek newspaper, 1929

 “Oh the Bells, the Woolves – or rather Virginia, for I do like Leonard! Oh how I do agree, and if to
become anti-Bloomsbury were not to become Bloomsbury, how I would become it!”

 E. M. Forster, Letter to W. J. H. Sprott, 16 July 1931

 Bloomsbury: “the most beautiful, the most exciting, the most romantic place in the world” where
“everything was going to be new; everything was going to be different.”

 Virginia Woolf quoted by Malcolm Bradbury in The Modern British Novel

 “Conversation; that was all.” Duncan Grant
 “What exactly do you mean‘ was the phrase most frequently on our lips. If it
appeared under cross-examination that you did not mean exactly anything, you
lay under a strong suspicion of meaning nothing whatever. It was a stringent
education in dialectic; but in practice it was a kind of combat in which strength of
character was really much more valuable than subtlety of mind.”

 John Maynard Keynes

Wild fancy dress parties
 “….a party for seventeen…at the
Café Royale…Afterwards they
went back to 46 Gordon Square  Click to edit the outline
for Clive’s and Vanessa’s party. text format
There they listened to a Mozart
trio…and went upstairs for the last  Second Outline Level
scene of a Racine play played by
three puppets made by Duncan,  Third Outline Level
with words spoken by the weird-
voiced Stracheys. The evening Fourth Outline
ended with Gerald Shove Level
enthroned in the centre of the
room, crowned with roses…” Fifth Outline
Level
 Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard
Keynes: Hopes Betrayed Sixth Outline
Level
THE GROUP’S ‘BIBLE’ – G. E. MOORE’S PRINCIPIA
ETHICA (1903)

“We were at an age when our beliefs

influenced our behaviour.”

“I read again last week Moore’s famous

chapter on ‘The Ideal..’ It is remarkable
how wholly oblivious he managed to be of
the qualities of the life of action and also of
the pattern of life as a whole. He was
existing in a timeless ecstasy. His way of
translating his own particular emotions of
the moment into the language of
generalised abstraction is a charming and
beautiful comedy.”
John Maynard Keynes
“The Ideal”

 “By far the most valuable things, which we know or can imagine,
are certain states of consciousness, which may be roughly
described as the pleasures of human intercourse and the
enjoyment of beautiful objects. No one, probably, who has asked
himself the question, has ever doubted that personal affection and
the appreciation of what is beautiful in Art or Nature, are good in
themselves; nor, if we consider strictly what things are worth
having purely for their own sakes, does it appear probable that any
one will think that anything else has nearly so great a value as the
things which are included under these two heads.”
 G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica
 AESTHETICISM
 19th century French l’art pour l’art

 19th century British aestheticism: Walter Pater’s Hellenism and Oscar

Wilde’s “art for art’s sake”

 Moore’s Platonic philosophy

 Woolf’s independent reading in Plato, her fascination with the Greek ideal of
beauty and with the Socratic roots of androgyny and personal relations
 THE ANDROGYNOUS MIND
 “The normal and comfortable state of being is that when the two live in harmony
together, spiritually co-operating. If one is a man, still the woman part of his brain
must have effect; and a woman also must have intercourse with the man in her.
Coleridge perhaps meant this when he said that a great mind is androgynous. It is
when this fusion takes place that the mind is fully fertilized and uses all its
faculties. Perhaps a mind that is purely masculine cannot create, any more than a
mind that is purely feminine, I thought.”

 “Coleridge certainly did not mean, when he said that a great mind is androgynous,
that it is a mind that has any special sympathy with women; a mind that takes up their
cause or devotes itself to their interpretation. Perhaps the androgynous mind is less
apt to make these distinctions than the single-sexed mind. He meant, perhaps, that the
androgynous mind is resonant and porous; that it transmits emotion without
impediment; that it is naturally creative, incandescent and undivided. In fact one
goes back to Shakespeare’s mind as the type of the androgynous, of the manwomanly
mind, though it would be impossible to say what Shakespeare thought of women.”

 Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

MEMBERS
 The novelists Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster
 The literary journalist Desmod MacCarthy
 The critics Roger Fry and Clive Bell
 The biographer and essayist Lytton Strachey
 The painters Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell
 The political writer and worker, publisher and
autobiographer Leonard Woolf
 The economist John Maynard Keynes
 The Cambridge Apostles
 an intellectual secret society at the University of Cambridge founded in 1820

 The origin of the Apostles' nickname dates from the number, twelve, of their founders

 The society is essentially a discussion group. Meetings are held once a week, traditionally on Saturday evenings,
during which one member gives a prepared talk on a topic, which is later thrown open for discussion

 during the meetings, members used to eat sardines on toast, called "whales“

 Women first gained acceptance into the society in the 1970s

 The Apostles retain a leather diary of their membership ("the book") stretching back to its founder, which
includes handwritten notes about the topics each member has spoken on. It is included in the so-called "Ark",
which is a collection of papers with some handwritten notes from the group's early days, about the topics members
have spoken on, and the results of the division in which those present voted on the debate

 Undergraduates being considered for membership are called "embryos" and are invited to "embryo parties",
where members judge whether the student should be invited to join. The "embryos" attend these parties without
knowing they are being considered for membership

 Becoming an Apostle involves taking an oath of secrecy and listening to the reading of a curse, originally written
by Apostle Fenton John Anthony Hort, the theologian, in or around 1851

 Former members have spoken of the life-long bond they feel toward one another. Henry Sidgwick, the
philosopher, wrote of the Apostles in his memoirs that "the tie of attachment to this society is much the
strongest corporate bond which I have known in my life."
 OLD BLOOMSBURY – “On or about December 1910 the human
character changed.”

 When they came down from college, the men of Cambridge began to meet the
women of Bloomsbury through the Stephen family.

 Cambridge Apostle friendships brought into the group Desmond MacCarthy, his
wife Molly, and E. M. Forster.

 Except for Forster, who published three novels before the highly successful
Howards End in 1910, the group were late developers.

 It was also in 1910 that Roger Fry joined the group. His notorious post-
impressionist exhibitions of 1910 and 1912 involved Bloomsbury in a second
revolution following on the Cambridge philosophical one.
 9/30/11

THE OLD BLOOMSBURYS

Old Bloomsbury’s development was shattered

along with just about everything else in
modernist culture by the First World War. None
of the men fought in the war. Most but not all of
them were conscientious objectors, which of
course added to the group’s controversies.
 July 1913
•  Click to edit the outline text
In July 1913 Omega Workshops Ltd opened to the
format
public at 33 Fitzroy Square in the heart of London's
Bloomsbury.

•  Second Outline Level

The workshops incorporated public showrooms as
well as studios.

•

Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant and Roger Fry were
Third Outline Level
named as Directors.
Fourth Outline
• Level
Roger Fry founded and was the driving force behind
the Omega Workshops. He wanted to remove what
he saw as the false division between the fine and Fifth Outline
decorative arts.
Level
Sixth Outline
•
Level
Seventh Outline
 9/30/11
THE OMEGA WORKSHOPS
Fry was keen to see some of the key
ideas of Post-Impressionism,
 Click to edit the outline text
such as bright colours and bold,
simplified forms, applied to format
design.
 Second Outline Level
Fry felt that objects and furniture
should be bought for their  Third Outline Level
aesthetic qualities rather than the
reputation of the artist, so he
insisted that all work was
Fourth Outline
produced anonymously. Level
Designs were unsigned and marked
Fifth Outline
only with the symbol Ω, the Greek
letter 'Omega'. 'Omega' is the last
Level
letter of the Greek alphabet, and in
the late nineteenth century it was Sixth Outline
used to mean the 'last word' on a
subject. Level
Seventh Outline
While the workshops
lasted…  Click
• "It is time that the spirit of fun was introduced to edit the outline text
into furniture and fabrics. We have suffered too
long from the dull and stupidly serious.“format

• Roger Fry
 Second Outline Level
"There were bright chintzes designed by the young
artists; there were painted tables and painted Third Outline Level
chairs and there was Roger Fry himself escorting
now Lady So-and-so, now a businessman from Fourth Outline
Birmingham, round the rooms and doing his best
to persuade them to buy.“ Level
Virginia Woolf Fifth Outline
Vanessa Bell's painted screen, Bathers in a Level
Landscape is a transitional piece between fine
and decorative art. Sixth Outline
The Omega Workshop lasted until 1920
Level
Seventh Outline
 CHARLESTON
• Charleston was the home and country  Click to edit the outline text
meeting place for the writers, painters and
intellectuals known as the Bloomsbury
Group.
format
• The interior was painted by the artists  Second Outline Level
Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell (Virginia
Woolf’s sister), and together with their
collection forms a unique example of their  Third Outline Level
decorative style.
Fourth Outline
• House parties were common and
Charleston was frequently full of guests. Level
Clive Bell came to visit his sons, and the
Woolfs lived only four miles away. Other
guests included Roger Fry and his children,
Fifth Outline
Maynard Keynes and his wife the dancer
Lydia Lopokova and Lytton Strachey and
Level
his sisters. All were captured by Vanessa
with her camera, and some with her
Sixth Outline
paintbrushes.
Level
Seventh Outline
 How Vanessa described Charleston
 My dear Roger,
You must really come & see this place soon. I wish you could think it possible to come
even with D. here. You see you’d have 8 solid hours a day alone with me! It really is so
lovely that I must show it to you soon. It’s absolutely perfect I think.

 It has been refaced with some kind of quite harmless stucco or plaster & has a creeper
 Click to edit the outline
over it. The other sides are wonderful. I suppose it’s 17th or early 18th century (but my
word doesn’t go for much). Anyhow it’s most lovely, very solid & simple, with flat
walls in that lovely mixture of brick & flint that they use about here, & perfectly flat
text format
windows in the walls & wonderful tiled roofs. The pond is most beautiful with a willow
at one side & a stone - or flint - wall edging it all round the garden part, & a little lawn
sloping down to it, with formal bushes on it. Then there’s a small orchard & the walled
garden like the Asheham one & another lawn or bit of field railed in beyond. There’s a
wall of trees – one single line of elms all round two sides which shelters us from west Second Outline Level
winds. We are just below Firle Beacon, which is the highest point on the downs near, &

 Third Outline Level

except towards the downs the ground slopes down from the house on all sides.

 Inside the house the rooms are very large, & a great many. 10 bedrooms I think, some
enormous. One I shall make into a studio. It is very light & large, with an east window,
but the sun doesn’t come in much after quite early morning, & it has a small room out Fourth Outline
of it with another window, so one might get interesting interiors, I think. The house is
really much too large at present of course, but it’s nice to have space & no doubt it will
get filled in time. There’s hardly any furniture in it yet. I am going into Lewes today to
Level
buy a few necessary things. The Omega dinner service looks most lovely on the dresser.
I wish you could come & see it all. It would be such fun to show it to you. Please write
& tell me how you’re getting on potting.
Fifth Outline
 Your V. Level
Sixth Outline
Level
IN A LETTER…

 Click to edit the outline

text format
 Second Outline Level
 Third Outline Level
Fourth Outline
Level
Fifth Outline
Level
Sixth Outline
Level
 Summer school at Charleston

 Vanessa had always hoped to run a

Summer School for children  Click to edit the outline
which would arouse their interest text format
in the arts without the stifling
orthodoxy of a traditional school.  Second Outline Level
In 1925 and 1926 she achieved this
when Marjorie Strachey ran courses  Third Outline Level
for about ten children at Charleston.
She ran a full curriculum for them Fourth Outline
including drama productions Level
which were presented to their
parents and friends. Amateur Fifth Outline
dramatics continued to be a popular Level
form of entertainment at Charleston
in the period between the wars. Sixth Outline
Level
• In 1917 the Woolfs founded their Hogarth
 Click to edit the outline text
Press, which would publish T. S. Eliot,
Katherine Mansfield, and many others
format
including Virginia herself along with the
standard English translations of Freud.

• Virginia set the type and Leonard worked the

 Second Outline Level
press to produce books.

•
 Third Outline Level
The press was named after a house where
they lived in Richmond.
Fourth Outline
• In 1918 Lytton Strachey published his
critique of Victorianism in the shape of four
Level
ironic biographies in Eminent Victorians,
which added to the arguments around Fifth Outline
Bloomsbury that continue to this day.
Level
Sixth Outline
The Hogarth Press - 1917 Level
Seventh Outline
 LATER BLOOMSBURY –
The Memoir Club – 1920
•  Click to edit the outline text
In March 1920 Molly MacCarthy began a club
to help Desmond and herself write their
format
memoirs and also to bring the members of Old
Bloomsbury back together.

• The comedy of a group of friends in their

 Second Outline Level
forties reading one another their memoirs was
not lost on Bloomsbury.  Third Outline Level
• The Memoir Club testifies to the continuing
cohesion of Bloomsbury. For the next thirty
Fourth Outline
years they came together in irregular meetings
to write about the memories they shared in
Level
growing up together, at college, and later in
Bloomsbury. Fifth Outline
• The members of The Memoir Club were not Level
Sixth Outline
quite equivalent to those of Old Bloomsbury.
Yet all but one of the other members belonged
to Old Bloomsbury, and indeed Old
Bloomsbury itself became a popular subject for Level
the Club’s memoirs.
Seventh Outline
THE BLOOMING OF BLOOMSBURY – THE 1920S
 The 1920s were in a number of ways the blooming of Bloomsbury. Virginia Woolf
was writing and publishing her most widely-read modernist novels and essays, E. M.
Forster completed A Passage to India which remains the most highly regarded novel
on English imperialism in India. Forster wrote no more novels but he became one of
England’s most influential essayists.

 Duncan Grant, and then Vanessa Bell had single-artist exhibitions.

 Lytton Strachey wrote his biographies of two Queens, Victoria and Elizabeth .

 Desmond MacCarthy and Leonard Woolf engaged in friendly rivalry as literary

editors, respectively of the New Statesman and the Nation and Athenaeum.

 Roger Fry wrote and lectured widely on art, while Clive Bell applied Bloomsbury
values to his book Civilization (1928), which Leonard Woolf saw as limited and
elitist.

 Leonard, who had helped formulate proposals for the League of Nations during the
war, offered his own views on the subject in Imperialism and Civilization (1928).
The twilight

 In the darkening 1930s Bloomsbury began to die.

 A year after publishing a collection of brief lives, Portraits in Miniature (1931), Lytton
Strachey died; shortly afterwards Carrington shot herself.

 Roger Fry, who had become England’s greatest art critic, died in 1934. Vanessa and
Clive’s eldest son, Julian Bell was killed in 1937 while driving an ambulance in the
Spanish Civil War.

 Virginia Woolf wrote Fry’s biography but with the coming of war again her mental
instability recurred, and she drowned herself in 1941.
 9/30/11

DOCUMENTARIES ON YOU TUBE

• Leonard Woolf - On the Bloomsbury Group and a critical appraisal of
Virginia Woolf (9:56)
• The home of Virginia and Leonard Woolf in Rodmell - film by Ann Perrin
(2:16)
• The Mind and Times of Virginia Woolf (Part 1 – 9:54; Part 2 – 8:06; Part 3
– 6:39)

• Virginia Woolf Documentary (29:25)

 9/30/11

Any questions?

THANK YOU!