Bloomsbury

“ And now he is in that portion of Bloomsbury where, earlier, very early in the century, the wealthy, and those of high degree resided. It is comfortable and middle class now, and our pedestrian passes a certain pleasant semi-detached house—not large, but eminently respectable—with a stealthy, lingering glance, pausing, before he has walked quite beyond it, as if to note some object of fleeting interest. ”

“ For the romance of houses is not divined by instinct; and even the taste of a Morris or a Rossetti has not always left its mark on their London abodes. That Dickens, Thackeray, John Leech, Darwin, the Rossettis, William Morris, have all lived in and about Bloomsbury, is not patent to the casual visitor. ”

“ In a large room on the ground-floor of Rupert Street, Bloomsbury, sat a woman writing, and undisturbed by the dull beating of the rain without. She often raised her head, intermitted her occupation, and appeared to listen; but it was to the voices of her Past that she was giving heed, and not to the ceaseless patter of the rain. What power they have with us, those voices! While they speak to us we hear nothing else; we know of nothing that is taking place; there is no Present at all; we are living our lives again. ”

“ I exhausted the possibilities of that part of Bloomsbury, the possibilities of variety in the types of housekeepers. The rest of London divided itself into bands—into zones. Between here and Kensington the people that I knew could not be called on after dinner, those who lived at Chiswick and beyond were hyperborean—one was bound by the exigencies of time. It was ten o’clock as I stood reflecting on a doorstep—on Johnson’s doorstep. I must see somebody, must talk to somebody, before I went to bed in the cheerless room at the club. ”

“ It is crushing—but so it is. You might as well, in the world's eyes, live at Fulham or Kennington Park. "Why do you live so far away?" is a question constantly asked of the Bloomsbury resident by people from distant Battersea or Campden Hill, whom it would be useless to try to undeceive. "The very absence of any knowledge of this locality," said a noted wit, "is accounted a mark of high breeding." Among those who have spoken despitefully of Bloomsbury is Mr. Gladstone. ”

“ I do not mean to imply by this that the Mannerings lived in Russell Square, or had any pretensions to be regarded among the magnates of Bloomsbury; for they were poor people, quite poor, living the quietest life; not rich enough even to have a house of their own; mere lodgers, occupying a second floor in a house which was full of other lodgers, but where they retained the importance and dignity of having furnished their own rooms. ”

“ Thus it had come about during that dim and delicate London June that the young lady from Eaton Square had become a familiar figure in the mind, if not in the life, of the Socialist potter of Church Street, Bloomsbury. ”

“ Vague and confused were the thoughts of Henry as the 'bus lumbered its way by historic Drury Lane and across Holborn, to his door in Bloomsbury. A 'bus ride was still full of romance to him, and the glimmering lamps of London were dearer to his mind than "the swing of Pleiades"; every jingling cab that passed, every lighted window, was touched with romance in his eyes. ”

“ Because we say the words right; and how can that sound queer?
It was nearly six o’clock when the chaise drew up before the door of my Uncle Charles’s house in Bloomsbury Square. These poor Southerners think, I hear, that Bloomsbury Square is one of the wonders of the world. The world must be very short of wonders, and so I said.
“O Cary, you are a bundle of prejudices!” laughed Annas.
Flora—who never can bear a word of disagreement—turned the discourse by saying that Mr Cameron had told her Bloomsbury came from Blumond’s bury, the town of some man called Blumond. ”

“ London, it has been ascertained, attracts now a greater number of tourists than any other place in the world, and these tourists mostly lodge in Bloomsbury. The theatrical world, also, lives largely about here—it is so convenient for the theatres; but it prefers, for its part, private lodgings, or flats. Yet, even with all this yearly influx from other nations, Bloomsbury is wonderfully little known to the world of shops or of fashion. Oxford Circus is only distant ten minutes from the Russell Hotel, yet "where is Russell Square?" ”

“ N Great Russell street, Bloomsbury square, is the British Museum, one of the chief glories of the English metropolis, and an institution of which every Londoner is deservedly proud. There is, perhaps, no finer collection of curiosities and antiquities, and the nation has been for a century gathering the tributes of Science, Art, and Antiquity together in this vast building, which covers, with grounds and outbuildings, an area of seven acres. ”

“ In this scene stood the peer from Bloomsbury or Brixton or Balham, watching with who knows what delicious thrills the Gentlemen-at-Arms standing at the doors holding their halberds in white gauntleted hands while the lights glanced off their golden helms. ”

“ The fair hair is powdered; the large eyes gaze from the soft oval face conscious of, and content with, its comeliness; the landscape is sufficiently reminiscent of nature to harmonise with the pretty artificiality of the contented little lady who left Duke Street, Bloomsbury, to sit in the studio of "the man in Cavendish Square" on May 7, 14, 25, July 1, 9, 22, of the year 1789. ”

“ When the eagles of Napoleon Bonaparte, the Corsican upstart, were flying from Provence, where they had perched after a brief sojourn in Elba, and from steeple to steeple until they reached the towers of Notre Dame, I wonder whether the Imperial birds had any eye for a little corner of the parish of Bloomsbury, London, which you might have thought so quiet, that even the whirring and flapping of those mighty wings would pass unobserved there? ”

“ The better residential district of Holborn, which extends northward to Euston Road in the borough of St Pancras, is mainly within the parish of St George, Bloomsbury. The name of Bloomsbury is commonly derived from William Blemund, a lord of the manor in the 15th century. A dyke called Blemund’s Ditch, of unknown origin, bounded it on the south, where the land was marshy. During the 18th century Bloomsbury was a fashionable and wealthy residential quarter. ”

“ You'll drive me to Bloomsbury Square, or I'll make it 'ot for you!'
"Now I knew too much to get into an argument with a woman, and so I drove to Bloomsbury Square. But when I had stopped at the number that she had given me she did not attempt to get out. She was perfectly sober, but in my opinion she was stark crazy, for she insisted that I had lost my way, and that we were not in Bloomsbury Square. ”

“ If you had gone all over the rest of the house—and it was a large one—you would have found nothing else remarkable, or which did not smack of Bloomsbury. It was, indeed, nothing but a lodging-house, and the room we have described was the private apartment of its mistress. She might consult her own private taste, she considered, in her own room, else the skull and the picture occasionally rather shocked "the daintier sense" of the new lodgers, to whom the landlady gave audience in this apartment. She is as little like a lodging-house keeper, to look at, as can be imagined. ”

“ ADELINE SERGEANT.
Despite the proverb that "comparisons are odious," there is a great fascination to those who love to explore the old quarters of London, and to hunt up the records of people who have lived and died there, leaving their mark whether for good or evil, and then to note the difference that a hundred or so of years have made in its buildings and inhabitants. Take old Bloomsbury for instance—by no means an uninteresting stroll—described by Evelyn in 1665 as "a little towne with good aire." ”

“ Even Mr. Austin Dobson's Muse, he complains, "pouts" when abroad, though "she is not shy on London stones!" The many-hued beauties of the country do not affect us as do the grey London stones and streets, eloquent with association and history.
If the Rossetti family are deeply connected with Bloomsbury streets and squares,—William Morris, the poet of The Earthly Paradise, the Socialist, designer, prophet of the House Beautiful, is hardly less so. It was in unromantic Bloomsbury that his ideas of beauty were mainly nourished; Oxford Street, Upton, and Kelmscott came later. ”

“ James the Less, Bishop of Jerusalem, now St. James’s Palace. The district of Soho was known by its present name as long ago as the sixteenth century; “So ho!” being the cry of the huntsmen when calling off their harriers in the days when the whole of London west of Drury Lane was open country. Bloomsbury is a corruption of “Lomesbury Village,” of which the Manor House stood on the site of Bloomsbury Square. Smithfield is a modern perversion of “Smoothfield,” an extensive tract of meadow land where horses were sold and tournaments were held as far back as the twelfth century. ”

“ The neighbourhood of Bloomsbury Square towards four o’clock of a November afternoon is not so crowded as to secure to the stranger, of appearance anything out of the common, immunity from observation. ”

“ There were many things Forty-eight Bloomsbury Square came gradually to the conclusion were not worth the doing:—Snatching at the gravy; pouncing out of one’s turn upon the vegetables and helping oneself to more than one’s fair share ”

“ You are too kind. It is a pleasure to do a little service for a gentleman like Mr. Hanbury, the great orator. If only Chetwynd Street knew it had so distinguished a visitor it would be very proud, although the cause in which I heard you speak in Bloomsbury is not very popular in the slums of Westminster. However, you may rest assured the public shall not be allowed to remain in ignorance of the distinction conferred upon our district, this obscure and poor and unworthy corner of Westminster. ”

“ It seemed to be no more than a piece of good luck that let me find him that night in a little room in one of the by-ways of Bloomsbury. He was sprawling angularly on a cane lounge, surrounded by whole rubbish heaps of manuscript, a grey scrawl in a foam of soiled paper. He peered up at me as I stood in the doorway.
“Hullo!” he said, “what’s brought you here? Have a manuscript?” He waved an abstracted hand round him. “You’ll find a chair somewhere.” ”

“ He took the boys to the British Museum, and descanted upon the antiquities and the specimens of natural history there, so that audiences would gather round him as he. spoke, and all Bloomsbury highly admired him as a prodigiously well informed man. And whenever he spoke (which he did almost always) , he took care to produce the very finest and longest words of which the vocabulary gave him the use; rightly judging, that it was as cheap to employ a handsome, large, and sonorous epithet, as to use a little stingy one. ”

“ The middle-class of London, before the development of omnibuses, lived in and round the City of London, Bloomsbury being the principal suburb; many thousands of well-to-do people, merchants and shopkeepers, lived in the City itself, and were not ashamed of their houses, and filled the City churches on the Sunday. Some lived at Clapham, Camberwell, and Stockwell on the south; a great many at Islington, where a vigorous offshoot of the great city ran through the High Street past Sadler’s Wells as far as Highbury ”

“ And the distinction which in Mayfair and Belgravia attaches to those who have been in the boxes and stalls on Parthenon first night is not greater than that which, in Bloomsbury and Camden Town, accrues to those who have occupied places—not necessarily seats—in the other parts of the house. It is understood, too, that the good will of Bloomsbury and Camden Town is much more valuable to a play than the best wishes of Mayfair and Belgravia. ”

“ Just now we are aggressively on the up grade. It is much worse than going down. The Duke has determined to make Bloomsbury a superior residential quarter once more. He has pulled down some houses, added a story to others, made gardens of the mews—and ruined the place for all sentimental people. These red-and-white blocks of flats spoil the neighborhood. We are becoming vulgarly opulent. Once you might have drawn a line, roughly, say down Southampton Row, and so divided the oppressively respectable from the aggressively Bohemian. That was so in Mrs. Conifer’s time. ”

“ Perhaps I devoted more time than was right to geography and the books of travelers and explorers, but I pegged [Pg 175] away at my major too, after a fashion, at times covering my desk with books on the subject. If many volumes stacked up in front of a reader make a savant in the British Museum, then I deserved a place in the front rank.
But with all my good intentions, reading and note-taking, the main good that London did for me, was accomplished outside of the somber pile in Bloomsbury. ”

“ I IF the majority of one’s friends live in Kensington and Bloomsbury, and if one is fond of going out to parties in the evening, then one should live somewhere midway between these two extremities of charm and culture. ”

“ In Dickens' time the region had become the [Pg 275] haunt of those who affected science, literature, or art, by reason of the proximity of the British Museum and the newly founded University of London.
The wealthy element, who were not desirous of being classed among the fashionables, were attracted here by its nearness to the open country and Regent's Park. Thus, clustering around Bloomsbury is a whole nucleus of squares; "some comely," says a writer, "some elegant," and all with a middle-class air about them. ”