Local modernity, global modernism: Bloomsbury and the places of the literary

ELH - English Literary History

Volumn 71, Issue 3, 2004, Pages 813-838

  Blair, Sara ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN   (United States)

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EID: 20044395908     PISSN: 00138304     EISSN: 10806547     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/elh.2004.0033     Document Type: Review

References (54)

1. Tony Aidous, The Illustrated London News' Book of London Villages (London: Secker and Warburg, 1980), 111. Hereafter abbreviated ILN and cited parenthetically by page number.
2. Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1990), 18.
3. Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel, 1800-1900 (London: Verso, 1998), 5.
4. Regina Marler, Bloomsbury Pie: The Making of the Bloomshury Boom (New York: Henry Holt, .1997), 6.
5. Riebard Brodhead, Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1993), offers a powerful account of the "literary-social world" as a continuum of authorial, production, reception, and canonization practices, unfolding in specific institutional networks and cultural contexts (5).
6. Virginia Woolf, "Old Bloomsbury," in Moments of Being: Unpublished Autobiographical Writings (New York: Hareonrt Brace Jovanovieb, 1976), 370. Hereafter abbreviated "OB" and cited parenthetically by page number.
7. Michel Foucault, "The Eye of Power," Power/Knowledge (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981), 149.
8. David Harvey, Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1996), characteristically charges that the map as a representational form is inevitably distorting, totalizing, capable of promulgating "any mixture of extraordinary insights and monstrous lies" (4-5).
9. See Howard Robinson, The British Post Office: A History (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1948), 353-55.
10. My sources are, respectively: Black's Guide to London and its Environs (London: Adam and Charles Black Publishers, 1908), hereafter abbreviated BG and cited parenthetically by page number;
11. and Ward Lock, A Pictorial and Descriptive Guide to London (London: Ward, Lock and Co., 1904), hereafter abbreviated P and cited parenthetically by page number.
12. Thomas Burke, Living in Bloomsbury (London: G. Allen and Unwyn Ltd, 1939), 11.
13. Burke's popular writings include such additional texts as Out and About: A Notebook of London in War-time (London: G. Allen and Unwvn, 1918)
14. The London Spy: A Book of Town Travels (London: Butterworth, 1922)
15. Limehouse Nights (London: R, M. MeBride, 1925)
16. and A Tea-shop in Limehouse (London: Little Brown, 1931).
17. John Lehmann, Holborn: An Historical Polirait of a London Borough (London: Macmillan, 1970), details the attention directed throughout the later Victorian era to the intransigent cultures of poverty in Bloomsbury, long connected with the infamous rookeries of St. Giles (137). I [ereafter abbreviated H and cited parenthetically by page number.
18. Burke, Living in Bloomsbury, 12.
19. My observations here run parallel to those made by Anna Snaith in her textured work on Virginia Woolf and what she calls the "journey to Bloomsbury"; for an excellent account of the social institutions and cultural practices comprising feminist and women's Bloomsbury, see Snaith's "From Private to Public: Hyde Park Gate to Bloomsbury," Virginia Woolf: Public and Private Negotiations (London: Macmillan, 2000), 16-29.
20. More broadly, mv mapping of feminist social networks and women's mobility is also indebted to the foundational work of Susan Merrill Squier in Virginia Woolf and London: The Sexual Politics of the City (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1985).
21. Margaret Oliphant, A House in Bloomsbury (New York: International Association of Newspapers and Authors, 1901), 13.
22. Deborah Thorn, "Free from Chains? The [mage of Women's Labour in London, 1900-1920," in Metropolis London: Histories and Representations since 1800, ed. David Feldman and Garcth Stedman Jones (London: Routledge, 1989), 88.
23. A contemporary's view of the intricate networks of women's, socialist, and progressive enterprises in the area - and the telling distinctions between reformism versus militancy - is offered by Magdalen Stewart Reeves, Round About a Pound a Week (1911; reprint, New York: Garland, 1980).
24. Additionally, such successors to local workers' education projects as Pitman's Business School, Faraday House (a college for the applied study of electrical engineering), and the London County Council Central School of Arts and Crafts aimed at providing practical industrial training and continue to be located in Bloomsbury; see Harold P. Clunn, The Face of London (London: Spring Books, 1962), 143-44.
25. H. G. Wells, Ann Veronica: A Modern Love Story (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1909), 142 ("Higher Thought"), 143 ("Suffrage"), 151 ("Dress Reform"; "Food Reform"; "detached"; "proportion"; "change")
26. Woolf notes that "[t]hings one had never seen in the darkness [of her father's house in Kensington]-Watts pictures, Dutch cabinets, blue china - shone out for the first time in the drawing room at Gordon Square. . .We were full of experiments and reforms. . . . Everything was going to be new; everything was going to be different. Everything was on trial" ("22 Hvde Park Gate," in Moments of Being, 163-64).
27. Edward Verrall Lucas, A Wanderer in London (London: Metheun & Company, 1917), 221, 223: hereafter abbreviated AW and cited parenthetically by page number.
28. In this respect, Bloomsbury rivaled the infamously metropolitan character of Victoria and Charing Cross stations, popularly writ as spaces of encounter for "all the accents of the empire." Jonathan Schneer, London in 1900: The Imperial Metropolis (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1999), 8.
29. Jonathan Freedman, "The Poetics of Cultural Decline: Degeneracy, Assimilation, and the few in James's The Golden Bowl," American Literary History 7 (1995): 477-99.
30. Bloomsbury's race-mixing is all the more notable in light of the truism that "the extent of [racial and ethnic] heterogeneity throughout most of [London's] history was surprisingly insignificant," and in particular the "association of [immigrants] with certain geographical parts of the city," producing distinctive "human ecological patterns." Emrys Jones, "Race and Ethnicity in London," in London: A New Metropolitan Geography, ed. Keith Hoggart and David Green (London: Edward Arnold, 1990), 176.
31. Among the most favored by figures associated with "Bloomsbury" were Poggioli, Bertorelli's, and the Wheatsheaf Pub, and other establishments in Museum Street and north Soho; thev drew on the historically more segregated and older populations of Jewish Soho, Italian Holborn, and Czech and Polish Kings Cross. A useful account of the area's shifting ethnic demographics is given bv Colin Holmes in John Bull's Island,: Immigration and British Society, 1871-1971 (London: Maemillan, 1988), 30-35.
32. Mulk Raj Anand, Conversations in Bloomsbury (London: Wildwood House, 1981), 5; hereafter abbreviated CB and cited parenthetically bv page number.
33. See Rozina Visram, Ayahs, Lascars and Princes: Indians in Britain 1700-1947 (London: Pluto Press, 1986), 63-64, 103. By 1909, Visram notes, the British government had not only moved against the journal but convicted its printer of publishing sedition (104). Hereafter abbreviated ALP and cited parenthetically by page number.
34. These organizations would provide models and precedent for the later League of Coloured Peoples and West African Students' Union, both associated with University College and active in Bloomsbury. The latter, in particular, was popularly characterized as "a mere training-ground for agitators"; Edward Scobic, Black Britannia: A History of Blacks in Britain (Chicago: Johnson Publishing Co., 1972), 145.
35. For further discussion of radical and anticolonial activities in London, see Amarjit Chandan, Indians in Britain (London: Oriental Univ. Press, 1986), 23-27.
36. R. A. Freeman, "The New Jersey Sphinx," Famous Cases of Dr. Thorndyke (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1929), 941.
37. The popular conception of ethnic and racial enclaves in London, and particularly the East End, is variously explored in Facts for Londoners: Fabian Tract Number 8 (1889), rev. (London: Executive Committee of the London Reform Union, 1905-1906): Visram, 181;
38. see [ames Walvin, Black and White: The Negro and English Society 1555-1945 (London: Allen Lane/The Penguin Press, 1973), 198-202, 217.
39. David Garnett, "Bloomsbury Parties," The Bloomsbury Croup: A Collection of Memoirs, Commentary and Criticism, ed. S. P. Rosenbaum (London: Croom Helm, 1975), 39.
40. Gannett, "Bloomsbury Parties," 39.
41. See Friedman, "Geopolitical Literacy: Internationalizing Feminism at 'Home'-The Case ol Virginia Woolf," in Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1998), 121.
42. Walter Benjamin, "On Some Motils in Baudelaire," Illuminations (New York: Schocken, 1968), 155, 188.
43. Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Super-Modernity, trans. John Howe (New York: Verso, 1995);
44. see also Augé, In the Metro, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2002).
45. See The London Village Atlas: The Growth of Victorian London 1822-1903 (London: Alderman, 1986), 102-3, 103-4.
46. For a provocative, if ultimately dematerialized, reading of Keynes's space of the market as an instantiation ol "Bloomsbury" space-creation, see Jennifer Wicke, "Coterie Consumption: Bloomsbury, Keynes, and Modernism as Marketing," in Marketing Modernisms: Self-Promotion, Canonization, Rereading, ed. Kevin J. H. Dettmar and Stephen Watt (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, .1996), 109-32.
47. My framing of these; questions has been influenced by Amardeep Singh's "The Politics of the Preface:: Globalism, Nationalism, and Alterity," a paper presented at the Modernist Studies Association in Madison, Wisconsin, October 2002. Singh's interest in the varied relationships between figures of canonical high modernism-including W. B. Yeats and E. M. Forster-and the colonial or emergently postcolonial writers for whose publications they provide legitimating prefaces-including M ulk Raj Anand - promises a more nuanced exploration of the afterlives of modernist poetics, forms, and institutions within contestatory cultural formations.
48. For example, Sonali Perera, in an unpublished dissertation chapter titled "Colonialism, Race, and Class in the Fiction of Mulk Raj Anand and Ambalavener Sivanandan," argues that Anand's writing in Coolie and thereafter represents an attempt to reconfigure "the general scheme of the 'thirties proletarian novel," in response to the changing realities of a colonial periphery shaped by the exigencies of a global depression and currency crisis. Perera, '"All that is present and moving . . .': Thinking Working-Class Writing at the Limits," unpublished dissertation (Columbia University, 2003), 2-3.
49. Anand's turn to an anticolonial critique is detailed in Author to Critic: The Letters of Mulk Raj Anand, ed. Saros Cowasjee (Calcutta: Writers' Workshop. 1973), including his commitment to the Communist Party, against the tides of engagement within the British Left.
50. A much cited passage in Anand's later memoir, Apology for Heroism: A Brief Autobiography of Ideas (New Delhi: Arnold-Heinemann, 1975), reinforces the reading of his radical break from metropolitan consciousness (here. Bloomsbury) as the necessary condition for the emergence of a genuinely postcolonial critique: "While the intelligentsia still inquires into the rights and wrongs of personal relations, international morality condones belligerency and war in the name ol the United Nations" (200). Yet that structural reading tends to suppress the ways in which the form ol Anand's rejection ol Bloomsbury echoes the latter's distancing from its own enabling class histories and codes - as well as the fact that Anand returned to the subject of Bloomsbury during the 1980s as part of his ongoing intellectual autobiography. Indeed, he writes in his 1980 preface to Conversations in Bloomsbury: "Not only did I learn to indulge in dangerous thoughts in Bloomsbury, but I began a love affair with lite which has lasted till today" (6).
51. P. K. Rajan, Studies in Mulk Raj Anand (New Delhi: Abhinav Publications, 1986), 12.
52. See Saros Cowasjee, "Mulk Raj Anand and the BBC." Indian & Foreign Review 10.10 (1973): 19-20.
53. Forster, A Passage to India (London: Edward Arnold, 1924);
54. Anand, Conversations, 71.