Virginia Wolf considered “exile” anything other than living near Tavistock Square, one of the squares that together with Russell Square and Bedford Square make up Bloomsbury, the London neighborhood that has probably concentrated the most talent per square meter in Europe. The years she spent in the suburbs of London were wasted time for the writer who preferred to write and live near the gardened and always elegant squares that surrounded the terraced houses created for wealthy families. The proximity of the courts, the British Museum and the University of London were a magnet for liberal professionals and intellectuals, who turned the neighborhood into a bastion of modern thought at the beginning of the 20th century.
So when she got a house at 52 Tavistock Square Virginia was a very happy woman. On January 9, 1924 she wrote in her diary: “At this very moment, or fifteen minutes ago to be precise, I purchased the ten-year lease of 52 Tavistock Sqre London. –I like to write Tavistock. Subject of course (…) to the providence and unforeseen whims of old Mrs. Simons, the house is ours: and the basement and the billiard room with the rock garden at the top and the view of the square in front and the desolate buildings behind, and Southampton Row, and all of London – London you are a jewel of jewels (…) – music, talks, friendship, views of the city, books, publications, something central and inexplicable, all this is now within my reach” .
This neighborhood deserves a leisurely visit, following certain guidelines so as not to pass by, as if nothing had happened there, the portals that house literary treasures. Beyond the British Museum with its queues of tourists, are the discreet streets and evergreen squares where literature and philosophy were made. You have to pay attention to the blue plaques that abound on these supposedly bland buildings.
With the purpose of taking a literary trip, we stayed at the Meliá White House, very close to Regent Park, an emblematic building from the 1930s that opened in the summer after a renovation that lasted five years. Just a stone’s throw from the hotel is the Charles Dickens House Museum (48 Doughty Street) where the writer lived between 1837 and 1839. Only two years. But what years! In that house he finished The Pickwick Papers, wrote all of Oliver Twist, and began work on Barnaby Rudge. Then he moved to a bigger one. He was already rich.
A few more streets and we come across Mecklenburgh Square, where at number 40 the mathematician Karl Pearson, one of the defenders of eugenics and Social Darwinism, spent his childhood. Virginia Wolf also lived around this square, between 1939 and 1940, in a house that was destroyed during World War II. A few meters further on, a blue plaque marks the house of Cyril Vernon Connolly, journalist, editor and literary critic, founder of Horizon magazine. Among the great milestones of his career is having been George Orwell’s editor.
Around the corner, in a huge building facing Brunswick Square is the window from which Peter Pan flew to get to Wendy’s house. In reality, it is the apartment where she lived and wrote the novel J.M Barrie. In this square was the heart of what would later become the Blomsburry Club. Let’s see: Virginia (Wolf when married) and her brothers Vanessa (Bell, when married) and Adrian Stephen, famous psychoanalyst, lived as singles. Also living in the same building was Leonard Woolf, who would later marry Virginia, and the economist John Maynard Keynes, creator of Keynesian theory. What city can surpass this block in intelligence? And I can assure you that we have not walked more than half an hour.
It is in these streets and in these parks that the Bloomsbury Circle was founded around 1904. They were children of Victorian families who renounced the strict principles of their houses and organized meetings and parties separately until they decided to join forces. They belonged to the intellectual elite, they knew it, and that’s how they behaved. All the male members of the group, except Duncan Grant, were Cambridge graduates. They functioned as an informal network of influence that at first was dedicated to mutually promoting the works of its members, but then they got involved in very modern and transgressive debates, such as the defense of homosexual rights, the inclusion of women in the arts and the defense of non-monogamous marriage.
They met at their homes in Bloomsbury, mainly at 50 Gordon Square, but also held country retreats at Charleston Farmhouse (Sussex) and Monk’s Farmhouse (Rodmell). Soon what happened in those meetings and between them began to matter more than their intellectual disquisitions. Among them there were stable marriages like that of Virginia and Leonard Wolf and that of Clive Bell and Vanessa, but there were also adventures and skirmishes between all of them. Lytton Strachey and her lover Duncan Grant were said to be close friends of Vanessa and her brother Adrian Stephen, and that they had all had dalliances with David Garnett, Maynard Keynes or James Strachey.
One of the group’s best-known pranks that served to put it into the world was the incident known as the Dreadnought Hoax. In 1910, several of its members, including Virginia and her brother Adrian, led by the poet Horace de Vere Cole posed as Abyssinian princes, with turbans, tunics, and their faces painted black. They managed to trick the British Navy into boarding their flagship, the HS Dreadnought. As they inspected the ship like experts they spoke in a mix of Swahili sprinkled with Latin quotes from Homer and Virgil. As a maximum sign of admiration they shouted “bunga bunga” from time to time. At the end of the visit they took a photo that was published the next day in the most important newspapers in London. No one had ever teased the British Navy like that.
The select Bloomsbury circle was the intellectual aristocracy and enjoyed distancing itself from the rest of humanity. Let’s say that its members took some pleasure in segregating those who did not deserve to enter their club, whether due to lack of intellectual aptitude, cowardice, embracing Victorian morality or lacking a sufficiently rebellious spirit to deserve admission to a club. club that is today more famous than the neighborhood that gave it its name.