Victorian Bloomsbury - Rosemary Ashton

Virginia Woolf may have put Bloomsbury into the minds of every student to take an interest in modernism, but she didn’t create that world. The London neighborhood long boasted of bright, artistic folk, and Rosemary Ashton’s Victorian Bloomsbury (Yale Univ., $40) gives context to a subculture that has too long been relegated to a footnote. From Charles Dickens to Mary Ward, from secular humanism to poor houses, Victorian Bloomsbury was filled to bursting with characters, idealisms, and clashing classes that could make any hardened modernist blush. Every history buff or Anglophile will enjoy perusing Ashton’s well-researched, flowing narrative of the high life and those who sought emancipation from small minds.