On or About 1901: The Bloomsbury Group Looks Back at the Victorians

Abstract

On or About 1901:The Bloomsbury Group Looks Back at the Victorians Simon Joyce (bio) With the turn into a new century and millennium, a number of critical texts have offered up a reexamination of the defining characteristics and legacies of the Victorian period. Such revisionist efforts have, however, consistently run up against the stumbling block of the Bloomsbury Group and their immediate reaction to a past that they felt had shaped both them and their generation. Arguably, theirs is a view that set the terms for thinking about the nineteenth century in the twentieth. John MacGowan, for instance, has written that "[t]he Bloomsbury Group played a large role in [the] transformation of the Victorian into the nonmodern by introducing the (subsequently) endlessly repeated narrative of our (ambivalent) progress around sexuality" (11). Similarly Matthew Sweet, who begins by supposing "that everything we think we know about the Victorians is wrong" (ix), finds Bloomsbury responsible for what he feels are grotesque caricatures and misreadings of the period—including the narrative of sexual enlightenment that MacGowan mentions, which is challenged for Sweet by the sheer volume of pornography that was produced by those "other Victorians."1 If, as he suggests, Bloomsbury modernists mounted a sustained assault on their predecessors, its "opening shots were fired in Eminent Victorians," Lytton Strachey's 1918 study of Cardinal Henry Manning, Florence Nightingale, General Charles Gordon, and Thomas Arnold, and sustained by such fellow travelers as Virginia and Leonard Woolf, and Vanessa and Clive Bell (xv). If we want to revise orthodox accounts of the Victorians, though, should we conclude that Bloomsbury's was simply wrong, perhaps the product of what Harold Bloom famously diagnosed as the "anxiety of influence"? As I shall suggest, something like that anxiety to distance oneself absolutely from what came before seems to have animated some Bloomsbury writing, including Virginia Woolf's "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown" (1924), and to have been conceded in later [End Page 631] memoirs, especially Leonard's. But I also want to point out the irony that we seem only to be able to restore to the Victorians (or their Edwardian successors) a sense of their heterogeneity by asserting and denigrating a monolithic "Bloomsbury" outlook, one that flies in the face of the Group's own repeated denials of a collective viewpoint and also—not incidentally—looks very much like another instance of Bloomian anxiety. In this essay, I want to rethink what leading Bloomsbury figures—Strachey, the Woolfs, Clive Bell—had to say about the preceding century to see if those accounts might also be viewed as heterogeneous and diverse. Surprisingly, given its seeming canonical status as Sweet's "opening shot," it is Strachey's that emerges as most profitable for a revisionist Victorian studies that hopes to challenge common-sense orthodoxies about the period and its defining characteristics. I. Virginia Woolf's famous assertion, in "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown," that "on or about December 1910 human character changed" is of course an intentional overstatement. The precision of the month and year is offset by the counterbalancing imprecision of "on or about," a tempering that is extended in the following paragraph as Woolf insists that it is not a "sudden and definite" transformation, saying only that "since one must be arbitrary, let us date it about the year 1910" (4). There is a sense, however, in which the precision of "December 1910" does matter, in terms of the priorities it sets for Woolf's essay: it denotes in particular the opening of the First Post-Impressionist exhibition in London, organized by Woolf's close friend Roger Fry, and—perhaps more importantly—not the death of Edward VII, which had occurred in May of that year. As I have argued elsewhere, the end of Victoria's reign nine years earlier produced a range of predictions—some apocalyptic and others entirely dumbfounded—about what the future might bring, all certain that it would at any rate be entirely different from what had come before (7-9). In that context, Woolf's de-emphasizing of monarchical succession is itself significant, and consistent with the larger argument of "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown" that nominally "Victorian" traits of...