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

Abstract

TW ^ Tith 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 they felt had shaped both them and their generation. Arguably, theirs is a view set the terms for thinking about the nineteenth century in the twentieth. John MacGowan, for instance, has written [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 MacGowan mentions, which is challenged for Sweet by the sheer volume of pornography was produced by those other Victorians.' If, as he suggests, Bloomsbury modernists mounted a sustained assault on their predecessors, its opening shots were fired in Eminent 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 Bloomsbury's was simply wrong, perhaps the product of what Harold Bloom famously diagnosed as the of influence? As I shall suggest, something like anxiety to distance oneself absolutely from what came before seems to have animated some Bloomsbury writing, including Virginia Woolfs Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown (1924), and to have been conceded in later