Mrs Humphry Ward - Marcella in model dwellings

On Monday 22nd February 2010 we explored a novel by Mrs Humphry Ward, Marcella (1894). This politically engaged (if also politically mystifying) novel has its titular character live for a period as a district nurse in what are clearly the Peabody model dwellings in what is now Herbrand Street. Bloomsbury's status as a threshold between east and west, rich and poor, became a fruitful topic of conversation, as we discussed the novel's intent depiction of the area's poor Jewish immigrant population and their housing, and the eighteenth-century townhouses to the south and east of Russell Square that had declined into multi-occupancy almost-slums by this end of the nineeteenth century.