Stevenson - Tontines in John Street

On Monday 22nd March 2010, we took a comic turn, and discussed The Wrong Box (1889), a novel penned by Robert Louis Stevenson and his step-son Lloyd Osborne, whose plot revolves around the two survivors of a tontine scheme, one of whom (Joseph Finsbury) lives in a gloomy house in John Street, Bloomsbury, with his avaricious relatives. We couldn't resist showing the 1966 film of the book, which stars Tony Hancock and Peter Sellars, as well as Michael Caine, who you can see in my grainy reproduction of the poster. The movie, we all agreed, preserves something of the grotesque dark humour of the original, though the careful geography of Stephenson's book has been dispensed with entirely: instead of employing Bloomsbury among other specifically meaningful places within nineteenth-century London, the film houses the brothers next door to each other in a proto-Wodehousian undefined England. Though not alluded to in the script, the street struck us as being not unlike the Royal Crescent in Bath...

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.

Trollope - Lady Anna in Bedford Square

On Monday 18th January 2010 we enjoyed our first session of the reading group in Foster Court, UCL. We looked at Anthony Trollope's Lady Anna (1874), one of his lesser known novels, whose legally-themed plot is mostly enacted within a small nexus of Bloomsbury streets. We explored the novel's rendering of the complex interaction of class identity and urban space, by the way characters in the novel are placed (and place themselves) within London's local geography, and we thought about the representation of Keppel Street in Lady Anna, the street in which Trollope was himself born. We also compared our own ideas about the success or otherwise of the novel - and about its feisty heroine! - with some reviews that appeared in the periodical press in the immediate wake of its first publication.