As a historian of nineteenth-century literature and culture, and author of Victorian Bloomsbury (2012), my aim in this paper is to off er a perspective on the intellectual “character” of the place so often associated in cultural shorthand with Virginia Woolf and her circle, who lived in Gordon Square and other Bloomsbury squares from 1904. Though Victorian Bloomsbury demonstrates that significant educational innovation occurred specifi cally in Bloomsbury through the founding of a number of progressive institutions in the area during the nineteenth century, it is not possible to talk about a characteristically “Bloomsburyish” view of empire in that period. It is, however, possible to discuss some aspects of the topic in relation to the two most important cultural institutions located in Bloomsbury, University College London and the British Museum; I have also identified one group based in Bloomsbury, which took a consistently anti-Empire stand from the 1850s onwards, and two anti-empire literary works, which are set in Bloomsbury.

The call for progressive education began in Bloomsbury with the so-called “March of Mind” in the mid-1820s, when agitation for political reform was closely associated with movements to widen educational opportunities for people of all classes, all faiths, and all ages. Radical politicians, lawyers, and educationists set up a number of organizations in Bloomsbury, beginning with Henry Brougham, George Birkbeck, and others who pioneered university education for non-Anglicans with the opening in Gower Street in 1828 of the University of London (known since 1836 as University College London). In the same years—the mid-1820s—the same men founded the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (SDUK), which published cheap informative pamphlets directed at aspiring members of the uneducated, or undereducated, working class. (There was no national education system in the 1820s, or indeed for another fifty years.)

The pioneering work continued with Elisabeth Jesser Reid, who founded the first higher educational institution for women, the Ladies’ College, in Bedford Square in 1849. Frederick Denison Maurice opened his Working Men's College in Red Lion Square in 1854; and Elizabeth Malleson founded the Working Women's College in Queen Square in 1864. All these addresses are Bloomsbury addresses; the extension of education to hitherto disadvantaged groups, namely women and working-class people, was a markedly Bloomsbury phenomenon.