Victorian Bloomsbury / Rosemary Ashton.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Surveying Bloomsbury -- Godlessness on Gower Street -- Steam intellect: diffusing useful knowledge -- Gower Street again: scandals and schools -- Bloomsbury medicine: letting in the light -- The British Museum, Panizzi, and the whereabouts of Russell Square -- Towards the millenium -- A "quasi-collegiate" experiment in Gordon Square -- Educating women -- Christian brotherhood, co-operation and working men and women -- Work and play in Tavistock Place.

While Bloomsbury is now associated with Virginia Woolf and her early-twentieth-century circle of writers and artists, the neighborhood was originally the undisputed intellectual quarter of nineteenth-century London. Drawing on a wealth of untapped archival resources, the author brings to life the educational, medical, and social reformists who lived and worked in Victorian Bloomsbury and who led crusades for education, emancipation, and health for all. She explores the secular impetus behind these reforms and the humanitarian and egalitarian character of nineteenth-century Bloomsbury. Thackeray and Dickens jostle with less famous characters like Henry Brougham and Mary Ward. This history of nineteenth-century London embraces the high life of the squares, the nonconformity of churches, the parades of shops, schools, hospitals and poor homes alike.