Famous Bloomsbury residents

The area of Bloomsbury was developed by the Russell family in the 17th and 18th centuries into a fashionable residential area.

It has become famous for the large number of famous literary figures that have lived there, most notably "The Bloomsbury Group" of writers from the 1940s.

Bloomsbury Square, which is overlooked by CATS College, was laid out in 1660 by Thomas Wriothesley, 4th Earl of Southampton and at that time was called Southampton Square.

Meet some of Bloomsbury's famous residents - as a student of our College, one day you could be among them!:

• The Bloomsbury Group
• Charles Darwin (Zoologist)
• Charles Dickens (Writer)
• John Maynard Keynes (Economist)
• Virginia Woolf (Writer)
• WB Yeats (Poet)

The Bloomsbury Group

The Bloomsbury Group or Bloomsbury Set was a group of writers, intellectuals, philosophers and artists who held informal discussions in Bloomsbury throughout the 20th century.

This English collective of friends and relatives lived, worked or studied near Bloomsbury in London during the first half of the twentieth century.

Their work deeply influenced literature, aesthetics, criticism, and economics as well as modern attitudes towards feminism, pacifism, and sexuality. Its best known members were Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, E. M. Forster and Lytton Strachey.

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Charles Darwin (1809–1882)

Darwin was a British scientist who laid the foundations of the theory of evolution and transformed the way we think about the natural world.

In 1831, he joined a five year scientific expedition on the survey ship HMS Beagle. On the voyage, Darwin read Lyell's 'Principles of Geology' which suggested that the fossils found in rocks were actually evidence of animals that had lived many thousands or millions of years ago. Lyell's argument was reinforced in Darwin's own mind by the rich variety of animal life and the geological features he saw during his voyage.

On his return to England in 1836, Darwin tried to solve the riddles of these observations and the puzzle of how species evolve. Darwin worked on his theory for 20 years. In 1859 Darwin published 'On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection'. The book was extremely controversial, However, his ideas soon gained currency and have become the new orthodoxy.

He lived at 12 Upper Gower St, Bloomsbury in 1839 and is now buried in Westminster Abbey.

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Charles Dickens (1812–1870)

Charles Dickens is much loved for his great contribution to classic English literature. He was the quintessential Victorian author with his epic stories, vivid characters and exhaustive depiction of contemporary life.

His own story is one of rags to riches. As a child, Charles' entire family was sent to live in Marshalsea prison when his father was imprisoned for bad debt. The young Charles endured terrible conditions working in a factory for three years which informed his later life and writing.

He began his literary career as a journalist, and went on to publish a huge list of successful novels, most of which were originally published in weekly periodicals.

He was also a theatre enthusiast, wrote plays and performed before Queen Victoria in 1851.

He lived at 14 Great Russell Street, Tavistock Square and 48 Doughty Street, both in Bloomsbury. He is buried in Westminster Abbey.

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John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946)

Keynes was one of the most influential economists of the 20th century. His father was also an economist and a philosopher, his mother became the town's first female mayor.

Keynes excelled academically at Eton as well as Cambridge University, where he studied mathematics.
He also became friends with members of the 'Bloomsbury Group' of intellectuals and artists.

After World War One he published 'The Economic Consequences of the Peace' in which he criticised the expensive war reparations demanded from a defeated Germany and prophetically predicted that it would foster a desire for revenge among Germans. This best-selling book made him world famous.

In 1926, he married Lydia Lopokova, a Russian ballerina.

Keynes' best-known work, 'The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money', was published in 1936, and became a benchmark for future economic thought. It also secured his position as Britain's most influential economist.

In 1942, he was made a member of the House of Lords. He lived for thirty years in Gordon Square, Bloomsbury.

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Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)

Virginia Woolf was an English author, essayist, publisher, and writer of short stories, regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century.

During the interwar period, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Her most famous works include the novels Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927) and Orlando (1928), and the book-length essay A Room of One's Own (1929), with its famous dictum, "A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."

Virginia Stephen married writer Leonard Woolf in 1912. In 1917 they founded the Hogarth Press, which subsequently published Virginia's novels along with works by T.S. Eliot, Laurens van der Post, and others.

She lived at 46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury.

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WB Yeats (1865–1939)

William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet and dramatist, and one of the foremost figures of 20th century literature. A pillar of both the Irish and British literary establishments, in his later years Yeats served as an Irish Senator for two terms.

He was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival, and along with Lady Gregory and Edward Martyn founded the Abbey Theatre, serving as its chief during its early years.

In 1923 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for what the Nobel Committee described as "inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation." He was the first Irishman so honored.

Yeats is generally considered one of the few writers who completed their greatest works after being awarded the Nobel Prize; such works include The Tower (1928) and The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1929).

He lived at Woburn Walk, Bloomsbury.

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