3 October 2017

tilly_bloomsbury

The second chapter of Bloomsbury is called Aspiring, which is a clever linking of  architecture (spires), secularism and religious idealism. The third chapter is Connecting, as in ‘only connect’ (meat and drink to us Forsterians), thus it covers St Pancras Station Hotel, the north side of Brunswick Square (now demolished, or bombed, but it is where Forster lodged for a while), the boarding house culture (and especially a 1919 play called Tilly of Bloomsbury, filmed three times including this version in 1931, we shall have a ‘rehearsed reading’ of the play in the shop next year), our author Mrs Oliphant‘s A House in Bloomsbury (1894), the pre-Raphaelites, and finally, of course, ‘the Bloomsbury Group’. All these disparate yet connected Bloomsbury elements are skilfully linked in one short chapter!