Abstract
On 2 January 1886, Robert Louis Stevenson penned a letter to the novelist James Payn, in which he addressed his portrayal of Bloomsbury in a book published the previous year. The Dynamiter, discussed in Chap. 5, placed the (anti)climax of one of its stories in West Central London, a bomb comically failing to detonate in a house in the vicinity of one of Bloomsbury’s many hospitals. Payn’s daughter Alicia had apparently recognized her own house in Queen Square from the author’s description, provoking her father to enquire whether Stevenson had borrowed it as the setting for his and his wife’s co-written extravagant fiction about inadequate terrorism. Rather than denying the parallel, Stevenson insisted that the address had not been chosen by the authors at all but was based on the account he had received of a real event that had occurred there:
…I beg to explain how it came about that I took her house. The hospital [Alexandra Hospital, in Queen Square] was a point in my tale; but there is a house in each side. Now the true house is the one before the hospital: is that No. 11? If not, what do you complain of? If it is, how can I help what is true? Everything in the Dynamiter is not true; but the story of the Brown Box is, in almost every particular; I lay my hand on my heart, and swear to it. It took place in that house in 1884; and if your daughter was in that house at the time, all I can say is she must have kept very bad society.
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Notes
- 1.
Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny Van de Grift Stevenson, The Dynamiter (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1885), 138.
- 2.
Stevenson, Letter to James Payn (2 January 1886), in Selected Letters, ed. Ernest Mehew (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 301–2.
- 3.
Alan Sandison, Robert Louis Stevenson and the Appearance of Modernism: A Future Feeling (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), 108. Sandison claims The Dynamiter as a “distinctively Modernist achievement,” colourfully describing the way in which “truth becomes a plaything and is kicked around like a giant, multi-coloured beach-ball” (107–08).
- 4.
Stevenson, Letter to James Payn (2 January 1886), in Selected Letters, 302.
- 5.
Actually, from biographical evidence, we understand that Stevenson did know that part of London well: back in 1876, Bloomsbury had functioned for him as a place of a different variety of fantasy. Fascinated by Fanny Sitwell, he had been accustomed to loiter around Queen Square and Southampton Row in the hope of bumping into her on her walk back from work. See Frank McLynn, Robert Louis Stevenson: A Biography (London: Hutchinson, 1993), 100.
- 6.
Marler, Bloomsbury Pie, 8.
- 7.
Brooker, Bohemia in London, 162.
- 8.
Woolf, “Literary Geography,” in The Essays of Virginia Woolf: Volume 1, 1904–1912, ed. Andrew McNeillie (London: Hogarth Press, 1986), 32–35, 35.
- 9.
Andrew Thacker, Moving through Modernity: Space and Geography in Modernism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 152–53.
- 10.
Woolf, “Literary Geography,” 32.
- 11.
Lewis Melville, The Thackeray Country (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1905), 76.
- 12.
Melville, Thackeray Country, 83–4.
- 13.
Melville, Thackeray Country, 82.
- 14.
Quoted in Woolf, Essays, i.35.
- 15.
Woolf, A Haunted House, 24 and 28. “Bloomsbury represents motion and excess; the talk from the party spills out into the street, not contained by the limits of the home.” Snaith, Virginia Woolf, 28.
- 16.
Woolf. A Haunted House, 25.
- 17.
Woolf. A Haunted House, 27.
- 18.
Ruth Livesey, “Socialism in Bloomsbury: Virginia Woolf and the Political Aesthetics of the 1880s,” Yearbook of English Studies 37 (2007): 126–44.
- 19.
Woolf. A Haunted House, 28.
- 20.
Woolf. A Haunted House, 28.
- 21.
Virginia Woolf, “Middlebrow,” in The Death of the Moth and Other Essays, ed. Leonard Woolf (London: Hogarth Press, 1981), 113–15.
- 22.
Woolf, “Middlebrow,” 115.
- 23.
Woolf, “Character in Fiction,” in Essays, 3:420–438, 429.
- 24.
Woolf, “Character in Fiction,” in Essays, 3:430. Roland Barthes, “The Reality Effect,” in The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1989), 141–48.
- 25.
Woolf, “Character in Fiction,” in Essays, 3:430.
- 26.
Melba Cuddy-Keane, Virginia Woolf, the Intellectual, and the Public Sphere (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 22–34.
- 27.
Blair, “Local Modernity, Global Modernism,” 814.
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Ingleby, M. (2018). Conclusion: “Bloomsbury” in Play. In: Nineteenth-Century Fiction and the Production of Bloomsbury. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54600-5_7
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