In 1978, at a seminar on John Maynard Keynes held by the University of Kent, Raymond Williams talked about 'The Significance of Bloomsbury as a Social and Cultural Group'. He accepted Leonard Woolf's characterisation of Bloomsbury as consisting 'of the upper levels of the professional middle class and county families, interpenetrated to a certain extent by the aristocracy' with 'an intricate tangle of ancient roots and tendrils stretching far and wide' through those classes. Williams also noted the importance of the Imperial bureaucracy in this tangle, especially the top echelons of the administration of India. Finally, he characterised Bloomsbury as an upper-class 'fraction', which turned against its own class without identifying itself with the subaltern classes and peoples, except insofar as it saw them as 'victims'. This fraction played an important 'liberalising' and 'modernising' role, producing 'adaptations' rather than 'basic changes'. It was against the 'dominant ideas and values' of the English upper class, while 'still willingly, in all immediate ways, part of it'.

LRB 6 April 1995 | PDF Download