Literary Cranks of London-- The Whitefriars Club

This was established in 1868 in three rooms at Radley’s Hotel, in New Bridge Street, Blackfriars. The authors don’t mention the fact, but  in the 1820s Radley’s was known as Walker’s Hotel and was infamous as the HQ of the generally despised Constitutional Association, the reactionary group dubbed by William Hone, the ‘Bridge Street Gang’, which harassed radical booksellers  it accused of circulating seditious libels--- usually the pirated works of Thomas Paine.

By the time it had come to house the Whitefriars ( incidentally, a humorous reference to the nearby Blackfriars) Radley’s was a respectable family business with ‘ an old-fashioned cuisine and an excellent cellar of wines ‘. Of the three rooms occupied by the Club, the one used as a dining room had ‘three windows looking out on Ludgate Hill Station, filled with heavy furniture and black horse-hair sofas of a late Georgian period’.

The Literary Cranks of London - The Vagabond Club

The second of a series on 'The Literary Cranks of London' this published in  The Sketch on Aug. 29th, 1894. Written by a member George Brown Burgin (1856-1944), novelist, critic and journalist. There are various photos of him in the National Portrait Gallery collection. He was sub-editor of the humorous journal The Idler from 1895 to 1899. He wrote over 90 novels but there is no Wikipedia page for him. However there is quite a bit online on him including various quotations such as his claim that: 'It is much more comfortable to be mad and know it than be sane and have one's doubts.' The Vagabond Club was founded around the blind poète maudit Philip Bourke Marston and boasted such distinguished members as Jerome K. Jerome, Robert Barr, Conan Doyle, Barry Pain,  and Israel Zangwill. No women. It is interesting that Burgin mentions, without opprobrium, that  it contained 'misogynists'...

The Literary Cranks of London 
The Vagabond Club.

"Our Noble Selves," a la Grant Allen (he ought to be a member), would more adequately describe the august body of which I have the honour to be secretary. When we were vagabonds we did not call ourselves so, but cheerfully used to meet at the late Philip Bourke Marston's rooms in Euston Road after a frugal dinner at Pagani's. There, amid clouds of smoke, people did just what they pleased until the small hours of the morning. Marston had the supreme gift of attracting the most dissimilar men and making them harmonise; he was the only religion some of them had. This circle of friends numbered about a dozen, and the last time I saw Marston before his death was when he attempted to recite a sonnet beginning "I stood amid the ruins of my soul," but was unable to finish it.

The Literary Cranks of London - The Cemented Bricks

I came across this oddly named literary coterie quite recently in a catalogue by the august bookseller and writer John Saumarez Smith in a scholarly note about one of its members - the writer (anthologist) Robert Maynard Leonard (1869 - 1941) who among other things was secretary to the Anti-Bribery League, which sounds like something from a G K Chesterton short story. Members of the 'Cemented Bricks' included Richard le Gallienne, Walter Jerrold, Sir John Parsons, Lord Amulree and Joseph Knight. The web yields very little about them except this page from The Sketch of 13/2/1895 bought for the price of a mocha latte on eBay. It remains unknown to Google books and even Brewster Kahle (praise his name) has not archived it... At the same time we bought another in the series of 'Literary Cranks of London' on 'The Vagabond Club' which will follow later.


The Literary Cranks of London.

The Cemented Bricks.

The Cemented Bricks.! Who or what are they? Is it a new order of Hod-fellows, or is it a building society?

That question, or series of questions, was put to me by a lady three years ago. This article will supply the answer.

About five years ago, four young men in London were drawn together by a certain similarity of journalist-literary tastes and aspirations. They had gravitated together from various places; one from a chemist's shop, via a Hull newspaper; another from a newspaper office in the West of England; the third from a similar centre of 'light and lending' in Lancashire; while the fourth would be penman and present writer was chained, as Lamb puts it, to the "desk's dead wood" in a counting-house near the Strand.

The Air of Bloomsbury

Virginia Woolf & Clive Bell 1909

Found in a Times Literary Supplement from 1954 this anonymous review of J.K. Johnstone's The Bloomsbury Group. Clive Bell did not agree with much of the information or opinions in this article and wrote a letter to the editor in response, which appeared a week later. Oddly he wrote later that the review "is by far the most intelligent and penetrating piece that has been written on the subject." It is obviously by someone very familiar with the group. The Bloomsbury industry did not start in earnest until 1967, the year of love,


with Michael Holroyd's monumental biography of Lytton Strachey. Interesting to note that Maynard Keynes was very slightly looked down on by the set - possibly this is something Bell addresses in his letter.


THE AIR OF BLOOMSBURY

Mr. Johstone's The Bloomsbury Group is a respect-worthy book. lt often shows imaginative insight, and always long and sincere thought. Sometimes we detect a faint aroma of what Mr. Forster calls pseudo-scholarship, but this might well have been far stronger and more frequent, considering that his study of the Bloomsbury Group, as he calls it, was first conceived as a Ph.D. thesis. A pseudo-scholar, Mr. Forster explain (adding endearingly that this is what most of us are) is one who moves around books and not through them. “Books have to be read," he adds, characteristically,"worse luck for it takes a long time; a few savage tribes eat them, but reading is the only method of assimilation revealed lo the west. The reader must sit down alone and  struggle with the writer. . . ." And this Mr. John- stone has done faithfully and well, almost throughout. His book is mainly a study of the three Bloomsbury writers, Lytton Strachey, the biographer, and the two novelists, Virginia Woolf and Mr. E. M. Forster... [the reader]will surely find that Mr.J increases his insight  into their art, and their unobtrusive mastery of pattern and design. Indeed Virginia Woolf, he shows, invented almost a new novel form to express her "experience of  living,"...

Mr. Johnstone's book has one main thesis. He sets out to show that the members of the Bloomsbury Group had common values stemming from an original gospel, the early Cambridge philosophy of G. E. Moore formulated in his Principia Ethica,and published in 1904. Moore himself stems from the Cambridge humanists, Lowes Dickinson and McTaggart, the philosopher, and he links up, too, with that mysterious Cambridge body,the Society - with a capital S, whose members were known as apostles. These included many figures, distinguished in their day, among them Leslie Stephen & Henry Sidgwick. Sidgwick describes the tradition of intimate discussion in the Society, which Bloomsbury was later to inherit.