Bloomsbury Friendship and its Victorian Antecedents

While there continues to be some discussion concerning both the membership and the precise meaning of ‘Bloomsbury’, there is general agreement that friendship formed its very core. ‘The Bloomsbury group’, Leonard Woolf insisted in his autobiography, ‘consisted of a number of intimate friends who had been at Trinity and Kings’ and subsequently moved to London – most of them to Bloomsbury. The key friendships that made up the group and the ways in which they were established in Cambridge in the late 1890s have all been described many times, as have their importance in the lives of those concerned. In his biography of Lytton Strachey, for example, Michael Holroyd offers a detailed analysis of the new friendships that Strachey established very soon after arriving at Cambridge, and stresses the ways in which, after the long years of loneliness and isolation Strachey had endured both at school and at home, they transformed his life. A similar picture is provided by Leonard Woolf who recalls how, after a few lonely days at Cambridge, he met a few people ‘with whom I could enjoy the exciting and at the same time profound happiness of friendship’ and all at once, ‘everything changed and almost for the first time one felt that to be young was very heaven.’ The friends that figure most prominently in Woolf ’s discussion are of course some of the central Bloomsbury figures: Sydney Saxon-Turner, Lytton Strachey, Thoby Stephen, Clive Bell, and Maynard Keynes. Friendship is central to many other discussions of Bloomsbury as well. Thus Leon Edel describes a series of different phases of Bloomsbury, each depending upon a particular form of sociability. The first phase of Bloomsbury was inaugurated by the Thursday evening gatherings hosted by Thoby Stephen and his siblings, Vanessa, Virginia and Adrian in Gordon Square in 1905–6. It had ‘a quality of delayed adolescence about it: a mixture of homosexuals with young virgins’, devoting their