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On French and British Freedoms: Early Bloomsbury and the Brothels of Modernism

When that Byronic gay blade of Bloomsbury Clive Bell proposed in his 1923 pamphlet On British Freedom that “Great Britain is one of the least free countries in the world,” he had in mind not Britain’s great political freedom, admired by all Europe, but the everyday personal, social, and public freedoms that ordinary Frenchmen take for granted.1 In France, Bell observed, art, literature, and theater flourish without a censor’s interference; bars and restaurants may be open at all hours yet do sometimes close without a curfew; people pursue their amatory affairs without state supervision; and a working man can raise a point of Biblical textual criticism without fear of prosecution by the state. An “ordinary Englishman” enjoys none of these freedoms, Bell pointed out, and indeed “is, on the whole, less free than a Roman slave in the time of Hadrian” (OBF, 4). From the Puritan revolution to the 1737 Licensing Act that put the playwrights of Shakespeare’s land into shackles through the nineteenth-century “reign of the Puritan middle-classes,” the ordinary Englishman’s everyday freedoms have been so far curtailed that such writers as Shaw and Wells, “when they sit down to work for humanity,” must “wonder whether what they want to say will be sanctioned by some shop-keeping alderman, or illiterate fox-hunter, or by a committee of dyspeptic and time-worn virgins” (OBF, 13, 10). Although Bloomsbury’s significance as a modern movement is often dismissed on grounds of class privilege, Bell writes here on behalf of “ordinary” Englishmen. The English aristocracy after all suffered few practical restrictions on their personal and social freedoms, and Bell’s Bloomsbury compeers had long Christine Froula, Professor of English, Comparative Literary Studies, and Gender Studies at Northwestern University, has published widely on modern thought and literature, including Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Avant-Garde: War, Civilization, Modernity (2005), Modernism’s Body: Sex, Culture, and Joyce (1996), and To Write Paradise: Style and Error in Ezra Pound’s Cantos (1984).