The Birth of the Underground in 19th Century Paris and London.
In 1854 self-proclaimed Bohemian George Augustus Sala introduced the readers of a widely circulated Victorian periodical to a clandestine network that had risen to prominence from its base in London, confessing his membership safe in the knowledge that his identity would be kept secret thanks to Charles Dickens’ editorial policy of anonymous signature in Household Words. “The Bohemians I tell of are the gipsies of civilization,” he continued, and though nomadic, predatory, dissipated, and improvident, they had exerted a powerful influence in the social, cultural, and political spheres of the nineteenth-century world.
Sala’s description of a ‘Bohemian Republic’ evokes associations with the ‘Republic of Letters,’ the intellectual community that fostered long-distance communication between scholars in the Age of Enlightenment. Underpinned by the circulation of handwritten letters, the publishing of papers and pamphlets, and the development of institutional networks through universities and fraternal societies, the Republic of Letters constructed the identity of the universal intellectual and a transnational community in service to scholarship – a metaphysical Republic. Though vastly different in character, Sala’s Bohemian Republic of the nineteenth century functioned in strikingly similar ways. In its birthplace of Paris, writers and artists constructed and embodied a new narrative for the modern artistic life in the metropolis. True to the archetypal nomadism at the heart of the identity, the concept spread rapidly to inspire the foundation of satellite communities in London, New York, and even Melbourne, carried by its nomadic pioneers. With the mechanisms for its development built on the new communications, print, and commercial culture networks of the mid-nineteenth century, Bohemia became a metaphysical Republic.
In Pascale Casanova’s seminal analysis of modern literary geopolitics, her description of the development of the ‘World Republic of Letters’ could equally be applied to a history of Bohemia, underlining the parallels between the metaphysical Republics. Casanova describes how Paris became
the capital of a republic having neither borders nor boundaries, a universal homeland exempt from all professions of patriotism, a kingdom of literature set up in opposition to the ordinary laws of states, a transnational realm whose sole imperatives are those of art and literature: the universal republic of letters.
This article charts a corresponding realm, the Bohemian Republic.
The story of Bohemia’s cross-Channel, transatlantic, and trans-Pacific migrations remains untold and contradicts the conventional narrative about the birth of Bohemia. Elisabeth Jay’s assertion that Bohemianism was “a mid-century French literary construct finally incomprehensible to the Anglo-Saxon system of values” echoes almost two centuries of commentary confining Bohemia’s borders to the Latin Quarter. In his lauded preface to the 1851 volume of Scènes de la vie de Bohème, Henry Murger, one of Bohemia’s original and most influential chroniclers, declared: “Bohemia neither exists nor could exist anywhere but in Paris.” But not only were successive and interacting Bohemias proclaimed in London, New York, and Melbourne, exerting a major socio-cultural influence in their respective cities, but Paris Bohemia was never exclusively Parisian. It was a cosmopolitan milieu encompassing nomads from many countries, converging in the ‘City of Light.’ In addition, Murger’s Parisian Bohemians were engaged in the dissemination of Bohemia in new territories, as visitors and settlers in the Anglophone satellites of the Bohemian Republic.
Avowals of Bohemia’s incompatibility with Anglo-Saxon values were made as soon as it emerged. The first Bohemian in English literature, Thackeray’s Becky Sharp, was denounced as “diabolically French” by Quarterly Review critic Elizabeth Rigby. Such impressions have endured. In 1943 V. S. Pritchett pronounced the Englishman constitutionally unbohemian, lacking the romantic and impractical nature intrinsic to the identity. In 1969, Joanna Richardson observed that while nineteenth-century England produced eccentric artists and socially unorthodox writers, “there was no sense of a Bohemian movement; and there was no Bohemian colony.”
Patrick Brantlinger concurred in a 1983 article entitled ‘Bohemia versus Grub Street,’ comparing the “relentlessly dismal” world depicted in George Gissing’s New Grub Street with the cheerful portrayal of artistic life in George du Maurier’s Trilby, concluding that the contrast is emblematic of the difference between the relative responses to social rationalization and the commercialization of the cultural trades in nineteenth-century Paris and London. The Parisian response, grounded in the romantic tradition, produced Bohemia, “an anarchic association of artists, writers, and students opposed to bourgeois commercialism.” London’s response mounted no such opposition and failed to envisage a new order. Instead, Grub Street “represents the capitulation of writers to commerce.” According to Brantlinger, Paris afforded writers and artists “opportunities for self-expression and for communal association” unavailable in London, fostering an environment in which an enlightened and politically radical Bohemia could flourish. He contrasts the “heady atmosphere of moral experimentation and freedom in Paris” with the reactionary “neoclassical conservatism” of London, concluding that “there was no equivalent for the Bohemia of the Latin Quarter in London, or for that matter anywhere else before the modern era.”
The texts selected by Brantlinger to support his argument are unsuited to a study of mid-nineteenth-century Bohemia. Both du Maurier’s Trilby and Gissing’s New Grub Street are retrospective reimaginings written in the 1890s. While du Maurier was present at the dawn of the original Parisian and London Bohemias in the 1840s and 1850s, Gissing was not born until 1857. Though du Maurier’s portrayal of Bohemia is derived from experience, Gissing’s portrayal of a “new Grub Street” is drawn from imagination. By mid-century, Grub Street was no longer the physical and symbolic locus of literary production in London that it had been in the Augustan era. Fleet Street and the West End had emerged as the focal points of the press and the theatre, and the “adventurers” who plied their trade in these spaces subscribed to a new identity. While Bohemia inherited important characteristics from the Grub Street tradition, most notably as a site of literary and artistic poverty, much was changed. The Bohemians self-identified, attaching themselves to an identity invested with a transcendental potential. In their satirical representations of Grub Street – in Alexander Pope’s mock-epic poem The Dunciad, or William Hogarth’s painting of The Distrest Poet – the Augustan satirists would never have identified themselves as Grubbeans. Rather, their satire was intended as a criticism of cultural commercialization, which had enabled and encouraged the dunces and hacks to degrade London’s press and theatrical trades.
By contrast Bohemianism was a self-constructed identity collectively claimed by networks who passionately defended it from external criticism. The establishment of Bohemian institutions and publishing ventures in London challenges Brantlinger’s assertion that there were no opportunities for self-expression and communal association in the capital; in his words,
Grub street authors did not think of banding together to exert political or social pressure against their society or their partisan employers. They merely tried to overcome poverty by selling their skills, thereby becoming objects of contempt to their betters, to each other, to themselves.
London’s original Bohemian generations do not match Brantlinger’s model: they banded together in clubs like the Tumbler and the Savage and in joint publishing ventures like The Train magazine, cooperative enterprises replicated in the Bohemias of New York and Melbourne.
Contradicting notions of Parisian exclusivity, the period between the birth and zenith of Paris Bohemia witnessed numerous declarations and representations of a London Bohemia. A host of late-century memoirists identified a Bohemian network active in London in the 1840s and 1850s, from Pre-Raphaelite William Michael Rossetti to Chartist Thomas Frost. Fleet Street printer John Farlow Wilson maintained that “Bohemianism had a definite meaning in London,” while journalist Thomas Escott believed London Bohemia had “as distinct a local existence as Leicester, and as much a population of its own.” Irish author Justin McCarthy described the London Bohemia he knew as “made up of young newspaper writers, young painters and actors,” united by “late hours of conviviality, much beer… unlimited tobacco… temporary poverty… debt… and… the bond of poor devilship.” This Bohemian network extending across the press, art, and the theatre refutes another of Brantlinger’s criticisms—that London’s cultural trades engendered no unity across the arts. “The Grub Street tradition views writers in isolation from other artists.” On the contrary, London Bohemia was an interdisciplinary enterprise underpinned by professional and social collaboration.
Depictions of ‘London Bohemianism’ as an oxymoron were derived from the historical enmity between France and England and the subsequent tendency of writers on both sides of the Channel to exaggerate their cultural difference into a polarity for their mutual gratification, defining themselves as opposites and associating disreputable habits with the other. As Linda Colley established, Victorian vilification of France served to consolidate notions of national identity. As a result, in the eyes of many, Bohemia’s Parisian origins precluded its existence in London. When Bohemia migrated across the Channel in the 1840s it was received by a nation at once suspicious of, and seduced by, the idea of France and French culture.
Failure to fully recognize London Bohemia has produced an incomplete picture of popular culture in Victorian Britain and has distorted impressions of the New York and Melbourne satellites. Bohemia migrated from Paris to London and from there it diffused out to the Anglophone satellites, its migrations underpinned by colonial networks and processes of cultural transfer. London Bohemia shaped the development of these satellites to a greater extent than Paris, and its absence from the conventional narrative has resulted in an incomplete picture of American and Australian Bohemianism.
Bohemia was endowed with an especial power in its new contexts, where the emergence of the Bohemian Republic coincided with the explosive growth of the “Anglo-World.” The “settler revolution” that fueled the expansion of English-speaking societies across the world in the nineteenth century brought Bohemia within its transit. At a time when Malthusian concepts of migration as a population control pressure valve and ideas about revitalization overseas were prevalent, the Bohemians were part of an “Anglo exodus.” But Bohemia maintained a complex relationship with ideas about ‘Greater Britain.’ As well as products and agents of imperialism, the Bohemians frequently played the role of dissident, registering opposition to the colonial project and the emergent ideologies of Social Darwinism alongside its more familiar critiques of the prevailing orthodoxies of bourgeois society. While Darwin regarded emigrants as conduits of the best of British civilization, the Bohemians were carriers of dissent toward Victorian cultural and ideological forms, in particular the hegemonic notions of respectability and Universal Progress.
Bohemia’s insurgent relationship to the dominant culture has often been viewed in relation to sexuality. It forms a prominent theme in Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet, where it serves a corresponding and at times intersecting function to the eponymous ‘closet’ – “that curious space both internal and marginal to the culture: centrally representative of its motivating passions and contradictions, even while marginalized by its orthodoxies.” From a position simultaneously despised and tolerated, a small and shadowy group showed the prevailing culture hidden truths about itself, much like the ideal Socratic philosopher. For Sedgwick, Bohemia derived its power from its marginality, and was an inherently sexualized realm. Accepting this premise, Bohemia held its greatest power amidst the anxious climate of the mid-nineteenth-century Anglo-World, where a Puritan revival flourished. Bohemia formed its mirror image, the transgressive other, creating a powerful spectacle of transgression and dissidence.
The London, New York, and Melbourne Bohemias articulated their corporate identities in strikingly similar ways. Each group established formal and informal social institutions: the Savage Club and the Tumbler Club in London; Pfaff’s in New York; and the Yorick Club in Melbourne. Each group collectively published a Bohemian periodical emanating from these social clubs to serve as the organ of the respective communities, platforms to capitalize on Bohemian sociability through published metanarratives. In each of the cities Bohemia was a collective enterprise, fostering distinctive styles and aesthetics across a range of media and platforms. And in each satellite the Bohemians reached the public chiefly through new genres of journalism and theatre.
Today the term Bohemian is usually employed as a clichéd adjective, but in the mid-nineteenth century it was a proper noun loaded with meaning, defining particular people, places, lifestyles, genres, and aesthetics. Bohemia denoted a network of creatives who proclaimed their self-exile from and collective resistance to dominant codes of modern morality, and who identified with Bohemianism, a new cultural construct born in Paris. Bohemianism was a creation of its own adherents. They had no established model to draw from: they were fashioning their own identity and constructing their own world creating and promoting a new phenomenon.
Bohemia attracted the attention of the most celebrated writers of the nineteenth century: Balzac, Baudelaire, Sand, and Flaubert in Paris; Dickens, Thackeray, and Mary Braddon in London; Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, and Bret Harte in New York; Marcus Clarke, Henry Kendall, and Rosa Praed in Melbourne. Each contribution shaped the legend in new ways. Conceptual discourse on Bohemianism has engaged critics, sociologists, and cultural historians ever since its emergence, with theories of Bohemia proposed by some of the most renowned thinkers of the modern era, from Karl Marx to Walter Benjamin, and from Pierre Bourdieu to Raymond Williams. Their contested and contradictory interpretations have produced a farrago of images and meanings, leaving Bohemia a quintessentially indeterminate, amorphous construct.
-G.S.
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