What is the Bloomsbury Project?
The -funded UCL Bloomsbury Project was established to investigate 19th-century Bloomsbury’s development from swampy rubbish-dump to centre of intellectual life
Led by Professor Rosemary Ashton, with Dr Deborah Colville as Researcher, the Project has traced the origins, Bloomsbury locations, and reforming significance of hundreds of progressive and innovative institutions
Many of the extensive archival resources relating to these institutions have also been identified and examined by the Project, and Bloomsbury’s developing streets and squares have been mapped and described
This website is a gateway to the information gathered and edited by Project members during the Project’s lifetime, 1 October 2007–30 April 2011, with the co-operation of Bloomsbury’s institutions, societies, and local residents
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Bloomsbury and the Bloomsbury Project
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Edward Irving (1792–1834)
a summary of his Bloomsbury connections
Irving was a charismatic Presbyterian preacher born in Annan, Dumfriesshire, the same town in which his friend and contemporary Thomas Carlyle was born
In December 1821 he was invited to London to minister to the small congregation at the Caledonian Chapel in Cross Street, Hatton Garden; his apocalyptic sermons and eloquent, theatrical preaching style greatly increased attendance among the many Scots in London and also attracted members of parliament and the aristocracy to hear him
Carlyle recalled how tickets were issued for his Sunday services, carrriages blocked the roads near the small chapel, Lady Jersey sat on the pulpit steps, George Canning, then foreign minister, attended, and they all listened “week after week as if to the message of Salvation” (Thomas Carlyle, Reminiscences, 1881)
This popularity led to a fundraising effort for a purpose-built church to house Irving, to be located in Bloomsbury; by December 1822 a building fund had raised £3000 towards the building of a new church to accommodate 2000 people (Tim Grass, The Lord’s Watchman: Edward Irving, 2011)
The new National Scotch Church, designed on the model of York Minster by William Tite, was opened in Regent Square on 11 May 1827, with a crowd of over 1700 attending (The Times, 12 May 1827)
Irving’s charismatic preaching led him into trouble with the Scottish Presbyterian church and with its London branch when he published sermons and pamphlets preaching the sinful nature of Christ
This, together with his encouragement of an outbreak of ‘speaking in tongues’ among his congregation, led to his dismissal from his ministry and expulsion from Regent Square in May 1832
He took a large proportion of his congregation with him round the corner to nearby Gray’s Inn Road, where he shared the Royal London Bazaar, originally built as a horse bazaar and repository, with various other organisations, including Robert Owen’s co-operative lectures and meetings
The Times reported that Irving had “engaged large premises at the Horse Bazaar, Gray’s-inn-lane, where the new ‘spiritual manifestations’ are to be again displayed. He and Mr Owen will thus hold forth from the same place, and exhibit, perhaps, the strangest conjunction that ever design or accident produced. The former will give his ‘new readings’ of the Apocalypse, with occasional interludes on the ‘tongues’; and the other his ‘new view of society’, with a little fiddling and a sixpenny hop, ‘for the benefit of the working classes’ ” (The Times, 5 May 1832)
By the end of 1832 Irving had moved with his congregation out of Bloomsbury to Newman Street, west of Tottenham Court Road
Here he continued to preach until his death from consumption in December 1834 at the age of forty-two while on a proselytising visit to Glasgow
For more general biographical information about Edward Irving, see his entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
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