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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Frederick Denison Maurice (1805–1872)
a summary of his Bloomsbury connections
He was a Church of England clergyman whose unorthodox denial of the doctrine of eternal punishment for impenitent sinners in Theological Essays (1853) led to his dismissal as professor of theology at King’s College London
He lived at 21 Queen Square from 1846 to 1856, when he moved his family to a larger house at 5 Russell Square
In 1848 he founded Queen’s College, Harley Street, in association with the Governesses’ Benevolent Institution, in order to improve the education of governesses
From 1848 he held Bible-reading classes in his house in Queen Square for young lawyers and recent graduates of Oxford and Cambridge, some of whom joined him in founding, and teaching at, the Working Men’s College from 1854
Also from 1848 he carried on a night school for local working people in Little Ormond Yard, having been told by the rector of St George’s Bloomsbury that the area was so disorderly that the police did not venture there at night (Frederick Maurice (jr) ed, The Life of Frederick Denison Maurice, 1884)
In 1851 he took over the lease of 31 Red Lion Square to begin classes for working people
Though these were unsuccessful, he opened the Working Men’s College in the same building in October 1854; in 1857 the College moved to 45 Great Ormond Street, where it remained until 1905
For more general biographical information about Frederick Denison Maurice, see his entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
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