The argument of Rosemary Ashton’s absorbing study is that the identity of Bloomsbury and its reputation as London’s intellectual quarter was formed well before the migration eastwards from Kensington of Virginia and Vanessa, daughters of the Victorian man of letters Leslie Stephen, in 1904. Stephen himself was in step with the much-satirised ‘march of mind’ that began in the 1820s, as progressives agitated for parliamentary and electoral reform, together with extension of educational opportunities. In the course of the century, Bloomsbury became the heartland of institutions that embodied these aspirations, in education, medicine, culture, and religion.

Ashton, of University College London (UCL), writes out of that heartland. She has to her credit notable biographies of individual nineteenth-century British literary figures, including George Eliot (1996) and her consort George Henry Lewes (1991). She has also written group biographies, most recently 142 Strand: A Radical Address in Victorian London (2006), which centres on the avant-garde assembled by publisher John Chapman to write for the important Westminster Review. These works are distinguished by exacting research, which informs Ashton’s detailed awareness both of intellectual and cultural contexts, and of historical and spatial ones. Such saturation in her material, and her capacity to identify ‘significant conjunctions of people and place’, underpin the achievement of Victorian Bloomsbury as she now moves northward, extending her scope from one building to a whole district.

She sets the scene in ‘Surveying Bloomsbury’, outlining the nineteenth-century development of parts of the area including its famous squares, and giving an overview of the people, buildings, and institutions that came to occupy them. Close attention is paid throughout to the significance of various architectural choices, while the motif of the power of the major landowners, especially the dukes of Bedford, is recurrent.

The early chapters are dominated by the establishment of UCL, finally so called in 1837. Its founders wanted a metropolitan university, which expanded its teaching beyond mathematics and the classics to science and literature, but offered no teaching of theology; an institution open to all sects and none, without the Oxbridge requirement to subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England. From the outset it was pilloried by many as a godless institution, dubbed ‘Stinkomalee’ in satiric sketches due its location in swampy surrounds. Ashton’s account of vicissitudes and victories in the process is crisp. While many episodes (hard-fought appointments, funding crises) could be paralleled in today’s academia, they are played out on an entirely different scale from that of our corporatised entities.

A rough chronology is followed in subsequent chapters, taking up first the extension of educational opportunities to the working class by the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. The professionalisation of medicine is seen through the establishment of institutions like the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children and University College Hospital, with many of their attendant practitioners being resident in Bloomsbury. The British Museum, especially under Anthony Panizzi, was central in more than a geographical sense. Panizzi was also a professor of Italian at UCL: typically curators and librarians used their expertise both in teaching and in museum posts, and tended to live in the neighbourhood. Theology might not have been on the curriculum, but the influence of the Oxford Movement and of Christian Socialism was felt.

We are rarely presented with straight chronicle. Ashton provides brisk character sketches of key players. She really knows these people, displaying affinity with fellow Scots, like Henry Brougham, and bringing to life not-so-eminent Victorians like the long-lived and benevolent bachelor Henry Crabb Robinson and the charismatic but inconsistent Frederick Denison Maurice. Along the way there are arresting details: the account of developments in pain relief, including mesmerism (practised by Dickens among others), mentions in passing surgeon Robert Liston’s ability to amputate a leg in twenty-five seconds.

Ashton has heroes: Robinson is one, and so is Mrs Humphry Ward, who takes the stage in the final chapter. Born Mary Arnold (in Hobart), she was a granddaughter of Thomas Arnold of Rugby and niece of Matthew Arnold, who used both the family connection and her formidable personality to carry out significant social and educational work – achievements which Ashton rates more highly than her considerable career as an author. Further, Mary Ward provides a clear example of the ever-present undertow of kinship networks. While she receives fuller treatment than other women, the pioneering medical practitioner Elizabeth Garrett Anderson is a presence, as are the German Bertha Ronge, largely responsible for establishing the kindergarten movement in England, and Octavia Hill and her sisters (brought up by their grandfather, sanitary reformer Thomas Southwood Smith, who donated Jeremy Bentham’s mummified body to UCL).

In some ways the expansion of Bloomsbury in the course of the nineteenth century was a microcosm of the expansion of London and other major cities. It is not a prime aim of this book to bring Victorian London to life, a task usually left to Dickens’s novels. Of course, Dickens himself, for years a Bloomsbury resident, has a number of walk-on parts, as do other writers – Marian Evans, not a resident and not yet George Eliot, enrolled for mathematics and Latin at the newly opened Ladies’ College in Bedford Square in 1850–51. Thackeray’s first home after his marriage was in Bloomsbury, Trollope was born there – and so on. Yet incidentally the book does cast light on how people lived: there are glimpses of the living conditions of both the middle and working classes, not least in mention of a range of occupations now lost such as that of watch case joint-finisher.

The book is a treat for those who tend to start reading from the back, with more than fifty pages of references and bibliography, and a fine index. Numerous archives have been consulted, newspapers and periodicals quarried, and imaginative use made of literary material such as the now little-known novels of Theodore Hook. The generous selection of illustrations earns its keep. Not all of this is down to Ashton’s own hands-on activity. Rather, the book is the product of a grant from the Leverhulme Trust 2007–11, of which she was the leader and presiding genius. She gives full credit to her team, while the project’s website (www.ucl.ac.uk/bloomsbury-project) displays the mass of information collected and synthesised. The website also constitutes a valuable resource for other scholars, and a serious distraction for reviewers.

Victorian Bloomsbury is a compelling reconstruction of a formative era of British intellectual and social history. And – a confession – it speaks particularly to me because my days as a doctoral student were spent on its turf, mainly in the famous blue-domed Reading Room of the British Museum, less aware than I am now of the ways in which the whole environment conditioned my research into the Victorian period.