London has always been home to outsiders. To people who won't, or can't, abide by the conventions of respectable society. For close to two centuries these misfit individualists have had a name. They have been called Bohemians.This book is an entertaining, anecdotal history of Bohemian London. A guide to its more colourful inhabitants: Rossetti and Swinburne, defying the morality of high Victorian England; Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley in the decadent 1890s; The Bloomsburyites and the Bright Young Things; Dylan Thomas, boozing in the Blitz; and Francis Bacon and his cronies, wasting time and getting wasted in 1950s Soho.It's also a guide to the places where Bohemia has flourished: the legendary Café Royal, a home from home to artists and writers for nearly a century, the Cave of the Golden Calf, the Colony Room, the Gargoyle Club and more.The story of Bohemian London is one of drink and drugs, sex and death, excess and indulgence. It's also a story of achievement and success. This book provides a lively and enjoyable portrait of the world in which Bohemian Londoners once lived, and perhaps still do.

The colourful, salacious and sumptuously illustrated story of Covent Garden - the creative heart of Georgian London - from Wolfson Prize-winning author Vic Gatrell SHORT-LISTED FOR THE HESSELL TILTMAN PRIZE 2014 In the teeming, disordered, and sexually charged square half-mile centred on London's Covent Garden something extraordinary evolved in the 18th century. It was the world's first creative 'Bohemia'. The nation's most significant artists, actors, poets, novelists, and dramatists lived here. From Soho and Leicester Square across Covent Garden's Piazza to Drury Lane, and down from Long Acre to the Strand, they rubbed shoulders with rakes, prostitutes, market people, craftsmen, and shopkeepers. It was an often brutal world full of criminality, poverty and feuds, but also of high spirits, and was as culturally creative as any other in history. Virtually everything that we associate with Georgian culture was produced here. Vic Gatrell's spectacular new book recreates this time and place by drawing on a vast range of sources, showing the deepening fascination with 'real life' that resulted in the work of artists like Hogarth, Blake, and Rowlandson, or in great literary works like The Beggar's Opera and Moll Flanders. The First Bohemians is illustrated by over two hundred extraordinary pictures, many rarely seen, for Gatrell celebrates above all one of the most fertile eras in Britain's artistic history. He writes about Joshua Reynolds and J. M. W. Turner as well as the forgotten figures who contributed to what was a true golden age: the men and women who briefly dazzled their contemporaries before being destroyed - or made - by this magical but also ferocious world. About the author: Vic Gatrell's last book, City of Laughter, won both the Wolfson Prize for History and the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize; his The Hanging Tree won the Whitfield Prize of the Royal Historical Society. He is a Life Fellow of Caius College, Cambridge.

In the mid-nineteenth century successive cultural Bohemias were proclaimed in Paris, London, New York, and Melbourne. Focusing on networks and borders as the central modes of analysis, this book charts for the first time Bohemia’s cross-Channel, transatlantic, and trans-Pacific migrations, locating its creative expressions and social practices within a global context of ideas and action. Though the story of Parisian Bohemia has been comprehensively told, much less is known of its Anglophone translations. The Bohemian Republic offers a radical reinterpretation of the phenomenon, as the neglected lives and works of British, Irish, American, and Australian Bohemians are reassessed, the transnational networks of Bohemia are rediscovered, the presence and influence of women in Bohemia is reclaimed, and Bohemia’s relationship with the marketplace is reconsidered. Bohemia emerges as a marginal network which exerted a paradoxically powerful influence on the development of popular culture, in the vanguard of material, social and aesthetic innovations in literature, art, journalism, and theatre. Underpinned by extensive and original archival research, the book repopulates the concept of Bohemianism with layers of the networked voices, expressions, ideas, people, places, and practices that made up its constituent social, imagined, and interpretive communities. The reader is brought closer than ever to the heart of Bohemia, a shadowy world inhabited by the rebels of the mid-nineteenth century.

First-rate collection of early 20th century British art by Vanessa Bell, the Omega Workshops, Lucien Pissarro, Henry Lamb, etc. - acquired and collected by new monied class.

When the respectable Londoner wants to feel devilish, he goes to Soho', wrote Thomas Burke in 1915 - but these words could have been uttered at any point in Soho's colourful history. From humble beginnings, Soho developed into a fashionable centre for London's nobility in the eighteenth century. This same area was to become a poverty-stricken Victorian hub of cheap lodging houses, the Soho of the devastating cholera outbreak of 1854. A new focus on business and manufacturing transformed Soho in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the 1960s, Carnaby Street became the fashion and retail centre of the world. The nightclubs of Soho played host to the Teddies, Mods, Rockers, Punks and New Romantics of post-war British youth culture. Complete with illustrations evoking the life and times of Soho, this new history explores the people and places that brought the area to worldwide fame.

They ate garlic and didn't always bathe; they listened to Wagner and worshiped Diaghilev; they sent their children to coeducational schools, explored homosexuality and free love, vegetarianism and Post-impressionism. They were often drunk and broke, sometimes hungry, but they were of a rebellious spirit. Inhabiting the same England with Philistines and Puritans, this parallel minority of moral pioneers lived in a world of faulty fireplaces, bounced checks, blocked drains, whooping cough, and incontinent cats. They were the bohemians. Virginia Nicholson -- the granddaughter of painter Vanessa Bell and the great-niece of Virginia Woolf -- explores the subversive, eccentric, and flamboyant artistic community of the early twentieth century in this "wonderfully researched and colorful composite portrait of an enigmatic world whose members, because they lived by no rules, are difficult to characterize" (San Francisco Chronicle).

This bookis a new translation of Henry Murger’s influential Scènes de la vie de bohème, first published in French in 1851. The book recounts the lives of a bohemian group of creative young people as they fall in and out of love, endure cold and hunger, enjoy drunken parties, see their friends suffer and die of poverty, and finally emerge as mature artists. The book's publication soon inspired many (mostly young) people to seek out a bohemian life in Paris and other cities around the world. Not only did it inspire people at the time to change their lives, it also inspired Puccini’s beloved opera La Bohème(1896) and, a hundred years later, Jonathan Larson’s phenomenally successful Rent (1996). Few works of literature have had such a social impact. Bohemian cultures and subcultures have been with us ever since and Murger’s book remains an engaging and satisfying work of literature.