Bohemia in London

by Arthur Ransome

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Genres: Writing, London, Biography

284 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1907

About the author

Arthur Michell Ransome (January 18, 1884 – June 3, 1967) was an English author and journalist. He was educated in Windermere and Rugby.

In 1902, Ransome abandoned a chemistry degree to become a publisher's office boy in London. He used this precarious existence to practice writing, producing several minor works before Bohemia in London (1907), a study of London's artistic scene and his first significant book.

An interest in folklore, together with a desire to escape an unhappy first marriage, led Ransome to St. Petersburg, where he was ideally placed to observe and report on the Russian Revolution. He knew many of the leading Bolsheviks, including Lenin, Radek, Trotsky and the latter's secretary, Evgenia Shvelpina. These contacts led to persistent but unproven accusations that he "spied" for both the Bolsheviks and Britain.

Ransome married Evgenia and returned to England in 1924. Settling in the Lake District, he spent the late 1920s as a foreign correspondent and highly-respected angling columnist for the Manchester Guardian, before settling down to write Swallows and Amazons and its successors.

Today Ransome is best known for his Swallows and Amazons series of novels, (1931 - 1947). All remain in print and have been widely translated.

Arthur Ransome died in June 1967 and is buried at Rusland in the Lake District.

Reviews

[Nancy Oakes · Rating 4 out of 5]

"This is Bohemia. What do you think of it?"

Personally, I thought it was grand. I will have more to say about this book at a later time; for now, published in 1907, Bohemia In London is kind of like a tour through the "grouping points" (Chelsea, Soho, Charing Cross Road, Fleet Street etc.) of young, freedom-seeking artists of various sorts for whom "penury... is but a little price to pay." It's much more, of course but I have to think about how to describe it before I post more.

This is book #2 in my list of about 13 I've selected to read from Library of the Lost (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4...) and I have to agree with author Roger Dobson who says that it is "by turns comic, poignant, lyrical, rumbustious and elegiac..." and I'll add charming and delightful to that description. But more soon.

I'm putting this under a vague category called "UK literature" since Dobson refers to it as Ransome's "somewhat fictionalized chronicle of this early years of the metropolis..."

ps/ the "Novelist" that Ransome met and describes toward the end of this book is actually MP Shiel, according to Dobson. More to add to my already-overtaxed brain full of completely useless but interesting knowledge.

[Roger · Rating 3 out of 5]

What a gem of a little book! Arthur Ransome, who is known to many readers through his children's series Swallows and Amazons, led a very long and interesting life both on the sea and off it; Bohemia in London was the first book he had published of which he was proud, and it would be hard to find a subject more distant to that of young girls and boys messing about in boats.

Part autobiographical, part historical, and I'm sure part fantastical, Bohemia in London takes us on a tour of the physical locations and human types that inhabited the intellectual quarter of London, in places such as Chelsea, Soho, Bloomsbury and the Charing Cross Road.

Ransome is at his best in this work when describing the sights and sounds of Bohemia - pen portraits of struggling authors and artists and their affectations, editors of failing magazines who are living an imagined life of glory, and parties fueled by cheap claret, pipe tobacco, bravado and singing.

He intersperses his work with historical snippets from older times, evoking the spirits of Johnson, Smollett, Steele and Addison. These forays are somewhat less successful than the rest of the book, and an imagined party in Ransome's room with the "attendance" of Ben Johnson, Robert Herrick, John Gay, John Keats and William Davies is the one occasion in the book where Ransome's youthful ardour (he was 22 when he wrote this book), overcomes his better authorial sense.

What comes through for the more modern reader is how little many of the ways of Bohemia have changed since this book was written - the self-importance, without reason, of many of the inhabitants, the tendency to cliques, the dismissal of any "mainstream" activity as "selling out", and the fact that most people leave its realms as age, success, or responsibility settles on their shoulders. Ransome's final chapter is an envoi for Bohemia - even at 22 he knew he'd leave it one day - and how step-by-step most people move on. It is right to do so of course, as Bohemia is a situation only truly useful to the young; Ransome writes "...it is better so. There are few sadder sights than an old man without any manners aping the boyishness of his youth without the excuse of its ideals, going from tavern to tavern with the young, talking rubbish till two in the morning....it is too pitiful to be amusing."

For the bibliophiles amongst us, the chapter in Bohemia in London entitled "The Book-Shops of Bohemia" is a must. This is a wonderful picture of the bookshops that once lined a section of the Charing Cross Road, and the types that frequented them - I will indulge myself with some quotes -

"There is something more real about this style of buying books [i.e. secondhand], than about the dull mercenary method of a new emporium. It is good, granted, to look about the shelves of a new bookshop,.....all that is pleasant enough, but to spend money there is a sham and a fraud; it is like buying groceries instead of buying dreams."
"And then, too, the people who buy in the ordinary shops are so disheartening. There is no spirit about them, no enthusiasm. You cannot sympathise with them over a disappointment nor smile your congratulations over a prize...the books they buy are doomed, Christmas or birthday presents, to lie about on drawing-room tables."

"It is an odd thing, by the way, that sumptuous volumes are always easiest to part with; a ragged, worn old thing, especially if it is small, tugs at our feelings, so that we cannot let it go whereas a school prize or an elegant present - away with it."

I fear that in the current barbarian age, we may well be losing the true joys of the second-hand bookshop - the good ones are closing, leaving the "sham" bookshops (overpriced, bad selection of titles, ignorant owners) left. While the internet is a boon in the sense that any book can be found, it spells the death of the innocent joys of browsing - soon we may only have the writings of ones such as Ransome to remind us of the era of the good second-hand bookshop. sic transit gloria mundi.

Check out my other reviews at http://aviewoverthebell.blogspot.com.au/

[Alex Sarll]

Utterly charming meditation on the rackety life of hacks and artists by the author of Swallows and Amazons (a book which I don't know why I've never read). Published over a century ago, looking back to a time before that, and haunted by the convivial ghosts of drinkers and wits older still, from Hazlitt to Jonson, it thus serves as a cheering reminder that while our watering holes too may now be turned to lumber rooms, still in some new guise the tavern of Bohemia survives. It's wistful in a way one seldom sees these days - aware of youth as but a phase, yet adamant that such a phase is important to warm the memories we take into later years. Like reviewers at the time, I feel oddly reluctant to quote from it; as with Bohemia itself, one must first venture through the door to meet Ransome on his own terms.

[Andrea · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is delightful -- I do not use the word 'delight' very often in the same sentence as Bohemian, and this first quote shows why, describing a tiny Moorish cafe:

Dark hair, dark eyes, sallow-skinned faces everywhere, here and there a low caste Englishman, and sometimes, if you are lucky, a Bohemian in emerald corduroy, lolling broadly on his chair and puffing at a porcelain pipe. Sit down near him, and it is ten to one that you will be engaged in a wordy battle of acting, of poetry, or of pictures, before the sediment has time to settle in your coffee. (122)

It's all there, the search to inhabit the quaint or the exotic, the dress that attempts both, but also the fascination and joy in all night discussions of things like words. It describes a life of relative poverty, but one you drop down into and you don't drop all the way -- you realise that when they still have a maid or at least someone to bring them their dinner. It's a mixed bag, but this book has all the best of it. Besides, even C.L.R. James loved his first stay in Bloomsbury.

And then, the poignant, painful self-abandon when at last you are conquered, and a book leads you by the hand to the passionless little man inside the shop, and makes you pay him money, the symbol, mean, base, sordid in itself, but still the symbol that the book has won, and swayed the pendulum of your emotions past the paying point.

I remember the buying of my "Anatomy of Melancholy" (that I have never read, nor ever mean to--I dare not risk the sweetness of the title)... (137)

I have been conquered that way so many times.

On Fleet Street, that I love:

Indeed, Fleet Street, brave show as it is today, must have been splendid then, seen through old Temple Bar, a turning, narrow thorough-fare, with high-gabled houses a little overhanging the pavements, those pavements where crowds of gentlemen, frizzed and wigged, in coloured coats and knee-breeches, went to and fro about their business. There would come strutting little Goldsmith in the plum-coloured suit, and the sword so big that it seemed a pin and he a fly upon it. There would be Johnson, rolling in his gait, his vast stomach swinging before him, his huge laugh bellying out in the narrow street, with Boswell at his side, leaning round to see his face, and catch each word as it fell from his lips. There would be Doctor Kenrick, Goldsmith's arch enemy, for whose fault he broke a stick over the back of Bookseller Evans, and got a pummelling for his pains. There would be the usual mob of young fellows
trying as gaily then as now to keep head above water by writing for the Press.

And then think of it in a later time, when Hazlitt walked those pavements, with straight, well-meant strides, as befits a man who has done his thirty miles a day along the Great North Road. Perhaps, as he walked, he would be composing his remarks on the oratory of the House of Commons, which he was engaged to report for Mr. Perry of the Morning Chronicle. Or perhaps, if it were Wednesday, he would turn in at Mitre Court, or meet a slim-legged, black-clothed figure with a beautiful head, Charles Lamb, coming out of the archway, or hurrying in there, with a folio under his arm, fresh from the stall of the second-hand bookseller. Perhaps Lamb might be playing the journalist himself, writing jokes for Dan Stuart of the Morning Post. You remember: "Somebody has said that to swallow six cross-buns daily, consecutively, for a fortnight would surfeit the stoutest digestion. But to have to furnish as many jokes daily, and that not for a fortnight, but for a long twelvemonth, as we were constrained to do, was a little harder exaction." Or, perhaps, you might meet Coleridge coming that way from his uncomfortable lodging in the office of the Courier up the Strand. Coleridge knew the ills of journalistic life. De Quincey "called on him daily and pitied his forlorn condition," and left us a description of his lodging. De Quincey had known worse himself, but this was evil enough. "There was no bell in the room, which for many months answered the double purpose of bedroom and sitting-room. Consequently I often saw him, picturesquely enveloped in nightcaps, surmounted by handkerchiefs indorsed upon handkerchiefs, shouting from the attics down three or four flights of stairs to a certain * Mrs. Brainbridge,' his sole attendant, whose dwelling was in the subterranean regions of the house. There did I often see the philosopher, with the most lugubrious of faces, invoking with all his might this uncouth name of 'Brainbridge' each syllable of which he intonated with long-drawn emphasis, in order to overpower the hostile hub-bub coming downwards from the creaking press and the roar from the Strand which entered at all the front windows.

***

And now there are these different Fleet Streets, one on the top of the other, dovetailed together indistinguishably. A building here, an old doorway there, the name of a side street, brings back a memory of one age or another. This tavern, for example, was given its name as a jest by a gay-dressed fellow in long locks, with a sword swinging at his side. there is the street of the White Friars. That building was designed by a subject of Queen Anne. Lamb walked past while those offices were still cradled in their scaffolding.

On a sunny morning there is no jollier sight in all the world than to look down Fleet Street, from a little below the corner of Fetter Lane on that side of the road. The thorough-fare is thronged with buses--green for Whitechapel, blue going to Waterloo Bridge, white for Liverpool Street, gay old survivals of the coaching days... (154)

I love our red buses but this still fills me with a desire for colour-coding...

This is youth and joy and excitement in words, paintings, life lived to the fullest in long nights drinking and talking and drinking and talking some more. It is a different kind of devotion to literature or art, made possible by relatively cheap lodgings (oh London, you don't know what you are destroying) and some limited freedom from the life of toil. It is life best in its full flush of youth, when a small sum earned from an article feels like gold and is spent on wine before age and children and the fight for survival has stripped all the joy away (Gissing makes this world hard to imagine in New Grub Street, but I believe that at times and for some it was really there).

It is an age long gone I think. But we still laugh and stay up all night talking over wine. Just not as picturesquely.

There is a description of the loveliest wedding party ever in Soho, gossip and chit chat galore. Plenty to smile at. But this is also an immensely erudite collection of who said what where in these little corners of the city Ransome loves.

So back to Fleet Street, he gives a list of pubs and clubs and the people who met there and the poems and epigraphs that they wrote, the discussions they had and, well, it is inspiration to go drinking I must say. But you cannot do them all at once, as he writes:

To sup with ale at the Cheshire Cheese, to drink at the Punch Bowl, at the Green Dragon, at the Mitre, at the Cock, at the Grecian, at the George, at the Edinburgh — in short, to beat the bounds of every tavern in Fleet Street, from Ludgate Circus to the Strand, that is a festival too peripatetic to be comfortable, an undertaking too serious to be lighthearted.

But one at a time? Oh yes. The Cheshire Cheese is already much beloved by me, so I shall just end with the description of that one:

ar down on the Fetter Lane side of the street there is the Cheshire Cheese, still the dirty-fronted, low-browed tavern, with stone flasks in the window, that it was even before Johnson's time. Here, so people say, Johnson and Goldsmith used to sup and be merry with their friends. Perhaps it vv^as the haunt of one of the talking clubs of which neither of them was ever tired. Although it is nowhere written that Johnson crossed the threshold, it is very unlikely that the man who asserted that "a tavern chair was the throne of human felicity" could have neglected such an opportunity as was his. For he lived for some time in Wine Office Court, in whose narrow passage is the entrance to the tavern, and I doubt if he could have passed it every day without finding some reason for encouraging it. Indeed, with Macaulayic logic, they show you Johnson's corner seat, the wall behind it rubbed smooth by the broadcloth of innumerable visitors, "to witness if they lie." It is a pleasant brown room, this, in the tavern, with Johnson's portrait hanging on the wall, old wooden benches beside good solid tables, and a homely smell of ale and toasted cheese.Here many of the best-known journalists make a practice of dining, and doubtless get some sauce of amusement with their meat from the young men and girls, literary and pictorial, destined to work for the cheap magazines and fashion papers, who always begin their professional career by visiting the Cheshire Cheese for inspiration. Up a winding, crooked, dark staircase there are other rooms, with long tables in them stained with wine and ale, and in one of them the Rhymers' Club used to meet, to drink from tankards, smoke clay pipes, and recite their own poetry. (161-162)

[Benjamin · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this little old book on a whim. I am, in short, a happier man for it. Much like the lifestyle that Arthur Ransome depicts, it is not always a book than can be described as a cohesive endeavour, though, as my rating suggests, I do not mean this as a criticism. Part coming-of-age memoir, part potted history and part pub yarn, Ransome paints a consistently compelling picture of a bygone London and the tortured (melodramatically speaking) artists and penniless flaneurs that inhabited it.

Despite being now an account of some age, I find Ransome to be a disarmingly relatable and likable guide, give or take the occasional moment where his perspective shows its age (though I found these moments to be relatively few, considering the time at which he was writing). Ransome's concerns, or rather the concerns of his younger self, centre on many of the things that inspire me: conversation, reading, storytelling, copious libation, a decent smoke and the occasional bout of frivolous pretentiousness. On every subject just listed, and more besides, one can find an eminently quotable phrase, borrowed or original, herein.

It is on the last point, however, that I wish to elaborate. Although the Bohemian life is, almost by definition, pretentious, the older Ransome writes without any such pretensions of his own; neither can one catch a whiff of the tutting elder lambasting a misguided youth. Every word stems from a deep love, for both his friends and for his calling, which is combined elegantly with the fond nostalgia of a man who seems well at ease with the life he has lead.

Whilst he may, in one moment, be amused to recall how the young would-be Bohemians of his day (and the present) were capable of 'talking rubbish till two in the morning', he will in another need no convincing of their abilities and seriousness of purpose (albeit self-perceived). There is no condescension here, only the true understanding of one who has lived the life and since, without bitterness or regret, moved on. I have never read an account that felt more genuine, ignorant as I may be to the reality. I daresay there may be the odd embellishment or fib here and there, but I do not think I can bring myself to care, so captivating is Ransome's enthusiasm. If anything, the occasional light fabrication would, I feel, be entirely in keeping with the Bohemian spirit. Never let the truth get in the way of a good story and all that.

There is no comment I could make on the subject matter that is not put better in the book itself and so I shall not attempt to. Thus, it remains only for me to reiterate my ringing endorsement for this old gem and call for its immediate reissue in a modern edition that, in order to align itself with Ransome's Bohemian principles, can only be bought second-hand, in the open air of a busy London street.

[Patrick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Arthur Ransome published his non-fiction tribute to the impecunious creative world, Bohemia in London (1907), when he was only 23 and just starting to make a name for himself. It paints a considerably cheerier picture of the New Grub Street lifestyle than Gissing does in his famous novel (but then, Gissing really piles on the misery).

[Kristin · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wish I had read a couple of chapters in this book prior to visiting London, as it would have provided a unique & fresh perspective on my walking tour of the city.