Bloomsbury

At the beginning of the 20th century in London's Bloomsbury district, an amalgamation of sets such as the Apostles and Vanessa Bell's Friday Club formed the first Bloomsbury Group, a society for the free-thinking intellectuals of the day, united by their belief in the pursuit of art and pleasure. The group's roots lay in the earlier Clapham Sect, and they shared the same left wing values of progressive thought and support for their friends' creative undertakings. In the group's history a divide can be seen between the 'old' and 'new' set, as changes and deaths in the 1920s and 30s brought in the younger generation, the sons and daughters of the original 'old' set. Although many principles remained the same, the rejection of their upper class heritage and privileging of love and life experiences, the 'new' set had a far stronger political stance, and many were conscientious objectors and members of political groups outside of Bloomsbury. The group did not survive the death of two of its key members, Lytton Strachey and Virginia Woolf, and by the end of the 1930s, the group that had never called itself a group had all but ceased to exist.