What is the Bloomsbury Project?

The Leverhulme-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

Bloomsbury and the Bloomsbury Project

Cartoon satirising the British College of Health

Bloomsbury Institutions

Bloomsbury Streets, Squares, and Buildings

Bloomsbury and the Bloomsbury Project

Eve family

a summary of their Bloomsbury connections

Henry Weston Eve (1838–1910) was the elder son of Henry Weston Eve (senior) of Maldon, Essex

He was educated at Rugby School and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he became a Fellow; he was subsequently a schoolmaster at Wellington College (The Times, 28 July 1910)

In 1875 he succeeded Thomas Hewitt Key as Headmaster of of University College School, where he was both popular and successful; he remained there until 1898 (The Times, 8 November 1898)

He was appointed Dean of the College of Preceptors in succession to A. K. Isbister in 1883 (The Times, 5 July 1883)

At the time of the 1881 census he was living at 37 Gordon Square with his two unmarried sisters, Mary Martha Eve and Margaret Ann Eve; he was then a widower

By the 1891 census he had remarried and his sisters had moved out of the house in Gordon Square

He died in 1910, at 37 Gordon Square, and his Times obituary remarked that his widow “was a sister-in-law of George Eliot” (The Times, 28 July 1910) — she was Florence Nightingale Cross (1857–1915), younger sister of John Walter Cross, who had married Henry Weston Eve in Paris in 1886 (The Times, 8 June 1886)

Neither marriage seems to have produced any children

His sister Margaret Anne Eve was an unsuccessful candidate for the London School Board (Finsbury division) in 1891 (The Times, 5 November 1891)

She stood again as a Progressive candidate for the same division in 1894, and was elected at the top of the poll with 29,124 votes (The Times, 25 November 1897)

She was re-elected in 1897 with fewer votes (22,576) but still at the top of the poll, and with an increased margin over the second-placed candidate (The Times, 27 November 1897)

She was also a member of the Government Committee appointed in 1895 to investigate reformatory and industrial schools (The Times, 18 May 1895) and in 1906 was on the Education Committee of the LCC (The Times, 14 March 1906)

In view of her educational activities, it seems likely that she, rather than her elder sister Mary Martha Eve, was the “Miss Eve” of Gordon Square who was Hon. Secretary of the Tavistock Place Training College in 1883 (Froebel Society minutes, 16 June 1883)