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

James Augustus Cotter Morison (1832–1888)

a summary of his Bloomsbury connections

He was the fourth son (according to Oxford University records) and only surviving child of James Morison, ‘the Hygeist’, of the British College of Health, by his second wife, Sharmer Jemima Clarinda Cotter (married 17 July 1830, according to The Times, 20 July 1830)

A younger son born in 1833 died aged 17 days of “hooping-cough and convulsions”, according to The Times of 29 March 1833

He was an Oxford-educated historian and author, and a student of Lincoln’s Inn without ever apparently being called to the bar (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography)

He moved to 10 Montague Place after the death of his wife, Frances Vertue, in 1878, to be near the British Museum (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography)

A Positivist, he also published some works advocating Positivism as the “religion of the future”; this secular form of religion, also known as the Church of Humanity, was based in Bloomsbury at Buckingham House, 19 (now 20) Chapel Street

He apparently took little interest in the day-to-day running of the business which had made his father so rich (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography)

For more general biographical information about James Augustus Cotter Morison, see his entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography