Inventors, Germans, and barristers wives: the Bloomsbury project reports
Who lived in Bloomsbury in the 19th century? A packed room of academics and enthusiasts learned all about the people of Bloomsbury in the second conference of the Bloomsbury Project in June 2009. The three-year project, funded by a grant from the Leverhulme Trust, brings together a range of researchers from across several disciplines and institutions. The aim of the project is to piece together an archive, illustrating 19th-century Bloomsbury's development from a swamp to a hub of intellectual life, and the impressions gained are strikingly diverse. Bloomsbury inventors, of both the authentic and the quack variety, were the subjects of Deborah Colville's presentation. In the 19th century, Colville explained, the epithet of 'inventor' was applied much more generously than it is today, and Bloomsbury, with its part-shady, part-academic reputation, was home to more than its fair share of the breed. One of these was James Morison, inventor of the Universal Vegetable Pill, a would-be cure all that Morison marketed as a treatment for a striking number of complaints, including bashfulness, anxiety and ringworm. His Pill factory was located on Euston Road, and despite regular lampooning in the press, Morison remained passionate about his beliefs, campaigning against the medical establishment and the ills of vaccination.
