Bloomsbury and economics

This chapter examines the distinctive hardheadedness of the Bloomsbury group’s famous devotion to the life of the mind. While Bloomsbury is virtually synonymous with the prizing of aesthetic appreciation, emotional intensity, and intellectual reflection, many of the group’s members were equally concerned with the inextricability of such rarefied states from very material sources of maintenance, support, and security. The chapter foregrounds the inseparable connection between economics and aesthetics in the thought and practice of the Bloomsbury group, identifying a concern with this connection as one of the key preoccupations stemming from the influence of G. E. Moore’s philosophy, and tracing its significance in a range of economic, artistic and literary works.