Making a movement
I'm fascinated by groups of people coming together and making a movement. Literary, artistic, philosophical, political, scientific, all of the above. In salons and coffee houses. Publishing pamphlets and poetry, creating culture.
What do we find so attractive about this? The idealism? The fomo? The yearning to be amongst like-minded people? The romance?
What do we call these groups? Collectives sounds too formally organised. Groups too generic. Movements too deliberate. Cliques, ensembles, I don't know.
What are the conditions under which this comes about? Can we create them or does it require more magic than that?
Looking at the individual people is really interesting because obviously some of these luminaries are still very much seen as luminaries... Others have very much faded. There are unsung heroes: the patrons, publishers, art collectors, critics, without whom these things couldn't get off the ground There are generally a lot more women than we are led to believe, as is usually the case with history.
This shares some ground with a post I wrote a while ago about biographies and also about collective blogging.
A few such groups that particularly interest me...
The Jena Set, or Jena Romantics, who kicked off Romanticism in Jena, Germany at the turn of the nineteenth century. Organised by Caroline von Schlegel, it included not just writers like Novalis and Goethe but philosophers, and scientists like Alexander von Humboldt. Andrea Wulf's book, Magnificent Rebels, is a cracking account of the brief flourish.
Bloomsbury Group, the bohemian writers and painters in London, famously having lots of affairs. Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, and friends.
Stratford-on-Odéon, James Joyce's name for the writers gathering around Adrienne Monnier's and Sylvia Beach's bookshops on the rue de l'Odéon in 1920s Paris. Featuring Joyce, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and Ernest Hemingway. I'm in the middle of a three-book Gertrude Stein biography binge.
Blue Stockings Society, largely but not entirely women in 1750s London, from which the term bluestocking arose. They were interested in women's education and social reform and included Elizabeth Montagu and Angelica Kauffman.
The Harlem Renaissance, 1920s and 30s New York. Creatively wide-ranging, socially significant, and politically crucial, featuring Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston.
I've got a book waiting on The Lunar Society of the Midlands Enlightenment, a more scientific and industrialist bent including Erasmus Darwin, Josiah Wedgewood, and James Watt.
A classic choice for fly on the wall questions is the famous holiday in 1816 that led to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, John Polidori's The Vampyre, and I guess Byron and Shelley were there too.
Mary Shelley's parents of course were also significant characters in creative, political, and philosophical gatherings.
There's a whole book about one such meeting, The Immortal Evening by Stanley Plumly, about a dinner party with Wordsworth and Keats.
There are, of course, thousands of examples going back millennia. I'm also interested in the Impressionists. There's the Wednesday Psychological Society having meetings at Freud's house. The Transcendental Club - unsung movers and shakers the Peabody sisters. The Four - Glasgow Style artists and designers Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Margaret Macdonald, Frances Macdonald, and Herbert MacNair. The Club, keeping it simple on the name there, a dinner club begun by Joshua Reynolds, Edmund Burke, and Samuel Johnson. No women allowed.
Everywhere you look there are people coming together. So often creativity is painted as a lonely garret sort of a thing. But so often it isn't at all.