Virginia Nicholson - Among the Bohemians: Experiments in Living 1900-1939

I know that I am not alone in my partiality for trivia. Nowadays, thousands of people flock to see the kitchens in stately homes when they could be admiring the portraits on the walls. Tourists visiting an ancient Roman site are delighted to turn a corner and discover a row of holes side by side along a stone bench communal lavatories. Hugely successful museums like Plymouth Plantation in Massachusetts now feed this public taste by employing actors to play out the homely everyday lives of the Pilgrim Fathers gardening, washing and preparing meals.

Too much reverence can estrange us from the object of our worship. I for one, love to be brought up close to touch, to taste, if possible to smell the lives of people from the past. I want to know how they coped. I want to compare my life with theirs. I want to feel I could have known them. This appetite for identification with history is important. A sense of contact brings with it a sympathy which helps us to understand our own links with the past.

But it can be hard. A visit to Mozarts birthplace in Salzburg demands strenuous efforts of the imagination to overcome the distancing effects of glass cases and trooping tourists with Audiokaisers jammed to their ears. One retreats into the seething Getreidegasse with all sorts of burning questions still hanging: what was the life of this child genius really like? How did the young Mozarts get fed, washed, educated? How did Anna Mozart run the house, do the washing, clean the sheets? Too many centuries have passed since Wolfgang was born there in 1756 for the best efforts of museum curators to succeed in providing satisfying answers to such questions.

The recent past is another story. So much still survives, in the form of tangible ephemera, photographs, writings, and the living memory of grandparents and survivors, that one has only to reach out and grasp it furniture, food, bedrooms, bathrooms and all. Here where I live in the south of England the small museum of Charleston (home of my grandmother the painter Vanessa Bell) still survives as it was when she lived there, down to the smallest detail. The homes of other famous names from the last century or so Freud, Proust, G. B. Shaw, Kipling, Monet, Cocteau are still furnished with the possessions of their occupants, making it possible to fantasise that they have merely stepped out for a brief stroll and will shortly return.

Bohemia provided inexhaustible material for