Much later, Madame Aurore Dudevant would say that her transvestism was nothing more than a practical expedient, a matter of common sense. As an adolescent, she had been permitted to dress in masculine attire to go riding. When she began to appear in public dressed as a man, in 1831, she did so because she had moved to Paris and quickly found the city to be hell on a lady’s wardrobe, soiling and spoiling it at a terrifying rate. She might have avoided the problem by spending more of her time at home, but she had come to this city...

The grisette leaves home, and she goes to work: so her story begins. Before it ends, this carefree girl will divide nations and novels, antagonize even some of those most attracted to her, and, in her provocative simplicity, raise questions so complex that they might seem to draw one inexorably to tragic conclusions. From the way she is represented by the writers of her time, we might easily be led to believe that historical developments such as the industrial uses of steam power and the onset of the Napoleonic Wars were of no more significance to nineteenth-century Europe than was...

Before he became known as the most famous chronicler of nineteenth-century bohemia, Henry Murger was a young man rebelling against his father. His friends all knew the story, and after Murger’s death they bequeathed it to posterity.¹ A tailor and apartment-house concierge, Claude-Gabriel Murger had assumed his son would also become a tradesman. Accordingly, when Henry turned fourteen, a traditional age for apprenticeship, his schooling came to an end. His mother, however, managed to dissuade the elder Murger from binding their child to a future of manual labor in a trade like his own. Her wish to give the boy...

Almost nothing was known for certain about the deceased, but at least one fact was established by his funeral cortege as it made its way through the streets of the faubourg Saint-Denis in the summer of 1859. Alexandre Privat d’Anglemont’s body in that coffin proved that mocking the Romantic desire for an attractive case of consumption, as he had, did not grant one immunity from this disease.¹

The same might be said of other Romantic fads that had infected so many members of this procession when they were young and youth was all in all. The mourners may have left...

Even today, people might be surprised to hear that bohemia had its origin in the United States. If we think about it at all, surely we know that la vie de bohème was born and bred on the banks of the Seine. Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, however, knew better.

In 1858 Barbey anointed Edgar Allan Poe “the King of the Bohemians” (376).¹ He explained that this honor could have been won only by a citizen of the United States, the country Poe perfectly represented. “It was logical and just” (377), he wrote, that the greatest of all modern bohemians should have...

Narrowly regarded, the concept of bohemia was French in origin, but, as we have seen, it could not be held within this boundary. It had also arisen elsewhere—and nowhere in particular. At the same time that it was beginning to designate a way of life among certain residents of Paris in the 1830s and 1840s, bohemia proclaimed the international nature of its scenes. We hear this proclamation in the French word itself, la bohème, which alluded to the foreign kingdom of Bohemia and, more specifically, to the Gypsies whom the French associated with that land and yet viewed as...

Bram Stoker and Arthur Conan Doyle did not know each other well, although they shared an acquaintanceship, having encountered each other in the waning years of the nineteenth century. Both were of Irish descent, but Conan Doyle’s immediate relatives had long been settled in England. As literary men they moved in some of the same social circles, and in 1907 Stoker would interview Conan Doyle for the New York World, but they were not especially close at this time or any other. Nonetheless, as if acting in concert, these two wrote tales that summed up the mythic life of the...

In all its migrations among nations, in all the tumultuous life of its diverse local scenes, in all the transformations wrought within it as the decades went on—including its translation into other terms, such as scapigliato and Schlawiner—the vagabond word bohemian made itself at home in the nineteenth century. Famed for living on the margins of society, or even completely outside it, what Fitz-James O’Brien called “that modern mystery, the bohemian,” in the end turned out to be inseparable from the social life of this time.¹

In the nineteenth century bohemia was much more than one would gather...