UCL BLOOMSBURY PROJECT

Bloomsbury Project

Bloomsbury Institutions

Benevolent

National Training School of Music

Also known as National Training School of Music at Tavistock House/Mrs Weldon’s Orphanage

Not to be confused with the National Training School for Music (sometimes also known as the National Training School of Music), opened in 1876 in South Kensington, and predecessor to the Royal College of Music

What was reforming about it?

Institutions for orphans tended to teach practical skills and/or religious precepts, not music

Mrs Weldon’s scheme of education was progressive and included opera attendance and vegetarianism; the orphans may also have been involved in her growing interest in spiritualism (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography)

Where in Bloomsbury

It was based from 1869 in Mrs Weldon’s home, Tavistock House, Tavistock Square, until its demise around a decade later

Mrs Weldon’s activities were always controversial and sometimes scandalous; by 1881, the house was occupied by servants only as Mrs Weldon was in Newgate Prison

Website of current institution

It no longer exists

Books about it

Georgina Weldon, The History of My Orphanage; or, The Outpourings of an Alleged Lunatic (1878); reprinted in Roy Porter and Helen Nicholson ed, Women, Madness, and Spiritualism, vol. I: Georgina Weldon and Louisa Lowe (2003)

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