Welcome To Hotel Bohemia

Eccentric. Rebellious. Amoral, quite often. But bohemianism was, maybe still is, about much more than just frightening the horses.

The writer Virginia Nicholson recently told the Today programme that "in a sense, we are all bohemians today".

But what is a bohemian, how do you spot one, and might you be a boho, too?

"Bohemian" was originally a term with pejorative undertones given to Roma gypsies, commonly believed by the French to have originated in Bohemia, in central Europe.

The Oxford English Dictionary's definition mentions someone "especially an artist, literary man, or actor, who leads a free, vagabond, or irregular life, not being particular as to the society he frequents, and despising conventionalities generally".

But the connotation rapidly became a romantic one. From its birth in Paris in the 1850s, and the huge success of Murgier's play Scenes de la vie de Boheme, the ethic spread rapidly.

Gypsy clothes became all the fashion, sparking a style which lives on today through lovers of boho-chic like Sienna Miller and Kate Moss. And artists and poets from Baudelaire to van Gogh characterised bohemian ideals.

Its foundations in the Romantic movement of the 19th Century imbued bohemians with an almost quasi-religious sense of purpose.

In Puccini's opera La Boheme, the poet Rodolfo and his friends do not shiver in their Parisian garret where Mimi's hand is famously frozen merely because of their poverty. Theirs, as Rodolfo has it, is a higher, if more sensual, calling.

I am a poet!

What's my employment? Writing.

Is that a living? Hardly.

I've wit though wealth be wanting,

Ladies of rank and fashion

All inspire me with passion;

In dreams and fond illusions,

Or castles in the air,

Richer is none on earth than I.

Although steeped in its French roots, the bohemian ideal transferred easily to many countries and cultures.

In Britain, the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the aesthetic movement of the 19th Century imbued bohemianism with a dangerous, dashing, social cachet. Later, the exploits of the Bloomsbury group - one of whom was Nicholson's grandmother, Vanessa Bell - thrust it into the cultural limelight.
Across the Atlantic, poets and writers like Jack Kerouac, William S Burroughs and Paul Bowles led their own offshoot. And the playwright Arthur Miller's prose conjures the musty essence of that temple of American bohemia, Manhattan's Chelsea Hotel, where "there are no vacuum cleaners, no rules and shame".

"Everyone has a view of what the bohemian is," says Nicholson. "The bohemian is an outsider, defines themselves as an outsider and is defined by the world as an outsider... A lot of people regard them as subversive, elitist and possibly just a little bit immature."

Bohemians were typically urban, liberal in outlook, but with few visible political passions and, above all, creative. Though critical of organised religion, they were keen - witness the pre-Raphaelites and Oscar Wilde - to defend and explore the religious spirit.

Above all, they defied the constrictions of hearth and home and the false morality which they believed underpinned it.

In essence, bohemianism represented a personal, cultural and social reaction to the bourgeois life. And, once the latter was all but swept away by the maelstrom that was the 1960s, the former was doomed, too.

UNTIL NOW!!!!

&a