Eminent Victorians
Encyclopedia
Eminent Victorians is a book by Lytton Strachey
(one of the older members of the Bloomsbury Group
), first published in 1918 and consisting of biographies
of four leading figures from the Victorian era
. Its fame rests on the irreverence and wit Strachey brought to bear on three men and a woman who had till then been regarded as heroes and heroine. They were:
The book made Strachey's name and placed him firmly in the top rank of biographers, where he remains.
and started work on a book then called Victorian Silhouettes containing miniature biographies of a dozen notable Victorian personalities. In November 1912 he wrote to Virginia Woolf
that their Victorian predecessors "seem to me a set of mouth bungled hypocrites". After his research into the life of Cardinal Manning
, he realised he would have difficulty managing twelve lives. In the following year he moved to Wiltshire where he stayed until 1915, by which time he had completed half the book.
By then it was wartime, and Strachey's anti-war and anti-conscription activities were taking up his time. He changed his views and concluded that the Victorian worthies had not just been hypocrites, but that they had bequeathed to his generation the "profoundly evil" system "by which it is sought to settle international disputes by force".
By 1917, the work was ready for publication and Strachey was put in touch with Geoffrey Whitworth at Chatto
. The critic Frank Swinnerton was taken with the work and it was published on 9 May 1918 with almost uniformly enthusiastic reviews.
and Arthur Hugh Clough
. Each story is set against a specific background.
In Cardinal Manning's story, the background is the creation of the Oxford Movement
and the defection of an influential group of Church of England
clergy to the Catholic Church. This aspect is covered in depth to explain the movement and its main protagonists, particularly Manning's hostile relationship with John Henry Newman.
Strachey is critical of Manning's underhand manipulations in attempting to prevent Newman being made a Cardinal.
The background features to Florence Nightingale's story are the machinations of the War Office
, and the obtuseness of the military and politicians. Strachey depicts Florence Nightingale as an intense, driven woman who is both intolerable to deal with and admirable in her achievements.
Dr Arnold is hailed as an exemplar who established the Public School
system. Strachey points out that this is an education based on chapel and the classics, with a prefectorial system to maintain order. Strachey points out that it was not Arnold who was responsible for the obsession with sport, but does make it clear that Arnold was at fault in ignoring the sciences. Although Arnold was revered at the time, in retrospect Strachey sees his approach as very damaging.
Strachey also mocks Arnold's efforts at moral improvement of the general public, for example his unsuccessful weekly newspaper.
Gordon’s is the story of a maverick soldier and adventurer, whose original military achievements in China would have been forgotten. He was a mercenary who got into and out of conflicts on behalf of various dubious governments, but much of his experience was in the Sudan
. The final disaster was when the Egyptian occupation of Sudan was almost completely overthrown by fundamentalist rebels, and someone was needed to retrieve the situation in Khartoum
. The job ended up with Gordon whose instincts were to do anything but withdraw, and so he became embroiled in a siege. The British government was put in an almost impossible dilemma, and when eventually they did send a relief expedition
it arrived just two days too late. Strachey based Gordon’s story on his diaries and letters to give an account of a strong individual almost at odds with the world.
wrote from Brixton Prison to Gladys Rinder on 21 May 1918.
The American critic Edmund Wilson
wrote in the New Republic of 21 September, 1932, not long after Strachey's death "Lytton Strachey's chief mission, of course, was to take down once and for all the pretensions of the Victorian age to moral superiority... neither the Americans nor the English have ever, since Eminent Victorians appeared, been able to feel quite the same about the legends that had dominated their pasts. Something had been punctured for good."
for future generations to read. Up until this point, as Strachey remarked in the preface, Victorian biographies had been "as familiar as the cortège of the undertaker, and wear the same air of slow, funereal barbarism." Strachey defied the tradition of "two fat volumes....of undigested masses of material" and took aim on the four iconified figures.
British Labour politician Roy Hattersley
wrote "Lytton Strachey's elegant, energetic character assassinations destroyed for ever the pretensions of the Victorian age to moral supremacy.".
Lytton Strachey
Giles Lytton Strachey was a British writer and critic. He is best known for establishing a new form of biography in which psychological insight and sympathy are combined with irreverence and wit...
(one of the older members of the Bloomsbury Group
Bloomsbury Group
The Bloomsbury Group or Bloomsbury Set was a group of writers, intellectuals, philosophers and artists who held informal discussions in Bloomsbury throughout the 20th century. This English collective of friends and relatives lived, worked or studied near Bloomsbury in London during the first half...
), first published in 1918 and consisting of biographies
Biography
A biography is a detailed description or account of someone's life. More than a list of basic facts , biography also portrays the subject's experience of those events...
of four leading figures from the Victorian era
Victorian era
The Victorian era of British history was the period of Queen Victoria's reign from 20 June 1837 until her death on 22 January 1901. It was a long period of peace, prosperity, refined sensibilities and national self-confidence...
. Its fame rests on the irreverence and wit Strachey brought to bear on three men and a woman who had till then been regarded as heroes and heroine. They were:
- Cardinal Manning
- Florence NightingaleFlorence NightingaleFlorence Nightingale OM, RRC was a celebrated English nurse, writer and statistician. She came to prominence for her pioneering work in nursing during the Crimean War, where she tended to wounded soldiers. She was dubbed "The Lady with the Lamp" after her habit of making rounds at night...
- Thomas ArnoldThomas ArnoldDr Thomas Arnold was a British educator and historian. Arnold was an early supporter of the Broad Church Anglican movement...
- General GordonCharles George GordonMajor-General Charles George Gordon, CB , known as "Chinese" Gordon, Gordon Pasha, and Gordon of Khartoum, was a British army officer and administrator....
The book made Strachey's name and placed him firmly in the top rank of biographers, where he remains.
Background
Strachey developed the idea for Eminent Victorians in 1912, when he was living on occasional journalism and writing dilettante plays and verse for his Bloomsbury friends. He went to live in the country at East IlsleyEast Ilsley
East Ilsley is a village and civil parish in the English county of Berkshire.It is situated at in West Berkshire, north of Newbury very close to the A34 road which bypasses the village....
and started work on a book then called Victorian Silhouettes containing miniature biographies of a dozen notable Victorian personalities. In November 1912 he wrote to Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf
Adeline Virginia Woolf was an English author, essayist, publisher, and writer of short stories, regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century....
that their Victorian predecessors "seem to me a set of mouth bungled hypocrites". After his research into the life of Cardinal Manning
Cardinal Manning
Cardinal Manning may refer to* Henry Edward Manning , English Roman Catholic Archbishop and Cardinal* Timothy Manning , Archbishop of Los Angeles...
, he realised he would have difficulty managing twelve lives. In the following year he moved to Wiltshire where he stayed until 1915, by which time he had completed half the book.
By then it was wartime, and Strachey's anti-war and anti-conscription activities were taking up his time. He changed his views and concluded that the Victorian worthies had not just been hypocrites, but that they had bequeathed to his generation the "profoundly evil" system "by which it is sought to settle international disputes by force".
By 1917, the work was ready for publication and Strachey was put in touch with Geoffrey Whitworth at Chatto
Chatto and Windus
Chatto & Windus has been, since 1987, an imprint of Random House, publishers. It was originally an important publisher of books in London, founded in the Victorian era....
. The critic Frank Swinnerton was taken with the work and it was published on 9 May 1918 with almost uniformly enthusiastic reviews.
Summary
Each of the lives are very different, although there are common threads - for example the recurrent appearance of William Ewart GladstoneWilliam Ewart Gladstone
William Ewart Gladstone FRS FSS was a British Liberal statesman. In a career lasting over sixty years, he served as Prime Minister four separate times , more than any other person. Gladstone was also Britain's oldest Prime Minister, 84 years old when he resigned for the last time...
and Arthur Hugh Clough
Arthur Hugh Clough
Arthur Hugh Clough was an English poet, an educationalist, and the devoted assistant to ground-breaking nurse Florence Nightingale...
. Each story is set against a specific background.
In Cardinal Manning's story, the background is the creation of the Oxford Movement
Oxford Movement
The Oxford Movement was a movement of High Church Anglicans, eventually developing into Anglo-Catholicism. The movement, whose members were often associated with the University of Oxford, argued for the reinstatement of lost Christian traditions of faith and their inclusion into Anglican liturgy...
and the defection of an influential group of Church of England
Church of England
The Church of England is the officially established Christian church in England and the Mother Church of the worldwide Anglican Communion. The church considers itself within the tradition of Western Christianity and dates its formal establishment principally to the mission to England by St...
clergy to the Catholic Church. This aspect is covered in depth to explain the movement and its main protagonists, particularly Manning's hostile relationship with John Henry Newman.
Strachey is critical of Manning's underhand manipulations in attempting to prevent Newman being made a Cardinal.
The background features to Florence Nightingale's story are the machinations of the War Office
War Office
The War Office was a department of the British Government, responsible for the administration of the British Army between the 17th century and 1964, when its functions were transferred to the Ministry of Defence...
, and the obtuseness of the military and politicians. Strachey depicts Florence Nightingale as an intense, driven woman who is both intolerable to deal with and admirable in her achievements.
Dr Arnold is hailed as an exemplar who established the Public School
Public School (UK)
A public school, in common British usage, is a school that is neither administered nor financed by the state or from taxpayer contributions, and is instead funded by a combination of endowments, tuition fees and charitable contributions, usually existing as a non profit-making charitable trust...
system. Strachey points out that this is an education based on chapel and the classics, with a prefectorial system to maintain order. Strachey points out that it was not Arnold who was responsible for the obsession with sport, but does make it clear that Arnold was at fault in ignoring the sciences. Although Arnold was revered at the time, in retrospect Strachey sees his approach as very damaging.
Strachey also mocks Arnold's efforts at moral improvement of the general public, for example his unsuccessful weekly newspaper.
Gordon’s is the story of a maverick soldier and adventurer, whose original military achievements in China would have been forgotten. He was a mercenary who got into and out of conflicts on behalf of various dubious governments, but much of his experience was in the Sudan
Sudan
Sudan , officially the Republic of the Sudan , is a country in North Africa, sometimes considered part of the Middle East politically. It is bordered by Egypt to the north, the Red Sea to the northeast, Eritrea and Ethiopia to the east, South Sudan to the south, the Central African Republic to the...
. The final disaster was when the Egyptian occupation of Sudan was almost completely overthrown by fundamentalist rebels, and someone was needed to retrieve the situation in Khartoum
Khartoum
Khartoum is the capital and largest city of Sudan and of Khartoum State. It is located at the confluence of the White Nile flowing north from Lake Victoria, and the Blue Nile flowing west from Ethiopia. The location where the two Niles meet is known as "al-Mogran"...
. The job ended up with Gordon whose instincts were to do anything but withdraw, and so he became embroiled in a siege. The British government was put in an almost impossible dilemma, and when eventually they did send a relief expedition
Nile Expedition
The Nile Expedition, sometimes called the Gordon Relief Expedition , was a British mission to relieve Major-General Charles George Gordon at Khartoum, Sudan. Gordon had been sent to the Sudan to help Egyptians evacuate from Sudan after Britain decided to abandon the country in the face of a...
it arrived just two days too late. Strachey based Gordon’s story on his diaries and letters to give an account of a strong individual almost at odds with the world.
Critical reception
Bertrand RussellBertrand Russell
Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, OM, FRS was a British philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, and social critic. At various points in his life he considered himself a liberal, a socialist, and a pacifist, but he also admitted that he had never been any of these things...
wrote from Brixton Prison to Gladys Rinder on 21 May 1918.
It is brilliant, delicious, exquisitely civilized. I enjoyed as much as any the Gordon, which alone was quite new to me. I often laughed out loud in my cell while I was reading the book. The warder came to my cell to remind me that prison was a place of punishment.
The American critic Edmund Wilson
Edmund Wilson
Edmund Wilson was an American writer and literary and social critic and noted man of letters.-Early life:Wilson was born in Red Bank, New Jersey. His father, Edmund Wilson, Sr., was a lawyer and served as New Jersey Attorney General. Wilson attended The Hill School, a college preparatory...
wrote in the New Republic of 21 September, 1932, not long after Strachey's death "Lytton Strachey's chief mission, of course, was to take down once and for all the pretensions of the Victorian age to moral superiority... neither the Americans nor the English have ever, since Eminent Victorians appeared, been able to feel quite the same about the legends that had dominated their pasts. Something had been punctured for good."
Significance
With the publication of Eminent Victorians, Lytton Strachey set out to breathe life into the Victorian eraVictorian era
The Victorian era of British history was the period of Queen Victoria's reign from 20 June 1837 until her death on 22 January 1901. It was a long period of peace, prosperity, refined sensibilities and national self-confidence...
for future generations to read. Up until this point, as Strachey remarked in the preface, Victorian biographies had been "as familiar as the cortège of the undertaker, and wear the same air of slow, funereal barbarism." Strachey defied the tradition of "two fat volumes....of undigested masses of material" and took aim on the four iconified figures.
British Labour politician Roy Hattersley
Roy Hattersley
Roy Sydney George Hattersley, Baron Hattersley is a British Labour politician, author and journalist from Sheffield. He served as Deputy Leader of the Labour Party from 1983 to 1992.-Early life:...
wrote "Lytton Strachey's elegant, energetic character assassinations destroyed for ever the pretensions of the Victorian age to moral supremacy.".
External links
- Various imprints and editions of the book at archive.org
- Lincoln Allison (Reader in Politics, University of Warwick) Colourful Eminence - Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians: a Retrospective Review Social Affairs Unit Web Review, July 2005
- OUP catalogue