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=                         Eminent_Victorians                         =
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                            Introduction
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'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 well known 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 until then been
regarded as heroes: Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Thomas
Arnold and General Charles Gordon. While Nightingale is actually
praised and her reputation enhanced, the book shows its other subjects
in a less-than-flattering light, for instance, the intrigues of
Cardinal Manning against Cardinal Newman.

The book made Strachey's name and placed him firmly in the top rank of
biographers.


                             Background
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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 Ilsley 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. One of the subjects he
considered but rejected was Isabella Beeton. He chose not to write
about her because he could not find sufficient relevant material.

By then it was wartime, and Strachey's anti-war and anti-conscription
activities were taking up his time. He hardened 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 & Windus. The critic Frank
Arthur Swinnerton was taken with the work and it was published on 9
May 1918, with almost uniformly enthusiastic reviews.


                              Summary
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Each of the lives is very different from the others, although there
are common threads, for example the recurrent appearance of William
Ewart Gladstone 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. That 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 underhanded manipulations in attempting to prevent Newman
being made a Cardinal.

The background features of Florence Nightingale's story are the
machinations of the War Office, and the obtuseness of the military and
politicians. Influenced by Sigmund Freud, Strachey depicts Florence
Nightingale as an intense, driven woman who is both personally
intolerable and admirable in her achievements.

Dr. Arnold is hailed as an exemplar who established the Public School
system. Strachey describes that as an education based on chapel and
the classics, with a prefectorial system to maintain order. He 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, Strachey sees his
approach as very damaging in retrospect. Strachey also mocks Arnold's
efforts at moral improvement of the general public, for example his
unsuccessful weekly newspaper.

The story of Gordon is that 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 fell
to Gordon, whose instincts were to do anything but withdraw, and 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.


                         Critical reception
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On 21 May 1918, Bertrand Russell wrote to Gladys Rinder from Brixton
Prison, in which he was imprisoned for his anti-war campaigning:
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 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
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With the publication of 'Eminent Victorians', Lytton Strachey set out
to breathe life into the Victorian era for future generations to read.
Up until that 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 at the four venerated 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.".


                           External links
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*
*
*
* Various imprints and editions of the book at
[https://archive.org/search.php?query=title%3A%22eminent%20victorians%22%20AND%20mediatype%3Atexts%20AND%20creator%3Astrachey
archive.org]
* Lincoln Allison (Reader in Politics, University of Warwick)  Social
Affairs Unit Web Review, July 2005


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