Eminent Victorians: The Illustrated Edition

(Giles) Lytton Strachey (1880-1932) introduced psychological depth to biographical writing, thereby forever changing the biography. Strachey "revolutionized the art of biography," E. M. Forster observed, by doing what no biographer had ever done before. He managed to get inside his subject's head. Strachey was a Victorian eccentric, educated at Trinity College, where he became a member of the secret society of "the Apostles," an elite group of passionate intellectuals who rejected Victorian mores, which later evolved into the Bloomsbury group (E.M Forester, Leonard and Virginia Woolf). Specifically written as an attack on Victorianism, EMINENT VICTORIANS caused a stir when it was first published in 1918. Strachey's radical goal in EMINENT VICTORIANS was to question the moral arrogance, hypocrisy, and ego of the Victorians. With his wicked pen, he targeted religion, education, imperialism, liberalism, and humanitarianism in such a flamboyant way that Strachey's book caused Bertrand Russell to laugh out loud while he was incarcerated for his antiwar activities. EMINENT VICTORIANS is a splendid collection of four portraits of an ecclesiastic (Cardinal Manning), a woman of action (Florence Nightingale), an educator (Thomas Arnold), and a man of adventure (General Charles "Chinese" Gordon). Rather than approaching his subjects from a safe literary distance, Strachey understood that they were multifaceted and at times inexplicable, ambiguous, and self-contradicting human beings, and by no means flawless Victorian heroes. G. Merritt

Eminent Victorians has been on my `to read' list for about 20 yrs, and I'm so glad I finally got around to it. Perhaps Lytton Strachey was the first to create "the new biography," not wrapping his subjects in flowery adjectives as was the style of his times, but instead skewering them with sarcastic and scathingly funny written portraits. And, as he seemed on intimate terms with Everyone Who Was Anybody during the early 1900s, his book created quite a stir. Far from confining his critiques to people, Strachey also lambasted the stilted mores, the hypocrisy, and the severely limiting lines of social strata of his era.Although it's dated, of course, Eminent Victorians makes terrific reading for anyone interested in that era before everything changed with the First World War.

Most of us here in the old "colony" have probably never heard of General Gordon. For Brits, he's a legendary eccentric military man of the late 1800's who died a hero in terrible circumstances.(At least that's what I think many Brits think..) After a brilliant career in many parts of the vast Empire, and beyond, Gen Gordon was sent to control some Islamic revolutionary jihadist types (sound familiar) led by a charismatic Mahdi (messiah). By all accounts the general was a man worthy of this assignment, and brought his small force to Khartoum to free the slaves, and rally the locals...The rest is bizarre and insane in the extreme with the good general suffering breakdowns of sorts, including having dinner with some rodent friends...When word gets to London, after political maneuvering and bickering, the people damand an expeditionary force to save Gordon and his men.Too late!! A great tragedy ensues. If there's a better short bio out there than this one, I'd read it ASAP...Florence Nightingale has a great story too, and her experiences show once again the horrors of war (this time the earlier Crimean one), and indifference of the comfortable few sitting at home by the fireplace in willful ignorance. No doubt she was a force to be reckoned with, and her ideas about clean hospitals and nursing helped change the world...This book is recommended to those looking for a different historical perspective on current events, and for nurse everywhere! The other two bios are good, but may be put aside for later.

The most famous anecdote about this book (and the one that made me aware of it) is the scene of Bertrand Russell in his prison cell incarcerated for his Pacifism during WWI laughing hysterically while reading the work. (And being henceforth rebuked by a guard for doing so in what was, after all, a penal institution.)-The other reviewers are pretty much on the mark in that Strachey set a new standard for biography.-But the piece on General Gordon surpasses all. I can see myself on death row laughing over this section.-It is in part a sad reflection on what years in the Sudan can do to an orthodox Englishman's mind. It is indeed uncanny to hear Gordon aver, on his famous expedition to save Khartoum, nearly the exact words of Baudelaire as he gazed across the perhaps too familiar desert landscape:"It is necessary to be drunken always. This is everything. This is the unique question." (my translation)-This is the aged General the sober English sent on this perilous quest. This is the man who daily battled with the question of what God's Will was for him.-What the Gordon section and the others show, of course, is that man (or woman) is not one-dimensional. Far more often, he(she)is multi-dimensional to the point of being paradoxical. The hypocritical Victorian mindset was pushed over the edge by this book.

This superb book, by a too-often overlooked author writing at the brink of the modern age, was an instant classic when it was released near the end of World War I. It exposed to the war-weary young the hypocrisy and hollowness of the Victorian ideals they believed they were fighting for, through its marvelous depictions of four leading Victorian figures. Strachey did a tremendous amount of background reading and research, which never shows in his tightly written, crystalline prose. But more impressive is how he managed to "re-imagine" these figures, based on their own writings and what was written about them, to understand why these figures were often held up as the ideal, but in reality had become stereotypes who did not deserve the reputations they had won (or deserved them for different reasons than were commonly acknowledged). Nightingale, Bennett, Gordon, Manning -- their names would taste bitter in the mouths of the first generation of the new century, because of this book.