Eminent Victorians

by Lytton Strachey

Few books have had such an impact on their own generation as did Eminent Victorians, which exposed the hypocrisy of the Victorian era by deflating the legends surrounding four of its most notable figures. In the process, Strachey revitalized the art of biography.

Genres: Biography, History, Nonfiction, Classics, Victorian, British Literature, Biography Memoir

372 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1918

About the author

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. His 1921 biography Queen Victoria was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.

Reviews

[Fergus, Weaver of Autistic Webs · Rating 4 out of 5]

A wonderfully witty book that, a century ago, forever burst the bubble of glory that had up till then so reverently encased the shimmering Victorian Empire.

I read it as a young guy and laughed uproariously at its irreverence, delighting all the while in Strachey’s finely pointed prose.

To the bohemian denizens of London’s Bloomsbury District, Strachey’s oddly iconoclastic vantage point, his languid and world-weary witticisms and his immense mastery of his subject matter must have elevated him to urban myth status in their eyes.

He turned Oscar Wilde’s dandyism into a form of cackling self-caricature in his stovepipe hat, collar-length black beard, and granny glasses, loping down London boulevards with a John Lennon grin.

He was too cool for rules.

And he’s not widely read now. Indeed, his cleverness was never an adjunct of substance.

Substance was the very balloon he wished to burst!

But wit doesn’t always pay the bills. And you don’t get into heaven on irreverence.

There has to be a middle ground in life, because extremes have no staying power. If you want to reach the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, you don’t go around with a chip on your shoulder.

Many of us who laughed with Strachey when young now see a far greater value in the middle way he mocked.

These upstanding Victorians he wrote about worked hard for their faith, and deserve our gratitude and respect, not our sneers.

No, for as F.R. Leavis said, we are all part of the milieu of the Great Tradition.

Even if we trash it.

[Jasmine · Rating 3 out of 5]

One should rather read Lytton Strachey’s ‘Eminent Victorians’ if one is interested to gain an insight into how Strachey dismounts with relish Victorian heroes and values. My motivation to read this book has been generated from my interest in the Bloomsbury Group, which the eccentric Lytton Strachey (1880 – 1933) was a prominent member of. The Bloomsbury Group with its writers, artists, philosophers and intellectuals challenged Victorian and Edwardian values and Strachey’s witty and ironic reckoning with prominent characters such as Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Thomas Arnold and General Gordon was certainly shocking for the reader of the early 20th century.

However, if one is interested in gaining a thorough knowledge of the life of these Victorians, I would rather not recommend Strachey’s book. This is first and foremost a literary work. Lytton’s historical approach is neither careful nor sound. John Sutherland writes in his introduction: “Eminent Victorians is not, we deduce, the work of a stickler for historical fact, documentary trustworthiness, or modern standards of scholarly citation. Art yes. Any amount of effort was lavished in that department. But accuracy was something else.”(p.xiii)

Thus, as so often with history books, ‘Eminent Victorians’ reveals more about the time it is actually written in (it was published in 1918) than the period it deals with. And it says something about Lytton himself too. Therefore, within the scope of my purpose of learning more about the Bloomsbury Group, this was a satisfying read, albeit a bit tedious at times. This has to do rather with me than with Lytton, though: I admit I was not that interested in Cardinal Manning’s or General Gordon’s fate as I was in the life of Florence Nightingale for that matter.

I highly recommend the Oxford World’s Classics edition that comes with an introduction and notes by John Sutherland. The explanatory notes are very helpful indeed.

[Paul Bryant · Rating 2 out of 5]

It’s not too hard to see that when this book exploded into the drawing rooms of 1918 it left its readers reeling from shock – four of the high and mighty big shot revered names of the Victorian period which had just ended were given a subtle but thorough debunking – the Lady with the Lamp turns out to be a nasty harridan, General Gordon, the hero of Khartoum, is a drunken deluded idiot, Cardinal Manning’s religion was a perfect screen for his enormous ambition, etc.

These days these names are distant blurs but back then they were huge, and Lytton Strachey was ready to pull them off their pedestals. But here’s a curious thing. In this Definitive Edition they hired four experts to add essays commenting on Strachey’s account, and in each case they debunk the debunker! The first three experts say things like

Strachey, unfortunately, was inclined to ignore evidence that did not fit his preconceived plan.

He represents an early example of a journalistic trend that assumes that no great person can be what they appear to be, there must be flaws below the surface

The fourth really puts the boot in though. Strachey’s account of General Gordon

Must now be buried except as a superb piece of writing… he misunderstood and distorted the character as well as making errors of fact… misinterpretations and factual errors abound… Strachey cannot be relied upon… any reader wanting a reliable account must turn elsewhere

Does this book work on any level anymore? The sardonic tone gets a little wearing, true; but the style is as smooth as silk, surely. The main problem is that the targets are no longer interesting. That an ambitious cleric switched from the Protestant to the Catholic faith and had a great career is yawn inducing ( – whoever in the 21st century didn’t assume that the serene princes of the Holy Roman Catholic Church did not conduct their affairs more or less along the lines of a slightly less murderous Tony Soprano?); that the great master of Rugby School was a religious egomaniac does not startle us; and his exposure of Florence Nightingale as an inflexible cantankerous monster falls completely flat since everything she applied her willpower and energy to was of enormous benefit to the poor soldiers and later to hospitals in general.

This is a historically important book but I think it will have very few readers now.

[Graham Power · Rating 5 out of 5]

A brilliantly iconoclastic book in which a long-haired gay aesthete detonates the great and good of imperial England, and the obsequious tradition of Victorian biography/hagiography along with them. The ‘ascetic’ Cardinal Manning is portrayed as a worldly and calculating careerist; Thomas Arnold as an educator who elevated religious indoctrination and ‘character-building’ above actual education; and General Gordon as egotistical, drunken, and self-destructive. Significantly, as she is the only female in the quartet, Strachey is rather more sympathetic towards Florence Nightingale, and clearly on her side in her battles with the male dunderheads of the War Office.

Strachey may have been less than industrious with the research (he did no primary research), sometimes loftily indifferent to mere facts, and a dab hand at embroidery in the interests of getting a laugh, but he wrote like an avenging angel and Eminent Victorians is eminently readable. Whatever its strengths and weaknesses as history, it’s straight from the top drawer as a work of literature. Above all, it’s very funny and teeming with great one-liners, sarcastic quips elevated to the level of art, and lethal verbal hand-grenades disguised as elegant epigrams.

Strachey was writing against the backdrop of the appalling slaughter of the First World War (he was declared medically unfit but was an outspoken conscientious objector nonetheless) which was, arguably, the logical culmination of all that Victorian deference and veneration of ‘great men.’ Behind the sardonic humour this is a deeply felt work and through layers of irony Strachey wrote from the heart.

In his preface, reacting against the turgid two volume biographies of the time, he asserts that brevity should be the essence of biography. Despite Strachey’s reputation as the founder of modern biography this is one piece of advice many subsequent biographers have chosen to ignore. The idea persists that a definitive biography is possible and, it seems, the longer the biography the more ‘definitive’ it is. The two biographies of recent times I have enjoyed most are relatively concise by the blockbusting standards still prevalent in the genre: Ma’am Darling (99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret) and One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time. Both are by satirist Craig Brown and possess distinctly Stracheyan qualities of playfulness and subversive wit. Like Strachey, Brown is concerned not with imparting new information about his subjects, but providing a fresh perspective on a familiar story. He has said that his approach to biography is to leave out the boring bits. I suspect Lytton Strachey would have approved.

[Peter · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was a rocking good read. It is very well written, and hilarious in parts. People have told me (either with glee or with a wag of the finger) that Strachey "takes the piss" out of Victorians in this book, but these people have never read the book. Waspish as his writing is, it is never (at least to a modern reader) disrespectful. The awesome (and I don't use that word often) power and presence of the four personalities treated shines through the writing despite (or because of) the economy of Strachey's prose. Strachey redeems his subjects; he doesn't condemn them.

[Eric Byrd · Rating 3 out of 5]

'The End of General Gordon' is Gibbonesque historical writing at its best. Lucid, swift, hilarious, with a keen eye for the absurdity of public life, and for the delusion of religion. Faultless dramatic styling:

'He was welcomed by many old friends of former days, among them Li Hung Chang, whose diplomatic views coincided with his own. Li’s diplomatic language, however, was less unconventional. In an interview with the Ministers, Gordon’s expressions were such that the interpreter shook with terror, upset a cup of tea, and finally refused to translate the dreadful words; upon which Gordon snatched up a dictionary, and, with his finger on the word “idiocy,” showed it to the startled mandarins.'

[Christopher Saunders · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this classic book, Strachey deconstructs four heroes of Victorian England with acid wit and brutal directness. Cardinal Manning, a man of Catholic integrity, becomes a scheming power player; Florence Nightingale, a heroine driven by ruthless demons; Dr. Thomas Arnold of Rugby school, a moralist pedant; and General Charles Gordon, a messianic mercenary. It's hard to measure the book's contemporary impact, given that critical biographies are now dime a dozen. Strachey's elegant writing still makes for engrossing reading; he regards his protagonists with bemused mirth, as flawed, strange yet not unsympathetic figures. My only caveat: Strachey, a socialist, hops on the religion-bashing train once too often. A seminal work in historiography, and a cracking good read on its own terms.

[P.J. Sullivan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Although it sometimes comes at the expense of clarity, there is some artful writing here. Some examples:

On public school education:
"A system of anarchy tempered by despotism. A life in which licensed barbarism was mingled with the daily and hourly study of the niceties of Ovidian verse."

On Monsignor Talbot:
He could apply flattery with so unsparing a hand that even princes of the church found it sufficient."

On Dr. Hall:
"A rough terrier of a man who had worried his way to the top of his profession."

On Cardinal Newman:
"With a sinking heart, he realized at last the painful truth: it was not the nature of his views, it was his having views at all that was objectionable."

If it is sardonic wit you want, you will find it here, in these four essays. Whether you will find these particular Victorians interesting is another matter. General Gordon, Florence Nightingale, Dr. Thomas Arnold, and Cardinal Manning are not as relevant today as they once were. But these psychologically penetrating essays created quite a stir in their time, and even changed the course of the art of biography.

[Lyn Elliott · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this when I was reading a whole swag of books about and by the Bloomsbury group. The book description on Goodreads is spot on in my memory - witty, iconoclastic biographies of Queen Victoria,, Florence Nightingale and other history making people from the Victorian era that changed the genre. This process of constructing my reading lists has made me want to read it again because it was fun.

[Lynne King · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book years ago and am considering rereading it again. I loved so many books about the Bloomsbury Group and Lytton Strachey was a very unusual but highly gifted individual.

[Eleanore · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a marvelous collection of short biographies for four great figures of the Victorian age: Dr. Arnold, Florence Nightingale, Cardinal Manning and General Gordon. Strachey's wit is no less cutting than his pen, exposing with relentless precision the hypocrisy, the ambition, the immorality and in some cases outright cruelty of some of the Victorian age's most treasured legends. In so doing, he makes a powerful argument for the art of the biography against the questionable value of idealized moral hagiography in favor of uncovering and identifying the essential humanity of its subjects, however deeply flawed. It is, among other things, thoroughly entertaining.

[Cookie M. · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don't know why I read this. Of the "Eminent Victorians" memorialized here I had only heard of two, Florence Nightingale and General Charles Gordon.
The other two, Dr. Thomas Arnold and Henry Edward Manning were, and still are strangers to me.
The best I can say about them is Manning was a contemporary and rival of St. John Newman and Arnold was responsible for turning the British boys public school system into the hell whole of rote memorization and terrorizing of younger boys by the older ones it is famous for being.
Nightingale's biography is excellent. I learned a great deal about her I hadn't known before.
General Gordon was just a name to me before I read Strachey's work, but I knew nothing about him.
I discovered what a complicated character he was, and how the British government really had no idea what to do with him.
At one point, I was reading about him being sent back to Egypt to deal with a situation for which there was no possible solution and I was struck with the realization that I had been in a and out of the room as a young child while my parents watched this story unfold on the TV screen in an epic film.
"Wait a second!" I exclaimed to the dog sitting in my lap. "I know this one! It's 'Khartoum!"
Spoiler: It doesn't end well for Gordon.
Now I have to find the movie and see what kind if a mess Hollywood made out if it.

[Leonie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I enjoyed this immensely. Not entirely what I thought it was going to be -- I'd imagined it was angrily anti-Victorian, or at least completely uninterested in giving the Victorians their dues. People over-emphasise the meanness. It's facetious, but I think Strachey is genuinely interested in all his subjects and is interested in what makes them go. What binds the book together is the sense that what makes these people go is, at bottom, the same thing, something perhaps distinctly Victorian. They're all veering off on some kind of mission, driven by a religious sense of duty which is filtered through their own idiosyncrasies, and which may or may not lead them where it's supposed to. I liked the form Strachey uses; it's imaginative non-fiction which almost becomes fiction at times with its sense of the subjects as characters whose nature is intuited rather than strictly evidenced.

[Frank · Rating 5 out of 5]

Marvelous! Four biographical essays full of delicious irony and sometimes devastating wit.

I have read this in the free ebook version provided by Standard Ebooks, which has a clean text, and the book seems eminently understandable without annotation -- though I'm sure considerate annotation might add some useful context. I did read John Sutherland’s excellent introduction to the Oxford World’s Classsics edition online, which provides some necessary background and provides a good caution not to take Strachey’s versions as ‘the truth’: he was rather careless with facts.

With books like this, I sometimes fear some of the irony might elude some contemporary readers. Suppose you would have to take a sentence like this at face value, the essay might seem a simple imperial exercise in jingoism: ‘Though he was too late to take part in the capture of the Taku Forts, he was in time to witness the destruction of the Summer Palace at Peking—the act by which Lord Elgin, in the name of European civilisation, took vengeance upon the barbarism of the East.’ Whereas in fact, of course, it’s the jingoism Strachey takes issue with (or gently derides).

But then (to conclude with a lengthy quote) -- who wouldn’t be aware of the irony when reading a portrait such as this of Lord Hartington, one of the members of Gladstone’s cabinet:

Lord Hartington’s conscience was of a piece with the rest of him. It was not, like Mr. Gladstone’s, a salamander-conscience—an intangible, dangerous creature, that loved to live in the fire; nor was it, like Gordon’s, a restless conscience; nor, like Sir Evelyn Baring’s, a diplomatic conscience; it was a commonplace affair. Lord Hartington himself would have been disgusted by any mention of it. If he had been obliged, he would have alluded to it distantly; he would have muttered that it was a bore not to do the proper thing. He was usually bored—for one reason or another; but this particular form of boredom he found more intense than all the rest. He would take endless pains to avoid it. Of course, the whole thing was a nuisance—an obvious nuisance; and everyone else must feel just as he did about it. And yet people seemed to have got it into their heads that he had some kind of special faculty in such matters—that there was some peculiar value in his judgment on a question of right and wrong. He could not understand why it was; but whenever there was a dispute about cards in a club, it was brought to him to settle. It was most odd. But it was trite. In public affairs, no less than in private, Lord Hartington’s decisions carried an extraordinary weight. The feeling of his idle friends in high society was shared by the great mass of the English people; here was a man they could trust. For indeed he was built upon a pattern which was very dear to his countrymen. It was not simply that he was honest: it was that his honesty was an English honesty—an honest which naturally belonged to one who, so it seemed to them, was the living image of what an Englishman should be.

In Lord Hartington they saw, embodied and glorified, the very qualities which were nearest to their hearts—impartiality, solidity, common sense—the qualities by which they themselves longed to be distinguished, and by which, in their happier moments, they believed they were. If ever they began to have misgivings, there, at any rate, was the example of Lord Hartington to encourage them and guide them—Lord Hartington who was never self-seeking, who was never excited, and who had no imagination at all. Everything they knew about him fitted into the picture, adding to their admiration and respect. His fondness for field sports gave them a feeling of security; and certainly there could be no nonsense about a man who confessed to two ambitions—to become Prime Minister and to win the Derby—and who put the second above the first. They loved him for his casualness—for his inexactness—for refusing to make life a cut-and-dried business—for ramming an official dispatch of high importance into his coat-pocket, and finding it there, still unopened, at Newmarket, several days later. They loved him for his hatred of fine sentiments; they were delighted when they heard that at some function, on a florid speaker’s avowing that “this was the proudest moment of his life,” Lord Hartington had growled in an undertone “the proudest moment of my life was when my pig won the prize at Skipton Fair.” Above all, they loved him for being dull. It was the greatest comfort—with Lord Hartington they could always be absolutely certain that he would never, in any circumstances, be either brilliant, or subtle, or surprising, or impassioned, or profound. As they sat, listening to his speeches, in which considerations of stolid plainness succeeded one another with complete flatness, they felt, involved and supported by the colossal tedium, that their confidence was finally assured. They looked up, and took their fill of the sturdy, obvious presence. The inheritor of a splendid dukedom might almost have passed for a farm hand. Almost, but not quite. For an air that was difficult to explain, of preponderating authority, lurked in the solid figure; and the lordly breeding of the House of Cavendish was visible in the large, long, bearded, unimpressionable face.

[Penelope · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read for next Bookclub. A re read but read originally so long ago not much of it familiar. Well written but found the content not to my taste although did enjoy the feisty Florence Nightingale.

[Gerard de Bruin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Onvoorstelbaar dat dit boek honderd jaar geleden is geschreven. 'Modern' in elke betekenis van het woord. Superieur, ook bij her-herlezing.

[Graychin · Rating 4 out of 5]

In one of the more famous take-downs in the history of biography, Lytton Strachey sets out to slay the sainted beast of a golden age in the persons of four representative figures, and he mostly succeeds. It may be hard for us to appreciate the feat at this distance (Eminent Victorians was published in 1918); the memory of that once-imposing Jabberwock – the Victorian era – is well faded. The fading itself, however, owes something to Strachey. The section on Cardinal Manning makes an irreverent history of the Oxford Movement, illustrating the sandpit dangers of odium theologicum and the mutual jealousies of worldly-wise politicians (Manning) and otherworldly mystics (John Henry Newman). In Strachey’s Florence Nightingale we find a woman so dogged in her work, and yet so doggedly hampered by her sex, that she runs a man to death. Thomas Arnold, the education reformer and headmaster of Rugby School, makes Strachey’s briefest subject. The best, however, is reserved for last in “The End of General Gordon.” And here’s why I say that Strachey “mostly” but not entirely succeeds in his take-down, because for all his personal misalignments Strachey’s Gordon Pasha (like Nightingale to a degree) is nonetheless an object of legitimate awe, even when his goals seem to us culpably eccentric. Through the whole volume – and in prose as crystalline as Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son, a book with thematic similarities – the message is clear: A culture is no less likely than an individual to fail in suspicion of its own motives or to manufacture divine endorsement of its most selfish desires, though thousands perish in consequence.

[Marguerite Kaye · Rating 3 out of 5]

No-one can question Strachey's beautifully acid tongue, his pithy way with words, nor the impact this highly irreverent quartet of baby bios challenged both the way history had until then been written, and the characters themselves. Strachey takes four sainted Victorians, and shows their feet of clay.

This was a second read for me after a very long gap, and I found myself much more critical, principally because I know a lot more about his subjects than I did the first time around. I still really enjoyed it, in places it made me laugh out loud, but I found myself constantly nit-picking at his 'facts' - in particular with reference to Florence Nightingale. He focuses on her neurosis, he focuses on the fact that she was a woman. He accepts that she achieved momentous things but all the time you get the impression of a caveat 'for a woman'. I found myself getting quite annoyed. (By a complete coincidence, in Lucy Worsley's Queen Victoria, which I have been reading at the same time, there is a day with Florence Nightingale at Balmoral, and the woman she presents is a very, very different creature.)

All that said, this is a very, very witty read and I wonder in the end, if that's how it should be judged?

[Scott · Rating 4 out of 5]

Why let scruples over facts and fairness get in the way of a wickedly good read? Lytton Strachey's quartet of pithy biographies, Eminent Victorians (1918), wittily, Wilde-ishly distorts the character and accomplishments of four noble worthies -- Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Thomas Arnold, and General Gordon -- in order to burlesque the nineteenth-century's most dearly held virtues: faith, hard work, learning, and courage. In its day, the book's tone and specious arguments ruffled a few aged feathers. But its derisive criticism of the past generation's pretense helped to usher in a new, Modern period of literature, and Strachey's probing of his subjects' psyches and his experiments with the structure of his lives profoundly influenced the scope and style of twentieth-century biography. Readers nowadays sometimes miss Strachey's mocking irony: his victims are too long dead, mostly forgotten, and the style he parodies has gone out of fashion. In spite of its age, though, the book is full of deliciously tart and stinging lines that make this acerbic read a guilty pleasure.

[D · Rating 4 out of 5]

The choice of people that get a biography in this book is excellent although I have no idea whether the sample is representative. I found all of the stories very interesting, well written, witty and humorous. The preoccupation with religion that all subjects share, with the possible exception of Florence Nightingale, is amazing and interesting. All in all, a great read, especially for anyone interested in the "Victorian" period.

[Arvind Radhakrishnan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was such an engrossing read.I thoroughly enjoyed Lytton Strachey's writing style.His subtle intellect is clearly evident in the way he has crafted this book and in how he understands the nuances of the social tensions that characterized the Victorian era.His prose is so elegant,tinctured as it is with faint irreverence and measureless wit.

While the essay on Cardinal Manning was immersed in theological disputes (that did not fascinate me) it was well penned.I found the essays on Florence Nightingale and Dr.Thomas Arnold very informative and insightful.Be that as it may,it was the essay on General Charles Gordon that impressed me the most.Strachey enlivens the legacy and historical relevance of that amazing personality.General Gordon's brave exploits in China and Sudan are examined objectively as is his complex inner life and layered personality- unimpeachle integrity combined with an unyielding obstinacy that irked people like Mr.Gladstone but even his staunchest critics would readily admit that Charles Gordon was the bravest of the brave.It is for this scintillating essay that I decided to give Lytton Strachey's book a rating of five stars.I heartily recommend this book to all history and literature buffs.

[C. B. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wonderful! Strachey tells a good story and never lets the details slow the pace of the narrative, yet all the while keeping the enterprise scholarly and accurate. Strachey's caustic humour underlies all of this, of course. The target: Victorian morals, sensibilities, and preoccupations. Through each life, Strachey is able to view a different key theme. Cardinal Manning's life allows Strachey to consider the church; Florence Nightingale's, technology and philanthropy; Thomas Arnold's, the public school; and General Gordon's, the Empire. A greatly entertaining book which is important in considering the historic sense of the literati in the years after the First World War.

[Tom Schulte · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really a remarkable, vintage biography anthology. I really don't care about Cardinal Manning's wrestling with the concept of immaculate conception and his conversion to Catholicism, but Strachey made it all interesting. I wonder how much energy and talent was wasted over the centuries in such theological hair-splitting?

Florence Nightingale is the attention-getting life story. Strachey really elevated here from bedside nurse to social reformer and the mother of all hospital administrators in an impressive career that spanned decades where her will, for good or ill, triumphed in a male-dominated, military and colonial empire bureaucracy.

Dr. Arnold could have been left out as I would have advised had I been Strachey's editor; too much like Manning's life, another career political theologian.

Major-General Charles George Gordon, also known as Gordon Pasha here, was a fascinating British Army officer and administrator. He saw action in the Crimean War as an officer in the British Army, but this focuses on Service with the Khedive in Equatoria building Egypt's empire in the Great Lakes region and ultimately the Mahdist uprising, the siege of Khartoum, and his principled death refusing rescue without his garrison while Prime Minister William Gladstone neglected military affairs and did not act promptly enough to save the besieged Gordon.

[Lisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

According to the introduction, Eminent Victorians was a rather ground-breaking work, replacing the thick, dusty tomes of yesteryear that were full of dull dates and a feeling of reverence for their subjects with acerbic wit and no small amount of irony.

While I didn't actually know who three of the subjects were prior to picking this up, it didn't mar my enjoyment at all (good old Flo Nightingale I know. Cardinal Manning, Thomas Arnold and 'Chinese' Gordon were complete strangers to me). And while Cardinal Manning's outing may have been ever so slightly overlong, the rest were rather amusing dashes through the years, highlighting the work ethic as well as the religious hypocrisy that seemed to have these over-achieving Victorians in its grip.

If you prefer to read the biographies of people that you've actually heard of then you'd be better off elsewhere, but if you're the sort of nerd (like me) that simply enjoys learning new and interesting things (especially if they're delivered in a deliciously bitchy, gossipy way) then Eminent Victorians will be right up your (cobbled) alley.

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'd always wanted to read this collection of four Victorian biographies, ever since I saw the 1995 movie Carrington based on the life of Strachey with painter Dora Carrington.

Lytton Strachey 's Eminent Victorians gives us short lives of Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Dr. Thomas Arnold of Rugby, and Charles "Chinese" Gordon of Khartoum. Strachey's style is sprightly and ironic, particular in the lives of Manning and Gordon, which broadly lampoon church and British parliamentary politics.

I was impressed by the biography of Florence Nightingale who was tireless for most of her long life in improving healthcare in both military and civilian life. Medical practice around the world owes much to her.

[Philip · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lytton Strachey’s book is very famous, at least in the United Kingdom. Let’s make that England, at least. Since I started amassing books on shelves, I have never been without a copy. I read it first about fifty years ago and it left such a strong impression on the young reader that, on starting this second exposure, I couldn’t even remember the people it described.

For the record, the subjects chosen for this enduring work were Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Dr Arnold and The End of General Gordon. And the first thing to note is that none of these people were royals and neither were they eminent politicians. Equally, none of them were activists for a specific cause and none of them opposed the establishment, apart from gently in the case of Florence Nightingale. But they were individuals. As Strachey himself says in his introduction, “Human beings are too important to be treated as mere symptoms of the past.”

A modern reader would cope with this prose, but perhaps might baulk at the paragraph length. It has to be said that the subject matter of the first study, that relating to Cardinal Manning, might also prove impenetrable. Such are theological arguments… “In the first place, that was the question of Baptismal Regeneration itself. This is by no means an easy one to disentangle; but it may be noted that the doctrine of Baptism includes (1) God’s intention, that is to say, His purpose in electing certain persons, to eternal life - an abstruse and greatly controverted subject, upon which the Church of England abstains from strict definition; (2) God’s action, whether by means of sacraments, or otherwise - concerning which the Church of England maintains the efficacy of sacraments, but does not formally deny that grace may be given by other means, repentance, and faith being present; and (3) the question whether sacramental grace is given instrumentally, by and at the moment of the act of baptism, or in consequence of an act of free prevenient grace rendering the receiver worthy - that is to say, whether sacramental grace in baptism is given absolutely all conditionally: it was over this last question that the dispute raged hottest in the Gotham case.” One hopes that the judgment in the case was clear, despite the fact that this was an age when theologians could not even agree on the trivial matter of precisely how many angels there were on a pin head.

But the reader should not be put off by the rather dry life that is described in the opening chapter. There is much here of interest, especially about people other than Cardinal Manning. Strachey has quite a lot to say about the Oxford Group and Cardinal Newman in particular, whom he portrays as a rather pathetic, confused recluse, quite unaware of the context within which his ideas had to take root. “Was it possible that Dr Newman did not understand that ideas in Rome were, to say the least of it, out of place?”

Florence Nightingale presents a different portrait. Born into relative wealth, she apparently displayed no interest in doing the things that women of her birth right might be expected to do. She was also unwilling to act like a woman at times, unable to accept that it was “The man who acts, decides, and achieves; the woman who encourages, applauds, and - from a distance - inspires.” She wanted more than this. She never married.

She made her name and reputation at Scutari, the military hospital in the then Ottoman Empire that received many of the wounded from the Crimean War. It was there that she demonstrated that clean linen, food, fresh air and care would improve survival rates. She went on to found modern nursing. But Strachey’s portrait of her depicts a complex but rather rigid figure, prone to intellectual shortcuts, possibly naivete. Clearly, she was also capable of mirth. “One of her Indian admirers, the Aga Khan, came to visit her. She expatiated on the marvellous advances she had lived to see in the management of hospitals, in drainage, in ventilation, in sanitary work of every kind. There was a pause; and then, ‘Do you think you are improving?’ asked the Aga Khan. She was a little taken aback, and said, ‘What do you mean by “improving”?’ He replied, ‘Believing more in God’. She saw that he had a view of God, which was different from hers. ‘A most interesting man’, she noted after the interview; ‘but you could never teach him sanitation.’”

Dr Thomas Arnold was headmaster at Rugby School, an English Public School, a private school, in contrast to a state school to which the public were actually admitted, rather than barred. State schools did not exist in those years. It is clear from Strachey’s description that Arnold believed in the curative powers of violence. A good thrashing is what he often delivered, but all in the best interests of the pupils, of course. Never did him any harm, I am sure he would have opined…

And then we encounter Lord Gordon, whom, we learn, used to like the company of boys. Already famous for bringing to an end rebellion in China, he meandered around the world in various offices of public service before, for a second time, accepting a post in Sudan. It was the time of the Mahdi’s fight for worldly power and the rest, as we now say, is history. But Gordon was no one-dimensional, swashbuckling military type. He was a complex character, prone to introspection, periods when he would lock himself away with a bottle of brandy, lost to everything apart from himself and his God. What Strachey describes well, however, are the political manoeuvrings around British involvement that eventually left Gordon high and dry defending an idea that had already ditched him. As ever, British action arrived late.

This time through, Eminent Victorians made a strong impression. What seems to run through this text, however, is an inability to describe or even relate aspects of these lives which, to the modern reader, seem both obvious and relevant.

[Denise · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lytton Strachey wrote about four of the 18th Century's "heroes". But he took off the blinders when he wrote. Bad tempers, arrogance, narcissism, and grandiose ideals are all included. The portrayed parties are not white-washed as they're done when fact turns into myth. This book was a best-seller AND a scandal when it was published in the early 1900's. Would be interesting to see what Strachey could have done with some of our major political characters! When done reading the book, go get the movie "Carrington" from your local library. Shows more about Strachey and his mental makeup, plus the fact that he was an "outed" homosexual at a time when polite people did NOT discuss nor acknowledge such a condition.

[Boris Gregoric · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good writer Strachey was. But this painfully d a t e d. We are now safe to assume that none of these once illustrious personages mean, or represent diddley in 2020.

[Nic Rowan]

Each portrait is a delight, but what I find most striking is Strachey’s explanation in the preface of his methods:

It is not by the direct method of a scrupulous narration that the explorer of the past can hope to depict that singular epoch. If he is wise, he will adopt a subtler strategy. He will attack his subject in unexpected places; he will fall upon the flank, or the rear; he will shoot a sudden, revealing searchlight into obscure recesses, hitherto undivined. He will row out over that great ocean of material, and lower down into it, here and there, a little bucket, which will bring up to the light of day some characteristic specimen, from those far depths, to be examined with a careful curiosity.

[Tom Brown · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fantastic book that was far better than I was expecting. In addition to being a masterpiece of biography, it also manages to paint a vivid picture of Victorian English society, and the figures who moved through it. In particular, the book makes quite clear just how omnipresent a figure Gladstone was during the Victorian age. I would thoroughly recommend this book to anyone.