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Eminent Victorians

July 19, 2009 by Roy Johnson

iconoclastic biographies of nineteenth-century heros

This is a book which marked a decisive step into the modern world of the twentieth century, and a clean break with the Victorian and Edwardian attitudes which preceded it. Lytton Strachey was hardly known when he published the book in 1918: afterwards, he was almost as notorious as Oscar Wilde. It’s a group of biographical studies – of Cardinal Manning (1802-1892), Florence Nightingale (1820-1910), Dr Arnold of Rugby School (1795-1842), and General Gordon (1833-1885) in which Strachey overturns all the pious hagiographic work of his forebears and portrays these icons of Victorian life as ordinary beings locked in the social context of their age.

Eminent VictoriansHis sketches are witty, pungent, and very elegantly expressed put-downs which punctured the blind optimism of the age which had led up to the disasters of the first world war. Well, not exactly ordinary. These were people who felt they had a messianic duty to ‘serve’ the public, and all of them were fuelled by religious fervour. If there is one theme which unites these portraits it is the intellectual contortions and the exhausting spiritual struggles these people made in trying to reconcile contradictions in their religious belief system – in this case Christianity.

And Strachey is not blind to their good qualities. He has a certain admiration for Manning’s soul-searching as he wavered on the edge of Protestantism and Catholicism. His account of Nightingale in the Crimea is largely a critique of the War Office’s blundering and obstructiveness. And General Gordon is shown as almost a scapegoat for Britain’s imperialistic equivocations.

It has to be said that by modern standards, Strachey is hopelessly unrigorous as a historian. He plagiarises his principal sources, fails to cite his quotations accurately; gets his dates wrong; invents ‘facts’; and bends details to suit his narrative purpose. But the stories he creates have tremendous drive and interest.

The chapter on Cardinal Manning is more than just a potted biography for instance. Strachey deals with power struggles in the politics of ecclesiastical preferment and in particular the rivalry between Manning and Cardinal Newman. He’s very interesting on the significance of the Oxford Movement (for Roman Catholicism) in relation to the State in nineteenth-century Britain.

In the case of Florence Nightingale Strachey’s purpose is less to do with individual biography and much more to offer a scathing critique of government and military mismanagement in its conduct of medical support during the Crimean war. Only when the war ends, and she spends a further fifty years of her long life engaged in Good Works and social reforms does he focus on her personal life.

His targets are all well chosen, representing as they do Church, public service, Empire, and reforming social zeal. In the case of Thomas (Dr) Arnold, he shows the example of someone who attempted to re-shape the conduct of Rugby School in a form which others would follow. This regime included a curriculum of dead languages plus Christianity, the complete exclusion of any sciences, and an authoritarian regime of discipline with corporal punishment administered by a cadre of elite sixth-formers and the head himself for serious cases. But as Strachey points out

so far as the actual machinery of education was concerned, Dr Arnold not only failed to effect a change, but deliberately adhered to the old system. The monastic and literary conceptions of education, which had their roots in the Middle Ages, had been accepted and strengthened at the revival of Learning, he adopted almost without hesitation. Under him, the public school remained, in essentials, a conventional establishment, devoted to the teaching of Greek and Latin grammar.

Much of the same Christian evangelicism is present in the life of General Gordon (and it takes almost as a matter of course an anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim element). Strachey produces a narrative which is amazingly contemporary in revealing the connections between government, military, and the press which resulted in General Gordon being sent on a mission to ‘save’ Khartoum – only to find himself bogged down in an imperialistic quagmire which resulted in him paying with his life, waiting for a rescuing expeditionary force which arrived just forty-eight hours too late.

At any rate, it had all ended very happily – in a glorious slaughter of twenty thousand Arabs, a vast addition to the British Empire, and a step in the peerage for Sir Evelyn Baring.

© Roy Johnson 2009

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Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, pp.336, ISBN 019955501X


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Lytton Strachey biography

September 22, 2009 by Roy Johnson

life, works, and loves of a literary bohemian

Lytton Strachey biographyLytton Strachey (1880-1932) was born at Clapham Common and raised at Lancaster Gate, in central London. He was the eleventh of thirteen children, to General Sir Richard Strachey (an engineer) and his wife Jane Grant. Though he spent some years at boarding schools, including Abbotsholme and Leamington College, he received much of his education at home. His mother took an interest in literature and politics, and Strachey met many of the leading writers and thinkers of the day when they came to visit Lady Strachey. His secondary education was completed at University College in Liverpool where he studied Latin, Greek, mathematics, and English literature and history. It was there that he met and was influenced by Walter Raleigh, a professor of English literature and well known biographer.

After failing to receive a scholarship to Oxford in 1899, Strachey decided to attend Cambridge where he developed many friendships which lasted the rest of his life. At Trinity College Cambridge he met Clive Bell, Thoby Stephen (Virginia Woolf’s brother) John Maynard Keynes, and Leonard Woolf.

Along with many other future members of the Bloomsbury Group, he was elected to the Apostles Society, and he also won the Chancellor’s medal for his poem, ‘Ely: An Ode’. In 1903 fellow Apostle G.E.Moore’s Principia Ethica was published, producing a profound effect on the aspiring intellectuals. The Principia became a rationalizing factor in loosening the repression of homosexual tendencies among the Apostles and in Trinity and King’s College as well.

Strachey completed his work at Cambridge with a thesis on Warren Hastings but failed to receive a Trinity fellowship. He returned to his parents’ home in Lancaster Gate and sought to support himself as a journalist. Much of his social life centred on the Thursday night ‘at-homes’ of the Stephenses – Thoby, Adrian, Vanessa Bell, and Virginia Woolf.

He contributed book and drama reviews to The Spectator magazine, published poetry, and wrote an important work of literary criticism, Landmarks in French Literature (1912). During the First World War, he was a conscientious objector, and spent much time with like-minded people such as Lady Ottoline Morrell and other members of the Bloomsbury Group.

In 1915 Strachey met Dora Carrington, a graduate of the Slade School of Art and the woman who devoted herself to him for the rest of his life. In 1917 Strachey and Carrington moved into a cottage in Tidmarsh, Oxfordshire, and continued to carry on with their separate personal lives. Carrington maintained a relationship with fellow artist Mark Gertler before marrying Ralph Partridge, and Strachey moved through a series of relationships with a series of men.

Eminent VictoriansHis first great success, and his most famous achievement, was Eminent Victorians (1918) a collection of four short biographies of Victorian heroes. With a dry wit, he exposed the human failings of his subjects and what he saw as the hypocrisy at the centre of Victorian morality. His portraits of Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Thomas Arnold, and General Gordon changed perceptions of the Victorians for a whole generation.

This work was followed in the same style by Queen Victoria, a work which used elements of romantic fiction and melodrama to create a warm, humorous and very human portrait of an iconic figure. We see Victoria as a strong-willed child, as the 18-year-old girl queen, as a monarch, wife, mother and widow. Equally fascinating are her relationships with Peel, Gladstone and Disraeli, with her beloved Albert and her Highland servant John Brown, all of which show a different side of her staid, pious image.

Strachey’s literary style was becoming very popular and he began to achieve a measure of fame which allowed him to support himself and his household from the proceeds of his writing. In 1924 he purchased the lease to Ham Spray House and moved in along with Carrington and Ralph Partridge. He completed Elizabeth and Essex in 1928 and started editing The Greville Memoirs, a project which was completed posthumously by Ralph and Frances Partridge and Roger Fulford.

Though his frequent ill-health often made it difficult, Strachey enjoyed travelling and made several trips abroad between 1928 and 1931. One of these excursions is described very humorously in Gerald Brenan’s memoir, South from Granada. Late in 1931 he began to decline rapidly from an illness which doctors were unable to identify. He died January 21, 1932, of what was later found to be stomach cancer. His famous deathbed bon mot was: ‘If this is dying, then I don’t think much of it.’ Distraught at the loss of her soul-mate, Carrington made two attempts to commit suicide. The latter was successful when she borrowed a gun from her neighbour and shot herself.


The Letters of Lytton StracheyStrachey’s Letters This collection reveals the poignant love-affair between him and the painter Dora Carrington, plus his affairs with Roger Senhouse and his cousin Duncan Grant. He also wrote almost every day to Leonard Woolf on politics, literature, and life – and he correctly predicted to Maynard Keynes that their sexual proclivities and attitudes put them a hundred years ahead of their time. Includes new materials unknown to previous biographers, almost every item revealing Strachey as a witty, gossipy, and sparkling character.


Lytton Strachey biography


Bloomsbury Group – web links

Bloomsbury Group - web links Hogarth Press first editions
Annotated gallery of original first edition book jacket covers from the Hogarth Press, featuring designs by Vanessa Bell, Roger Fry, and others.

Bloomsbury Group - web links The Omega Workshops
A brief history of Roger Fry’s experimental Omega Workshops, which had a lasting influence on interior design in post First World War Britain.

Bloomsbury Group - web links The Bloomsbury Group and War
An essay on the largely pacifist and internationalist stance taken by Bloomsbury Group members towards the First World War.

Bloomsbury Group web links Tate Gallery Archive Journeys: Bloomsbury
Mini web site featuring photos, paintings, a timeline, sub-sections on the Omega Workshops, Roger Fry, and Duncan Grant, and biographical notes.

Bloomsbury Group - web links Bloomsbury: Books, Art and Design
Exhibition of paintings, designs, and ceramics at Toronto University featuring Hogarth Press, Vanessa Bell, Dora Carrington, Quentin Bell, and Stephen Tomlin.

Bloomsbury Group - web links Blogging Woolf
A rich enthusiast site featuring news of events, exhibitions, new book reviews, relevant links, study resources, and anything related to Bloomsbury and Virginia Woolf

Bloomsbury Group - web links Hyper-Concordance to Virginia Woolf
Search the texts of all Woolf’s major works, and track down phrases, quotes, and even individual words in their original context.

Bloomsbury Group - web links A Mrs Dalloway Walk in London
An annotated description of Clarissa Dalloway’s walk from Westminster to Regent’s Park, with historical updates and a bibliography.

Bloomsbury Group - web links Women’s History Walk in Bloomsbury
Annotated tour of literary and political homes in Bloomsbury, including Gordon Square, University College, Bedford Square, Doughty Street, and Tavistock Square.

Bloomsbury Group - web links Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain
News of events, regular bulletins, study materials, publications, and related links. Largely the work of Virginia Woolf specialist Stuart N. Clarke.

Bloomsbury Group - web links BBC Audio Essay – A Eulogy to Words
A charming sound recording of a BBC radio talk broadcast in 1937 – accompanied by a slideshow of photographs of Virginia Woolf.

Bloomsbury Group - web links A Family Photograph Albumn
Leslie Stephens’ collection of family photographs which became known as the Mausoleum Book, collected at Smith College – Massachusetts.

Bloomsbury Group - web links Bloomsbury at Duke University
A collection of book jacket covers, Fry’s Twelve Woodcuts, Strachey’s ‘Elizabeth and Essex’.

© Roy Johnson 2000-2014


More on Lytton Strachey
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Filed Under: Bloomsbury Group, Lytton Strachey Tagged With: Biography, Bloomsbury Group, Eminent Victorians, Literary studies, Lytton Strachey

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