I read this in my freshman year of college, and it was a pleasure to go back to it again. Here are four portraits of leading figures of Victorian England: Cardinal Henry Manning, Florence Nightingale, Dr. Thomas Arnold, and General Charles Gordon. Manning was the leader of England's Catholics, Nightingale pretty much created the nursing profession, Arnold was the headmaster of Rugby and helped create the British public schools, and Gordon was ultimately a tragic figure, the victim of anti-colonial Muslim armies in Sudan. All were respectable, talented, formidable people - yet they were all stuffy and priggish, able to see things only from the point of view of dignified leaders of the United Kingdom. Strachey's brilliant portraits of them serve as a criticism of British attitudes and approaches.Strachey had a very interesting approach to history - he tried to really get inside the heads of his subjects, to fully understand their motives and tendencies. I suppose he could be accused of speculating a little too much, but any good reader should understand that there is some opinion mixed in with the facts. He writes so well, and with a very subtle wit too, that it is enjoyable even when he refers to things that a contemporary reader would have little knowledge of. Here is an example: "Arnold started, in 1831, a weekly newspaper, The Englishman's Register. The paper was not a success, in spite of the fact that it set out to improve its reader morally and that it preserved, in every article, an avowedly Christian tone."The General Gordon section was as exciting a history piece as I have ever read, and there are resonances for today's world political situation. Gordon successfully led armies in China against a rebellion led by Hong Siu-tsuen, a former teacher who had religious visions and became the Tien Wang (the "celestial king"), the leader of a movement. He and his followers took over Nanking, and found themselves at odds with both the British and Chinese governments. Ultimately they were defeated. "Chinese Gordon" later became Governor-General of the Sudan. At a later point (around 1875 maybe? - Strachey is not a big one for providing dates), a rebellion grew in the Sudan, also centered around a spiritual leader, this one named Mahommed Ahmed, a young man who gathered some followers, then announced that Allah had revealed to him that he was the "mahdi", or the next great prophet. His movement grew and became the Mahdi Army. The Sudanese revolted against their Egyptian rulers and their English backers. The British government sent Gordon to Khartoum to lead an evacuation of the area. However, once he arrived, the bull-headed and contentious Gordon showed no intentions of giving in to the rebels, and soon he was besieged. An expeditionary force was organized and sent to Khartoum, after much delay - there was a lot of consternation in London over Gordon deciding to rewrite foreign policy on his own - but arrived too late. Khartoum fell into the Ahmed's hands, and Gordon was killed. A few years later, the British recaptured the area, but that story is not told here.Strachey was the gay son of a former viceroy of India, and part of the celebrated Bloomsbury group. He is regarded as a groundbreaking historian who emphasized psychological insight and paired it with an irreverent wit. He was a superb historical writer, and this book proves it.
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.
Do You like book Eminent Victorians (2003)?
The genre of "Eminent Victorians" is an art of high quality. The book "Eminent Victorian" by Lytton Stachey and John Sutherland is about reverence with a touch of wit and iconoclasm and a skill for narration. The author portrays Victorian life with a level of perception. The book was first published in 1918 with a dramatic feeling for Victorian life. Stachey's literary style is full of emotion and unique style of his own. The book "Eminent Victorians" is an amazing short biographies.I gave the book "Eminent Victorians" with characters such as Florence Nightingale and Cardinal Manning because the author is able to display their immortality and cruelty of legendary time periods. Also, the Victorian time period is not my favorite although the time period is a powerful time period. Stachey has a style all his own as a writer and a critic with a touch of sympathy and irreverence as well as a touch of wit. The book received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize by Queen Victoria.
—Carolyn Mccargish
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.
—Scott
In Eminent Victorians, Lytton Strachey examines the lives of four prominent figures of 19th century Britain in order to capture the spirit of the Victorian era. He treats his subjects, as Strachey himself admits, with ‘brevity’ and ‘freedom of spirit.’ Dividing the book into four chapters, he opens his volume with the life of Cardinal Manning, focusing on his role in the Oxford Movement and his machinations to solidify his position as the figurehead of this religious reform. In the second chapter, Florence Nightingale’s lifelong devotion to effecting reform in the British medical system constitutes the subject of scrutiny. Nightingale, Strachey tells us, rose to fame because of her unwavering will to achieve her objectives through hard work and manipulation of colleagues and politicians along the way. An educator, Thomas Arnold appears in the third chapter also as a reformist. He intends to introduce “elements of character and principles of conduct” into the school system in order to turn schools into “places of really Christian Education.” His reformist attempts, however, seem to fall short of Strachey’s expectations. The last chapter explores the adventures of Charles Gordon, a British army officer and his role in the Sudanese Mahdi Revolt in 1884. Gordon’s adventurous faceoff with the Mahdi, which earned him a lot of respect at home, receives sardonic treatment from Strachey. Eminent Victorians represents an attempt to shatter the aura formed around a number of representative figures of the Victorian era held in public esteem. By weaving together the personal traits and public roles of his subjects, Strachey conducts a critical examination of individuals who served as agents of reform, shaping and shaped by the spirit of their time. In order to present a more realistic picture of this era, he depicts the broader historical background in which these figures became influential. As one of the first works of biography to break with the tradition of glorifying subjects, this post-war monograph conducts its investigation through a critical lens, giving out a more balanced portrait of outstanding personalities of the era.
—Mardin Aminpour
