Eminent Victorians (Classic, 20th-Century, Penguin) Paperback – July 19, 1990

The four essays are easy to read. Strachey basically imitates Gibbon's style, although he disclaims it. Unlike current biography, there is clearly much that cannot be stated - as being unacceptable to the then-contemporary reader - and has to be hinted at, creating a rather feline atmosphere. Some minor figures border on caricature: politicians, Pius IX, but Strachey provides many fascinating details of 19th century background to his chosen subjects, probably unknown to the modern reader.

Some of Lytton Strachey's choices of subject for the four scathing biographical essays contained in _Eminent Victorians_ may seem rather strange. Florence Nightingale was an obvious choice for any biographer, but who cared about Matthew Arnold in the post-war era when Strachey was writing these essays? Who gave a thought to Cardinal Manning or Chinese Gordon? And why combine their biographies into one book?The answer may be that all four shared one unusual character trait, one so reminiscent of the Victorian age that even the thought of it brings the scent of lavender to mind: extreme earnestness. Each figure cared very, very deeply about something, but for each that earnestness also masked a corresponding personal craving. Like many young Britons in the post-WWI era, Strachey was deeply distrustful of earnestness, often seeing it as an excuse for personal gain or fulfillment. This was especially true when one man's deeply held beliefs sent others to their deaths, as it often had during WWI. He had no time for official incompetence, ignorance, or inaction, but often found the opposite just as dangerous.The first essay in _Eminent Victorians_ is that of Cardinal Manning. Manning was a priest in the Church of England who became involved in the Oxford Movement, a group of churchmen who disliked the increasing secularization of the C of E and who wished to bring it back to its Catholic roots. Most of those involved remained in the Anglican communion, forming the nucleus of the "High Church" movement of the late 19th century. Manning found that he could not stop at that, though; unable to reconcile his belief in a Church Universal with his membership in a church that existed basically because Henry VIII was a serial adulterer, and unable to 'take back' the text of a tract he had written that was deeply critical of the Anglican church and which eliminated any chances of his gaining higher office, Manning found himself eventually in the arms of Rome. Strachey paints Manning as a weak, vacillating, impulsive man of great ambition whose conversion to Roman Catholicism was as much a political and career move as one of the heart and soul. Had Manning remained in the Church of England, Strachey implies, he would have been an archdeacon until death; only conversion to Roman Catholicism allowed him to fulfil his ambitions towards higher office. It's a masterful biography, one that explores not just its purported subject but also the birth of Anglo-Catholicism.The third essay, of Rugby school headmaster Matthew Arnold, reveals Strachey's hatred of the English public school system (or what we in North America would call the private school system). He skewers Arnold for failing to make the educational reforms he was hired to make and for delegating the discipline of younger students to the senior class, thereby condoning and even encouraging the type of severe bullying that caused many young men to consider suicide. Arnold, whose earnestness in creating 'Christian gentlemen' did not go so far as to allow him to teach them himself, refused to update the school curriculum ostensibly because gentlemen didn't need science, maths, or English literature, but really (as Strachey contends) because Arnold had studied Latin and Greek himself and didn't want to feel his own learning was unnecessary. Strachey points out that Arnold did little at Rugby except pronounce the Sunday sermon, intimidate students, and foster a personality cult that eventually made him the father of modern education in many Britons' eyes - even though he made no changes to the educational system itself. His reforms in discipline and in religion (and his lack of reforms in curriculum) were copied by most public schools, to the great detriment of the British people.In Strachey's essay on General Gordon, Strachey shows how a brave man with a strong belief in the rightness of his cause and an overwhelming desire for adventure may have been used to precipitate a war and to advance the cause of imperialism. Gordon, a war veteran and former colonial administrator (and a rather unstable fellow), was sent to the Sudan during a revolt to report on conditions there and to evacuate civilians who were loyal to Egypt, which was then controlled by the British. Gordon did none of the above; he instead tried to wipe out the insurrection, and for his troubles was killed and his staff and allies massacred. His death was used by the imperialist factions in the ruling party as a call to arms. Strachey wonders: was this deliberate? Was Gordon given alternate instructions by the imperialists? Did they intend for him to die, so that his death could be used as a rallying point for further imperialism? He argues his point well, and the essay is definitely worth reading.Strachey's portrait of Florence Nightingale is not quite as successful as the rest. Nightingale was born into a wealthy family, and like all young women of her class and time was expected to marry young, have children, and generally be nothing more than a society lady. Florence wanted more: she wanted to work, to make a difference, to change the world, and she wanted everybody around her to work as hard as she did. After many years of waiting, she finally had her chance; her efforts to reform British military hospitals and eventually the practice of medicine in the Empire did in fact change the world. Strachey seems to have thought that she pushed her colleagues too hard, that her own drive was so abnormal that her friends and family could not keep up. Granted, she did push some of her colleagues very hard, and one may have even died from overwork, but they chose to work with her because they believed in her, and given what she was able to do I think they were right to believe in her. It also appears that Strachey may not have been comfortable with a woman refusing to hide her intelligence or personal strength when dealing with men. I had the distinct impression while reading this essay that Strachey was sneering at those men who took orders from Nightingale or who assisted her in her work. Another reviewer mentioned that Nightingale is portrayed here as a 'pushy woman' - and she certainly is; however, most of Strachey's implied criticism seems to be directed towards the men who treated her as the intelligent, hard-working, valuable human being she was. Strachey also seems to have viewed her invalid status as something of a neurotic problem, which in the light of recent research (showing that she likely had undulant fever) may not be accurate.

John Sutherland's full commentary remedies the one defect - carelessness with factual detail - that mars Strachey's fascinating and informative biographies of four eminent Victorians. However, Sutherland himself, like all other commentators I have read, has a serious fault, which could distort readers' understanding of what Strachey was doing. He assumes that Strachey "spectacularly subverted the certainties on which the Victorian age was founded" (page viii); that he "portrayed" "all four" as "neurotics"; was "examining the dark and dirty labyrinth of Victorian unconsciousness" (page xi); that he "spatters" "ridicule" on his subjects (Page xii); or, as the blurb on the back cover alleges, "Debunking Church, Public School, and Empire ..."Strachey says in his preface that his biographies differ from "[t]hose fat two volumes ... with their tone of tedious panegyric." Anyone who has read Monypenny and Buckle's SIX volume biography of Disraeli, which goes out of its way to attribute to Disraeli every imaginable virtue (e.g., he loved children), knows what Strachey means.However, if the reader ignores the allegations of generations of commentators and looks at what Strachey wrote without preconception, he will see that he admired all four of his subjects and meant for his readers to admire them. "[A] perfect English gentleman" is the way Strachey describes Sydney Herbert (page 121), and Strachey's description of him in that paragraph and the following pages shows that he meant that as the highest praise. Strachey even treats with impartiality and often empathy the aspect of Victorian life that by the time he was writing must have already seemed strange: the centrality of "old time religion" in the thought and lives of educated Victorians. (From the inception of printing through the year 1900, more books were published in the United Kingdom on religion than on all other subjects combined.)Different as Strachey's subjects are from each other, they have one thing in common. All were rebels. Manning deserted the Church of England, one of the central pillars of the Victorian establishment. Nightingale defied the expectations of the way an upper-class woman should lead her life to challenge relentlessly and adamantly the British army and radically reform the nursing profession and army hospitals. Arnold radically reformed another bastion of the establishment: the public (i.e., private) schools. Gordon was an eccentric loner, who followed the opposite policy from the one he was sent to Khartoum to implement.Nevertheless, all were greatly admired by those whom they led or cared for: Manning by British Catholics, Nightingale by the soldiers under her supervision, Arnold by his students (page 165), and Gordon by the people of the Sudan (page 208). More strikingly, these rebels, radicals, and eccentrics were heroes of British society; they were "eminent Victorians" in their own time. This fact must force the reader to re-assess one of the most prevalent stereotypes about the Victorians: their supposed insistence on conventionality and conformity.In fact, Strachey achieved what Collingwood stated was the goal of history in his classic study The Idea of History (pages 231-49). He reconstructed a plausible and coherent account of what his four subjects (and several of the people with whom they interacted) were like, what motivated them, what "made them tick." It must be added (and this also fulfilled Collingwood's requirement) that Strachey's account is not plausible of human beings in general. Rather, it is historically plausible; it is plausible considering the specific time and place in which his subjects lived; and by providing it, Strachey illuminated important aspects of Victorian life and thought.