Eminent Victorians - Softcover

Strachey, Lytton

3.75

2,459 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0486451364 ISBN 13: 9780486451367

Publisher: Dover Publications, 2006

View all copies of this ISBN edition:

An unparalleled manifesto for the modern biographer, Lytton Strachey's razor-sharp essays about four prominent Victorians brought him tremendous fame. However, the great pacifist's subjects did not fare as well. Strachey skewers the legends glorifying Florence Nightingale, educator Thomas Arnold, Cardinal Henry Manning, and military hero General Charles "Chinese" Gordon. His incisive portraits challenge the nineteenth-century's preeminent values: humanitarianism, liberalism, evangelicism, and imperialism.
First published in 1918, this book made an enormous impact on war-weary readers, who were seeking alternatives to Victorian manners and morals. In the Preface, Strachey notes of the role of biographer that "it is not his business to be complimentary; it is his business to lay bare the facts of the case, as he understands them. That is what I have aimed at in this book--to lay bare the facts of some cases, as I understand them, dispassionately, impartially, and without ulterior intentions." Strachey's approach to his subjects—recognizing their multifaceted, ambiguous, and often self-contradicting humanity—established a new style for biographical writing. Eminent Victorians remains one of the most influential and entertaining studies ever written.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

Review:

The four biographical essays that make up Eminent Victorians created something of a stir when they were first published in the spring of 1918, bringing their author instant fame. In his flamboyant collection, Lytton Strachey chose to stray far from the traditional mode of biography: "Those two fat volumes, with which it is our custom to commemorate the dead--who does not know them, with their ill-digested masses of material, their slipshod style, their tone of tedious panegyric, their lamentable lack of selection, of detachment, of design?" Instead he provided impressionistic but acute (and, some said, skewed) portraits. Rarely does Strachey explore the details of a subject's daily or family life unless they point directly to an issue of character. In short, he pioneered a deeply sardonic and often scathingly funny biographical style.

None of Strachey's Victorians emerge unscathed. In his hands, Florence Nightingale is not a gentle archangel descended from heaven to minister sweetly to wounded soldiers, but rather an exacting, dictatorial, and judgmental crusader. Her "pen, in the virulence of its volubility, would rush ... to the denunciation of an incompetent surgeon or the ridicule of a self-sufficient nurse. Her sarcasm searched the ranks of the officials with the deadly and unsparing precision of a machine-gun. Her nicknames were terrible. She respected no one." Dr. Thomas Arnold, the man appointed to revamp the very private British public school system, fares little better: in Strachey's acid ink, he became "the founder of the worship of athletics and the worship of good form." In this same vain, military hero General Gordon is portrayed as a temperamental, irascible hermit, occasionally drunk and often found in the company of young boys--a man who tended to forget and forgo the tenets found in the Bible he kept with him always. And the powerful and popular Cardinal Manning, who came within a hair's breadth of succeeding Pope Pius IX, belonged, Strachey writes, "to that class of eminent ecclesiastics ... who have been distinguished less for saintliness and learning than for practical ability."

As he offered up indelible sketches of his less-than-fab four, Strachey was intent on critiquing established mores. This effortlessly superior wit knew full well that deep convictions and good deeds often go hand in hand with hypocrisy, arrogance, and egomania. His task was to pique those who pretended they did not. --Jordana Moskowitz

From the Publisher:

9 1.5-hour cassettes

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.