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Eminent Victorians

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Overview

When it was published in 1918, EMINENT VICTORIANS became one of the first books to take apart the heroes of an earlier era.

Editorial Reviews

An illustrated edition of the classic, with numerous paintings, drawings, and photographs of the Victorian era enhancing the text.-- MR -- PUBLISHERS WEEKLY.

Author Information

Bio of Lytton Strachey

Giles Lytton Strachey, whose iconoclastic reexaminations of historical figures changed forever the course of modern biographical writing, was born in London on March 1, 1880, the eleventh child of a distinguished upper-class family. His father was an elderly lieutenant-general in the army who had spent much of his career in India. Strachey's upbringing was supervised primarily by his mother, a strong-willed young Scotswoman well versed in English and French literature. He was educated in a series of private schools and attended University College, Liverpool, before entering Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1899. A member of the secret Cambridge Conversazione Society, better known as the Apostles, he made lasting friendships with Clive Bell, Leonard Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, and other intellectuals who rejected Victorian mores and later formed the core of the illustrious Bloomsbury group. Thwarted in his attempts to pursue an academic career, Strachey returned to London in 1905. There he found work as an essayist for various journals and became drama critic for The Spectator. The favorable reception of his first book, Landmarks in French Literature (1912), bolstered his commitment to writing. Strachey's next work, Eminent Victorians (1918), caused a succ's de scandale, establishing him as a leader of the reaction against the Victorians that followed World War I. "Lytton Strachey's chief mission . . . was to take down once and for all the pretensions of the Victorian Age to moral superiority," noted Edmund Wilson. "In Eminent Victorians he stripped forever of their solemn upholstery the religion, the education, the statesmanship and the philanthropy of the society which had brought it about." His biographer Michael Holroyd agreed: "Evangelism, liberalism, humanitarianism, education, imperialism these were Strachey's targets: and he struck them beautifully." Cyril Connolly deemed it "the work of a great anarch, a revolutionary textbook on bourgeois society," and it is reported that Bertrand Russell laughed out loud while reading Eminent Victorians during his imprisonment for antiwar activities.

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Additional Info

Imprint

Modern Library

Filesize

706.39 KB

Number of Pages

336

eBook ISBN

9780679640158

Excerpt from: Eminent Victorians by Lytton Strachey

Henry Edward Manning was born in 1807 and died in 1892. His life was extraordinary in many ways, but its interest for the modern inquirer depends mainly upon two considerations--the light which his career throws upon the spirit of his age, and the psychological problems suggested by his inner history. He belonged to that class of eminent ecclesiastics--and it is by no means a small class--who have been distinguished less for saintliness and learning than for practical ability. Had he lived in the Middle Ages he would certainly have been neither a Francis nor an Aquinas, but he might have been an Innocent. As it was, born in the England of the Nineteenth Century, growing up in the very seed-time of modern progress, coming to maturity with the first onrush of Liberalism, and living long enough to witness the victories of Science and Democracy, he yet, by a strange concatenation of circumstances, seemed almost to revive in his own person that long line of diplomatic and administrative clerics which, one would have thought, had come to an end with Cardinal Wolsey. In Manning, so it appeared, the Middle Ages lived again. The tall gaunt figure, with the face of smiling asceticism, the robes, and the biretta, as it passed in triumph from High Mass at the Oratory to philanthropic gatherings at Exeter Hall, from Strike Committees at the Docks to Mayfair drawing-rooms where fashionable ladies knelt to the Prince of the Church, certainly bore witness to a singular condition of affairs. What had happened? Had a dominating character imposed itself upon a hostile environment? Or was the Nineteenth Century, after all, not so hostile? Was there something in it, scientific and progressive as it was, which went out to welcome the representative of ancient tradition and uncompromising faith? Had it perhaps, a place in its heart for such as Manning--a soft place, one might almost say? Or, on the other hand, was it he who had been supple and yielding? he who had won by art what he would never have won by force, and who had managed, so to speak, to be one of the leaders of the procession less through merit than through a superior faculty for gliding adroitly to the front rank? And, in any case, by what odd chances, what shifts and struggles, what combinations of circumstance and character had this old man come to be where he was? Such questions are easier to ask than to answer; but it may be instructive, and even amusing, to look a little more closely into the complexities of so curious a story.