The tyro author – Strachey’s only previous book had been a volume of academic criticism – proclaims that the old ways of writing about past lives will no longer do. The Great, it went without saying, were also always Good.įrom the first page of Eminent Victorians it is clear that something is up. These lacunae included but were not limited to homosexuality, bankruptcy, illegitimacy, alcoholism and telling whopping fibs. While every market town and London square had a giant statue of Nelson or Gladstone caught at their most flattering angle, every bookshelf sagged under the weight of a two-volume life that conveyed the most admirable aspects of its subject’s public career and stayed silent on the rest. Prominent men (and the very occasional woman) were memorialised on paper in much the same way as they were materialised in stone.

Over the previous 100 years, roughly the span of the 19th century, biography valued reticence over revelation. And all of them knew for a fact that God was on their side.īiography, for good and for ill, would never be quite the same again.

Gordon drank, “was particularly fond of boys” and slapped his servants Manning had gone over to Rome from the C of E because it offered better job prospects Nightingale was a psychotic bully who ran her saintly helpers ragged while Arnold, in a wonderfully allegorical description, had legs that were slightly too short for his body. With language sharpened to a scalpel, Strachey cut away the fatty layers of celebratory bluster to reveal these heroes of Victorian Britain as deluded narcissists whose achievements depended on the ruthless exploitation of those around them. These four eminences – the founder of modern nursing, the British empire’s most honoured military man, the reforming headmaster of Rugby School and Protestant England’s most prominent Catholic churchman – were simultaneously knocked down, duffed up and left looking slightly ridiculous. Strachey’s subjects, although “targets” might be more accurate, were Florence Nightingale, General Gordon, Thomas Arnold and Cardinal Manning. A hundred years ago, Lytton Strachey published Eminent Victorians, a sequence of four biographical essays whose elegance belied their punkish intent.

Eminent Victorians by Lytton Strachey