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May. 30th, 2021 09:15 amBack in early 2020, I happened to view a clip of someone talking about Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians in which they said it was funny, so I got it out of the library.
Then the rest of 2020 happened and for a while I largely lost the ability to read anything that required more than surface levels of attention, so Eminent Victorians sat on my bedside table for about a year before I finally decided I wanted to try getting something else out of the library and so I had probably better give it another try.
It turns out -- surprise! -- Eminent Victorians is very funny! This is a set of novella-length biographies of four leading Victorians who were apparently extremely well-known in 1918, when the book was published; Florence Nightingale is the only one of them who remains in the popular consciousness today. I could not tell you whether that has anything to do with the fact that Lytton Strachey thought she was very mean and hot and competent, as opposed to incredibly embarrassing and a general bad influence on society overall, which is his primary assessment of most of the others.
( Cardinal Manning )
( Florence Nightingale )
( Dr. Arnold )
( General Gordon )
Anyway, the overall impact of the book, as intended, is a decisive evisceration of Victorian society, its petty politics and complacency and hypocrisy; the Nightingale and Gordon sections I think are especially impactful because they focus on people who are at least aware of the human cost of it, and their self-destructive batterings against their respective bureaucratic institutions allow Strachey a chance to express his own deep frustrations with the whole edifice of it through their words and actions, and not just his own satirical remarks.
Then the rest of 2020 happened and for a while I largely lost the ability to read anything that required more than surface levels of attention, so Eminent Victorians sat on my bedside table for about a year before I finally decided I wanted to try getting something else out of the library and so I had probably better give it another try.
It turns out -- surprise! -- Eminent Victorians is very funny! This is a set of novella-length biographies of four leading Victorians who were apparently extremely well-known in 1918, when the book was published; Florence Nightingale is the only one of them who remains in the popular consciousness today. I could not tell you whether that has anything to do with the fact that Lytton Strachey thought she was very mean and hot and competent, as opposed to incredibly embarrassing and a general bad influence on society overall, which is his primary assessment of most of the others.
( Cardinal Manning )
( Florence Nightingale )
( Dr. Arnold )
( General Gordon )
Anyway, the overall impact of the book, as intended, is a decisive evisceration of Victorian society, its petty politics and complacency and hypocrisy; the Nightingale and Gordon sections I think are especially impactful because they focus on people who are at least aware of the human cost of it, and their self-destructive batterings against their respective bureaucratic institutions allow Strachey a chance to express his own deep frustrations with the whole edifice of it through their words and actions, and not just his own satirical remarks.
