skygiants

Strachey is very very funny! One of my favourite Bloomsbury anecdotes is when Bertrand Russell was reading the book in prison and supposedly laughed so loudly the warder chastised him that nobody was supposed to enjoy himself in prison that much.

Eminent Victorians led on to Queen Victoria and both made him rich and famous -- EV is fascinating as a post-WWI book, because he's deliberately blowing up so much of the English hierarchy -- the Church/religious morality (Manning), the war effort and the military (Nightingale, Gordon) and even the public school system (Arnold). And it's one of the first great British works seriously influenced by Freud IIRC -- I don't think his brother James had gone to Vienna or even begun translating Freud when the book was published, but Strachey's use of emotions and unconscious drives to explain actions of public figures is def post-Freudian. But there's love in it too, not just revenge and censure. I think he def influenced Virginia Woolf's view of the Victorian past, of which her parents were pillars (Julia Woolf, her mother, absolutely wore herself out ministering to the poor and sick). It's one of those books where it feels impossible to know what the current audience or the generation before him made of it, it's so influenced our approach to biography and even history in general.

If you ever want more funny Strachey -- his letters, published in one volume I think, are very funny, and even more unbound than his public books.