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Back 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 Henry Edward Manning: Manning was an eminent Church of England deacon who eventually made a high-profile conversion to Catholicism and became an even more eminent Archbishop. This section is quite long and probably the most dense, and intensely focused on Victorian religious politics -- I had always thought of the Victorian era as one in which the Anglican church was more or less settled and stodgy compared with the tumults of previous bits of history, but Strachey is very witty about the drawn-out agonies of serious religious thinkers attempting once again to grapple with the fact that their version of Protestantism had its origins as Catholicism in a hat that said "HENRY VIII CAN GET DIVORCED NOW" -- and ends with a focus on Cardinal Manning's one-sided religious work rivalry with John Henry Newman, whom Strachey clearly likes quite a bit more, and presents as a naive but sincere figure in contrast to Manning's ambition.
Florence Nightingale: the popular conception of Florence Nightingale appears to have been much the same then as it is now, "kindly nursing saint," and what Strachey wants you to understand is that Nightingale was neither kindly nor a saint, but in fact much more impactful and effective and also much dreamier than previously supposed:
she struck the casual observer simply as the pattern of a perfect lady; but the keener eye perceived something more than that -- the serenity of high deliberation in the scope of the capacious brow, the sign of power in the dominating curve of the thin nose, and the traces of a harsh and dangerous temper -- something peevish, something mocking, and yet something precise -- i the small and delicate mouth
And here's one about Sidney Herbert, whom Strachey more or less thinks that Florence Nightingale worked to death in her relentless mission to overhaul modern medicine and that this was very sexy of her:
Ah! Why had he ever known Miss Nightingale? If Lord Panmure was a bison, Sidney Herbert, no doubt, was a stag—a comely, gallant creature springing through the forest; but the forest is a dangerous place. One has the image of those wide eyes fascinated suddenly by something feline, something strong; there is a pause; and then the tigress has her claws in the quivering haunches; and then—!
One more, my actual favorite quote:
Yet her conception of God was certainly not orthodox. She felt towards Him as she might have felt towards a glorified sanitary engineer; and in some of her speculations she seems hardly to distinguish between the Deity and the Drains. As one turns over these singular pages, one has the impression that Miss Nightingale has got the Almighty too into her clutches, and that, if He is not careful, she will kill Him with overwork.
This is not as overtly sexy to the others, but it is sexy to me ... go ahead, Florence! Kill God with overwork!! Do it!!
Dr. Thomas Arnold: Dr. Arnold was headmaster of a public school and instituted a lot of quote-unquote reforms that served as the pattern for other public schools throughout the Victorian era, such as emphasizing sports, diminishing the sciences in favor of Christian moral philosophy, and setting up the prefect system in which the oldest boys had more or less absolute power over all the younger ones. This is the shortest section since Dr. Arnold had by far the most boring personal life of the lot, and Strachey is mostly using it as a way to explain how bad all of his ideas were for education, which they were.
General Charles George Gordon: ending with a bang, General Gordon was a British army officer who died very dramatically trying to hold Khartoum in Sudan during the Mahdist War; this is particularly notable because he was sent to Sudan to do the exact opposite and evacuate all British forces from the area, so his fatal last stand was preceded by several months of the entire British government screaming at him to please not to do a fatal last stand. This whole section has a larger-than-life Shakespearian-tragedy fascination to it, and Strachey also clearly thinks Gordon was a bit sexy, in an obsessive and terrible, Ahab-ish way -- a bad idea for himself and everyone around him, but also a real life human who in real life said things like "When God was portioning out fear to all the people in the world, at last it came to my turn, and there was no fear left to give me. Go, tell all the people in Khartoum that Gordon fears nothing, for God has created him without fear."
Now, Gordon spent his entire career killing people in unjustifiable Imperialist wars, and in the end his involvement in the Sudan situation almost certainly made everything worse and caused more suffering than if he'd never been. But I'll say this for him: he does seem to have genuinely been motivated by a desire to protect the people of Khartoum from the consequences of British greed and apathy, and one gets at least a glimmer of awareness of the fact that all the foreign policy in which he'd spent his life participating was deeply fucked up:
"What a contradiction is life! I hate Her Majesty's Government for their leaving the Sudan after having caused all its troubles; yet I believe our Lord rules heaven and earth, so I ought to hate Him, which I (sincerely) do not."
Anyway here is one of my other favorite quotes from this section, Strachey's description of Gordon sending a stream of incomprehensible despairiing telegrams to Sir Evelyn Baring, his sort-of-supervisor in the Sudan situation and the person who probably most emphatically did not want him there:
There upon the table, the whole soul of Gordon lay before him -- in its incoherence, its eccentricity, its impulsiveness, its romance; the jokes, the slang, the appeals to the prophet Isaiah, the whirl of contradictory policies -- Sir Evelyn Baring did not know which exasperated him most. He would not consider, to what degree, the man was a maniac; no he would not. A subacid smile was the only comment he allowed himself.
Would genuinely love to read Strachey's shelved RPF drawerfic, Evelyn Baring/Gordon Graham, enemies to lovers, 75K.
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 Henry Edward Manning: Manning was an eminent Church of England deacon who eventually made a high-profile conversion to Catholicism and became an even more eminent Archbishop. This section is quite long and probably the most dense, and intensely focused on Victorian religious politics -- I had always thought of the Victorian era as one in which the Anglican church was more or less settled and stodgy compared with the tumults of previous bits of history, but Strachey is very witty about the drawn-out agonies of serious religious thinkers attempting once again to grapple with the fact that their version of Protestantism had its origins as Catholicism in a hat that said "HENRY VIII CAN GET DIVORCED NOW" -- and ends with a focus on Cardinal Manning's one-sided religious work rivalry with John Henry Newman, whom Strachey clearly likes quite a bit more, and presents as a naive but sincere figure in contrast to Manning's ambition.
Florence Nightingale: the popular conception of Florence Nightingale appears to have been much the same then as it is now, "kindly nursing saint," and what Strachey wants you to understand is that Nightingale was neither kindly nor a saint, but in fact much more impactful and effective and also much dreamier than previously supposed:
she struck the casual observer simply as the pattern of a perfect lady; but the keener eye perceived something more than that -- the serenity of high deliberation in the scope of the capacious brow, the sign of power in the dominating curve of the thin nose, and the traces of a harsh and dangerous temper -- something peevish, something mocking, and yet something precise -- i the small and delicate mouth
And here's one about Sidney Herbert, whom Strachey more or less thinks that Florence Nightingale worked to death in her relentless mission to overhaul modern medicine and that this was very sexy of her:
Ah! Why had he ever known Miss Nightingale? If Lord Panmure was a bison, Sidney Herbert, no doubt, was a stag—a comely, gallant creature springing through the forest; but the forest is a dangerous place. One has the image of those wide eyes fascinated suddenly by something feline, something strong; there is a pause; and then the tigress has her claws in the quivering haunches; and then—!
One more, my actual favorite quote:
Yet her conception of God was certainly not orthodox. She felt towards Him as she might have felt towards a glorified sanitary engineer; and in some of her speculations she seems hardly to distinguish between the Deity and the Drains. As one turns over these singular pages, one has the impression that Miss Nightingale has got the Almighty too into her clutches, and that, if He is not careful, she will kill Him with overwork.
This is not as overtly sexy to the others, but it is sexy to me ... go ahead, Florence! Kill God with overwork!! Do it!!
Dr. Thomas Arnold: Dr. Arnold was headmaster of a public school and instituted a lot of quote-unquote reforms that served as the pattern for other public schools throughout the Victorian era, such as emphasizing sports, diminishing the sciences in favor of Christian moral philosophy, and setting up the prefect system in which the oldest boys had more or less absolute power over all the younger ones. This is the shortest section since Dr. Arnold had by far the most boring personal life of the lot, and Strachey is mostly using it as a way to explain how bad all of his ideas were for education, which they were.
General Charles George Gordon: ending with a bang, General Gordon was a British army officer who died very dramatically trying to hold Khartoum in Sudan during the Mahdist War; this is particularly notable because he was sent to Sudan to do the exact opposite and evacuate all British forces from the area, so his fatal last stand was preceded by several months of the entire British government screaming at him to please not to do a fatal last stand. This whole section has a larger-than-life Shakespearian-tragedy fascination to it, and Strachey also clearly thinks Gordon was a bit sexy, in an obsessive and terrible, Ahab-ish way -- a bad idea for himself and everyone around him, but also a real life human who in real life said things like "When God was portioning out fear to all the people in the world, at last it came to my turn, and there was no fear left to give me. Go, tell all the people in Khartoum that Gordon fears nothing, for God has created him without fear."
Now, Gordon spent his entire career killing people in unjustifiable Imperialist wars, and in the end his involvement in the Sudan situation almost certainly made everything worse and caused more suffering than if he'd never been. But I'll say this for him: he does seem to have genuinely been motivated by a desire to protect the people of Khartoum from the consequences of British greed and apathy, and one gets at least a glimmer of awareness of the fact that all the foreign policy in which he'd spent his life participating was deeply fucked up:
"What a contradiction is life! I hate Her Majesty's Government for their leaving the Sudan after having caused all its troubles; yet I believe our Lord rules heaven and earth, so I ought to hate Him, which I (sincerely) do not."
Anyway here is one of my other favorite quotes from this section, Strachey's description of Gordon sending a stream of incomprehensible despairiing telegrams to Sir Evelyn Baring, his sort-of-supervisor in the Sudan situation and the person who probably most emphatically did not want him there:
There upon the table, the whole soul of Gordon lay before him -- in its incoherence, its eccentricity, its impulsiveness, its romance; the jokes, the slang, the appeals to the prophet Isaiah, the whirl of contradictory policies -- Sir Evelyn Baring did not know which exasperated him most. He would not consider, to what degree, the man was a maniac; no he would not. A subacid smile was the only comment he allowed himself.
Would genuinely love to read Strachey's shelved RPF drawerfic, Evelyn Baring/Gordon Graham, enemies to lovers, 75K.
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.
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2. Gordon... wait, that Gordon of Khartoum? He... had issues.
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He and Dora Carrington also had an epic self-destructive-for-her "if only you were a boy" thing where he pushed her to marry and made out with her boyfriends/husbands, while she lived with him and kept house. Even after she dumped one husband, Strachey called his new squeeze (Frances Partridge) in and was like, You do understand Ralph and I will still be close won't you? &c &c. (I am very fond of Carrington and don't much like Lytton.)
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"He had issues" DEFINITELY also comes through in the text.