In the Library
Eminent Victorians
Lytton Strachey, 1918
- Form
- Form Essay
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 7 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 18
- Length
- Length 97k words
£1.99
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The history of the Victorian Age will never be written; we know too much about it.
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If you like this, try
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Virginia Woolf
Orlando does the same thing to biography itself, but trades Strachey's deflating wit for pure fantasy, following one restless life across four centuries and two sexes.
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The Way of All Flesh
Samuel Butler
Way of All Flesh does the same demolition of Victorian piety, but works from inside one suffocating clerical family instead of four public careers.
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Zuleika Dobson
Max Beerbohm
Zuleika Dobson does the same thing to English institutions, but trades Strachey's cardinals and generals for an Oxford undone entirely by beauty.
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About the book
Dr Arnold of Rugby, the great moral engine of English schooling, is dispatched in half a clause: his legs, Strachey notes, were shorter than they should have been. Four lives, four idols, and a scalpel so courteous you barely feel it go in. Cardinal Manning climbing toward the red hat over the bodies of his friends. Florence Nightingale not the soft Lady with the Lamp but a woman possessed by a demon, exhausting cabinet ministers and working her closest ally into an early grave. General Gordon alone at Khartoum with his Bible, his brandy, and his terrible certainty. Strachey wrote all this while a generation was being killed in France, and the irony is never cruelty for its own sake: he is plainly in love with the absurd, unmanageable people he finds under the marble. English biography had been a kind of undertaking before him and became an art afterwards. No one since has been quite so wicked, or so exquisitely well mannered about it.