Rereadings Eminent Victorians By Lytton Strachey Essay

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A string quartet in four movementsIn 1912, Lytton Strachey, who was living on his occasional journalism (chiefly for his cousin St Loe Strachey’s Spectator), and amusing himself and his Bloomsbury friends by writing plays and verse, got the idea for the book that would become Eminent Victorians.He had decided, finally, to leave Hampstead (which though part of London, was inconveniently distant from theatres, concert halls and restaurants) and live in the country, so he accepted his fellow-Cambridge apostle Harry Norton’s longstanding offer of a loan of Ј100. Influenced by his confidante Lady Ottoline Morrell, who had moved to a small farmhouse at Churn, Strachey found a similar house, The Chestnuts, in the village of East Isley, on the edge of the Berkshire Downs. He took it for three months in the autumn.While finishing an 8,000-word essay on Madame du Deffand for the Edinburgh Review, he was inspired to write a book, then called Victorian Silhouettes, which would contain a dozen miniature lives of Victorian notables. Some, whom he expected to treat favourably, were men of learning; all the rest were people whom he did not admire as much as did popular opinion. The list included the four who made it through to the finals: Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale (he had been offered the chance to write her official biography), Thomas Arnold and General Gordon.The also-rans were Henry Sidgwick, the last truly great Cambridge philosopher to be troubled by religious doubts; GF Watts, the fine portrait painter who was better known for his sickly narrative paintings and was briefly married to the actress Ellen Terry; the eighth Duke of Devonshire, who was to figure (as Lord Hartington) as a comic butt in the final piece on Gordon; Charles Darwin; John Stuart Mill; Benjamin Jowett, the broad church master of Balliol, famous for his translations of Plato and for having the young AC Swinburne as his guest in the master’s lodgings; Carlyle; and Lord Dalhousie, the “greatest of Indian proconsuls”, who was responsible for much of the infrastructure of modern India.To Virginia Woolf he wrote (on November 8 1912) that their Victorian predecessors “seem to me a set of mouth bungled hypocrites”, but allowed that they could be said to have a “baroque charm about them which will be discovered by our great-great grandchildren”.He began by researching Cardinal Manning – he thought the many volumes of theology and ecclesiastical history with which he surrounded himself might cause his landlady to think he was contemplating going into the church, he joked in a letter to Lady Ottoline. It was this research, and the intractability of the subject, that made him realise that he could not possibly do all 12 subjects.The next year he moved to The Lacket, a cottage in Wiltshire. He had some of Harry Norton’s Ј100 left, and his mother topped it up with a further Ј100. He stayed there until the end of 1915 and wrote half the book. But now the war, and his anti-war, anti-conscription activities took up his time and changed his views. The Victorian worthies had not just been hypocrites, they had bequeathed to Strachey’s generation the whole “profoundly evil” system “by which it is sought to settle international disputes by force”. Strachey, however, was not a pacifist. Indeed, he risked being conscripted by insisting to the Hampstead tribunal that he was not against all wars, and sought exemption from this war on political, not religious or moral grounds.The summer of 1917 found Strachey paying a series of visits to friends, especially to the Woolfs at Asheham, near Rodmell in Sussex, and to Charleston, the house Vanessa Bell had taken to enable Duncan Grant and David Garnett to do alternative war service by working on the land. It was Strachey’s practice on these excursions to read the latest version of his four biographies to his friends, seeking both encouragement and criticism.By the end of 1917 he had spent five years researching and writing the book, which was ready for the press – he had been tempted to add a fifth life, of the ecclesiastical historian Mandell Creighton, and flirted briefly again with Watts. But he saw, says his biographer Michael Holroyd, that these four pen portraits corresponded to the movements of a symphony, or perhaps more appropriately to the more intimate pattern of a string quartet: Cardinal Manning – allegro vivace; Florence Nightingale – andante; Dr Arnold – scherzo; The End of General Gordon – rondo.In 1914, Strachey had had a couple of lunches with publishers, but the negotiations failed. His only previous published book was Landmarks in French Literature, first published in an inexpensive edition by the Home University Library in 1912. This time the financial aspect was important to him, as he had very little income and considerable debts.Clive Bell introduced Strachey to his editor at Chatto, Geoffrey Whitworth, who read the typescript, and passed it to his colleague, the novelist and critic Frank Swinnerton. He began reading in his office just before Christmas 1917. The first few pages, he wrote, were so enchanting that, “I continued, and when night fell I could not leave the book, but took it carefully home… I had hardly taken the typescript up again after dinner when… there was an air raid by Germans. The whirring of aeroplanes overhead, the rattle of machine-gun fire, and finally the frightful thunder of a gun in the field at the bottom of our garden, would all have served to distract a mind less happily engaged; but as it was, with curtain closely drawn to prevent the escape of light, I consorted that evening with Cardinal Manning, Thomas Arnold, Florence Nightingale, and General Gordon. The 19th century had come alive again.”Though Strachey was a cult-figure to Cambridge undergraduates before and after the war, his fame had not spread to London publishing circles. Early in 1918, Strachey called at the offices and finally met his publisher-to-be. Swinnerton penned a detailed, lively portrait of his new author: “His excessive thinness, almost emaciation, caused him to appear endless. He had a rather bulbous nose, the spectacles of a British Museum bookworm, a large and straggly dark brown beard (with a curious rufous tinge); no voice at all. He drooped if he stood upright, and sagged if he sat down. He seemed entirely without vitality… Sad merriment was in his eye, and about him a perpetual air of sickness and debility.”Pleased though he was by his publisher’s praise, Strachey began to suffer pre-publication nerves. He had doubts about his style and tone, and continued to read portions of his work aloud whenever he had a suitable audience. Virginia Woolf thought he was “painfully anxious”, and suspected “that he is now inclined to question whether Eminent Victorians, 4 in number, & requiring 4 years for their production, are quite enough to show for his age and pretensions”.But she wrote reassuringly to Strachey, who had sent her the final section on The End of General Gordon: “It’s amazing how from all these complications, you contrive to reel off such a straight and dashing story, and how you weave in every scrap – my God, what scraps – of interest to be had, like (you must pardon one metaphor) a snake insinuating himself through innumerable golden rings… I don’t see how the skill could be carried further.”Strachey overstepped the mark, however, when he asked her to review it. She first tried to get out of it by saying she didn’t like the idea of working “under surveillance”, then told him that Bruce Richmond, editor of the TLS, “has to make it a rule that reviewers don’t review their friends”.Strachey was enjoying the business of being published. He swanked to Lady Ottoline that “my life passes almost entirely among proof sheets, which now flow in upon me daily. It is rather exciting but also rather harassing. All sorts of tiresome details, and minor crises – about covers, illustrations, contracts, and so on – keep turning up; but my hope is that in about six weeks or so Eminent Victorians will burst upon an astonished world.”Strachey was still committed to leftwing activities – he was writing a good deal, including political reviews for War and Peace, then being edited by Leonard Woolf. When in London that winter he attended whenever possible Bertrand Russell’s trial for writing an article that advocated acceptance of a German offer of peace.It was while serving his sentence in Brixton prison that the philosopher read Eminent Victorians, which “caused me to laugh so loud that the officer came to my cell, saying I must remember that prison is a place of punishment”. Eminent Victorians had, says Holroyd, begun “without a thesis, but acquired a theme” because of the war. Sigmund Freud, surely correctly, thought that the whole work comprised a treatise against religion.At the time of writing Eminent Victorians, the country was more than usually certain that God was on its side. In 1915, the then Bishop of London went so far as to say that “this is the greatest fight ever made for the Christian religion”. Eminent Victorians was Strachey’s counter-assault.On May 9 1918, the book was published. The reviews were almost uniformly enthusiastic. Chatto had published it at the price of 10/6 (equivalent to about Ј12 today). The terms were an advance against royalties of Ј50, a royalty of 15% on the first 1,000 copies and 20% thereafter. By February 1920 there had been nine printings of 1,000 copies each; in the summer of the next year, Chatto brought out a second edition with a print-run of 5,000.The standard historian’s complaint with the work has been that Strachey used only secondary sources, consulted no unpublished sources, and gave no references. Moreover, scholars have made specific complaints about the sources he did use. Modern scholarship holds that some of these objections are well-founded, others less so. But these are matters for specialists, providing them with gainful employment, and do not much affect the present-day reader’s enjoyment of the book.The great American critic Edmund Wilson tackled the question of Strachey’s legacy, writing in the New Republic of 21 September, 1932, not long after Strachey’s death: “Lytton Strachey’s chief mission, of course, was to take down once and for all the pretensions of the Victorian age to moral superiority… neither the Americans nor the English have ever, since Eminent Victorians appeared, been able to feel quite the same about the legends that had dominated their pasts. Something had been punctured for good.”And, he might have added, the form of biography had been changed for ever. Strachey gave posterity a licence to experiment.· This is an edited version of the introduction to a new edition of Eminent Victorians published this month by Continuum