Rereadings Eminent Victorians By Lytton Strachey Essay

Rereadings: Eminent Victorians By Lytton Strachey Essay, Research Paper

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 £100. 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 £100 left, and his mother topped it up with a further £100. 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 fr