Eminent Victorians Paperback – March 25, 2017

Strachey writes like he was there next to his subjects. So full of interesting historical information.Today, every one of these stories could be turned into a masterpiece theater film. He's already written the screen- plays! It was hard for me to put down this paperback as he blends the events of the lives of his subjects in his beautifully conversational style. I'm a new fan!

Strachey needles the hypocrisy of the self-serving Victorian establishment with elegance and wit. Manning disguises personal ambition as piety. Nightingale's reforms are loathed by bureaucrats so they turn her into a pallid angel. Arnold the great educationalist is an anti-intellectual sadist. Gordon is a lunatic whose idiocies are redefined as heroism by imperialist populism back in Britain. 'Eminent Victorians' has become a modern book, as another generation of conservatives invokes religion, heroism, patriotism and family values to justify stupid decisions.

It is the FUNNIEST book that I have read. I laughed so much that my dogs were started.I adore the style and cheekiness of Lytton Strachey! The best essay -- among the best -- is, of course, that of the hat (Cardinal)!

I began to read "Eminent Victorians" several decades ago and was bored by what seemed to me its stilted language. Being an admirer of the writings of Virginia Woolf who was a friend of his I kept reading about him. I read a wonderful biography about him (and his life with the painter Dora Carrington) which gave me a renewed appreciation for his wit and erudition.(Their story, for her a tragic love story, has been made into a great film.) I then started to reread Strachey and found him hilarious, deflating the "great" with a withering sneer of beautifully arranged words, exposing the petty ways we all can be too human, yes,even these eminent Victorians. Wanna see a guy pull wings off butterflies? No. Wanna see how it's done on paper? Read Lytton Strachey.

Publication date: 1918One certainly recognizes, even today, the tradition Strachey sought to undermine in these four Lives:... Those two fat volumes, with which it is our custom to commemorate the dead—who does not know them, with their ill-digested masses of material, their slipshod style, their tone of tedious panegyric, their lamentable lack of selection, of detachment, of design? They are as familiar as the cortege of the undertaker, and wear the same air of slow, funereal barbarism. One is tempted to suppose, of some of them, that they were composed by that functionary as the final item of his job.How many lessons are to be learned from them! But it is hardly necessary to particularise. To preserve, for instance, a becoming brevity— a brevity which excludes everything that is redundant and nothing that is significant— that, surely, is the first duty of the biographer. The second, no less surely, is to maintain his own freedom of spirit. It is not his business to be complimentary; it is his business to lay bare the facts of the case, as he understands them. That is what I have aimed at in this book— to lay bare the facts of some cases, as I understand them, dispassionately, impartially, and without ulterior intentions.(Call me naive, but I thought Strachey meant what he says here.. but his claim to impartiality, and to lay bare the facts are just irony. Strachey had an ax to grind, and would not scruple to omit a joke or two merely because he had made them up himself:)He collected quotations, and began to translate the works of Optatus for Dr. Pusey. He wrote an article on Justin for the British Critic, "Newman's Magazine". He published a sermon on Faith, with notes and appendices, which was condemned by an evangelical bishop, and fiercely attacked by no less a person than the celebrated Mr. Bowdler. 'The sermon,' said Mr Bowdler, in a book which he devoted to the subject, 'was bad enough, but the appendix was abominable.'My first impression was that of these four Victorians, only "Doctor Arnold" seems to be as ridiculous as Strachey thinks, but this turns out to have been because Strachey hated Arnold so much (or at least hated public school so much) that he refused to make that Life anything but a fable. As another reviewer says, Manning, Nightingale, and Gordon come off as quite heroic in spite of Strachey's sneering. Indeed, I could recommend "The Last of General Gordon" to anyone, especially to anyone who might find the first three Lives a little boring. The rise of the Mahdi and the fall of Khartoum will strike a contemporary with the shock of recognition.

A fascinating study of eccentric personality as only England manages to produce them. Strachey's psychological portrait of Florence Nightingale, alone, is worth the price of admission here.

I hadn't heard of Lytton Strachey until I stumbled across the movie "Carrington." I'm loving his writing. Witty, wry, compelling, and a whole new view of those times and people. Recommended.

Lytton Stratchey was a master. So this was masterful. I don't why so many have said that this was sarcastic and nasty towards his subjects. Certainly Cardinal Manning and Florence Nightingale came out of it well.

I love the way Lytton Strachey writes - he is one of my favourite authors now. Thank God I discovered him through Michael Holroyd. It's a pity his output was so small but he died young. Here he debunks Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Dr Arnold & General Gordon of Khartoum - all of whom were somewhat idolised by the Victorian public. I think he did have some personal connection with all of them so not completely picked out of the air. All of them slightly controversial figures of whom to this day you're not quite sure what to believe. As with his biography of Queen Victoria (also on my Profile page) he manages to spin out things you didn't know and make each character more interesting. I thought the best one on Cardinal Manning. He uses some quite old-fashioned vocabulary but that doesn't matter. Onto The Greville Memoirs now.

The title sounds stuffy or grossly satiric - it is neither. Strachey shares with his reader an authentic interest in his four subjects and brings them to life with novelistic vigour but historical truth. He writes as if Saki had found a serious subject or as if Oscar Wilde had managed to lose his egocentricity - clear, witty, elegant, precise, lucid and with a surprising emotional range as well as delightful touches of humour. I found the portrait of Florence Nightingale particularly moving as she is a figure we imagine we already know everything about but Strachey's account left me with a greater and more complex respect for the woman and her achievements. A classic of its kind which should appeal to all lovers of written English at its best.

Lytton Stracheys series of short lives of Victorians is a most readable and beautifully written book. My particular favourite 'life' is of Cardinal Manning. He easily creates the hothouse world of Victorian religion with its conflicts between evangelicals and anglo catholics and conveys the stresses of that time in wonderful prose. He is no great admirer of Manning and carefully contrasts his subject with the saintly Cardinal Newman and he exploits the differences in their tempraments and outlook to the great disadvantage of Manning. Manning was a man of his time and Newman a man of vision and conflict between the two was inevitable. I have no doubt that Manning was as ambitious for preferment as is here described and I am sure that he could be a difficult character but it cannot be doubted that his tireless work for the London poor, for education and social justice was at the forefront of his mind. This is only dimly glimpsed in this book. Perhaps Manning is not the most inspiring chracter for us to look back on but this account of his life and times , though written in a compelling style which maintains attention to the end, is strongly biased to the point of being unfair and unjust. A good read nevertheless

I believe that biographies before and after Eminent Victorians are fundamentally different,and that this work brought about a paradigm shift in the assumptions later biographers brought to their labours.Psychological insight and examination of motives became much more important to all serious future biographers,indeed, those who do not probe sufficiently deeply into their subjects are often said to have produced mere hagiography.I cannot commend this book too highly,although it's sheer density does not make for an easy read. Eminent VictoriansEminent Victorians

I started by reading the preface or foreword (I forget which it is called) and nearly gave up - it is dense off-putting prose - but moved on to the first biography (Cardinal Manning but as much about Newman) and found it so much more readable with wry comments that bring on a laugh. The same with Florence Nightingale and the War Office of the time, and perhaps today, and Dr Arnold who seemed too good to be true. Haven't done Gordon yet but am looking forward to it.Don't be put off by the preface! This is a very readable book and a good addition to my KIndle. Biography hasn't been the same since this book was written - no more hagiography - with enough laughs to make it a holiday read.