# Eminent Victorians

consists of biographies of four leading figures from the Victorian era. Its fame rests on the irreverence and wit Strachey brought to bear on three men and a woman who had till then been regarded as heroes and heroine. The book made Strachey's name and placed him firmly in the top rank of biographers, where he remains.
EMINENT VICTORIANS
CARDINAL MANNING - FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE
DR. ARNOLD - GENERAL GORDON
BY
LYTTON STRACHEY
LONDON CHATTO & WINDUS 1918
First published . . May 9, 1918. Second Impression . May, 1918, Third Impression . July, 1918.
PRINTED IN ENGLAND BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED LONDON AND BECCLES
All rights reserved
TO
H. T. J. N.
PREFACE
The history of the Victorian Age will never be written: we know too much about it. For ignorance is the first requisite of the historian—ignorance, which simplifies and clarifies, which selects and omits, with a placid perfection unattainable by the highest art. Concerning the Age which has just passed, our fathers and our grandfathers have poured forth and accumulated so vast a quantity of information that the industry of a Ranke would be submerged by it, and the perspicacity of a Gibbon would quail before it. It is not by the direct method of a scrupulous narration that the explorer of the past can hope to depict that singular epoch. If he is wise, he will adopt a subtler strategy. He will attack his subject in unexpected places; he will fall upon the flank, or the rear; he will shoot a sudden, revealing searchlight into obscure recesses, hitherto undivined. He will row out over that great ocean of material, and lower down into it, here and there, a little bucket, which will bring up to the light of day some characteristic specimen, from those far depths, to be examined with a careful curiosity. Guided by these considerations, I have written the ensuing studies. I have attempted, through the medium of biography, to present some Victorian visions to the modern eye. They are, in one sense, haphazard visions—that is to say, my choice of subjects has been determined by no desire to construct a system or to prove a theory, but by simple motives of convenience and of art. It has been my purpose to illustrate rather than to explain. It would have been futile to hope to tell even ​a précis of the truth about the Victorian age, for the shortest précis must fill innumerable volumes. But, in the lives of an ecclesiastic, an educational authority, a woman of action, and a man of adventure, I have sought to examine and elucidate certain fragments of the truth which took my fancy and lay to my hand.
I hope, however, that the following pages may prove to be of interest from the strictly biographical no less than from the historical point of view. Human beings are too important to be treated as mere symptoms of the past. They have a value which is independent of any temporal processes—which is eternal, and must be felt for its own sake. The art of biography seems to have fallen on evil times in England. We have had, it is true, a few masterpieces, but we have never had, like the French, a great biographical tradition; we have had no Fontenelles and Condorcets, with their incomparable éloges, compressing into a few shining pages the manifold existences of men. With us, the most delicate and humane of all the branches of the art of writing has been relegated to the journeymen of letters; we do not reflect that it is perhaps as difficult to write a good life as to live one. 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 cortège 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. The studies in this book are indebted, in more ways than one, to such works—works which certainly deserve the name of Standard Biographies. For they have provided me not only with much indispensable information, but with something even more precious—an example. How many lessons are to be learnt 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. To quote the words of a Master—"Je n'impose rien; je ne propose rien: j'expose."
A list of the principal sources from which I have drawn is appended to each Biography. I would indicate, as an honourable exception to the current commodity, Sir Edward Cook's excellent "Life of Florence Nightingale," without which my own study, though composed on a very different scale and from a decidedly different angle, could not have been written.
CONTENTS
| | PAGE |
| CARDINAL MANNING | 1 |
| FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE | 117 |
| DR. ARNOLD | 181 |
| THE END OF GENERAL GORDON | 215 |
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
| | | page |
| CARDINAL MANNING | Frontispiece |
| JOHN HENRY NEWMAN | facing | 68 |
| Reproduced from Ward's Life of Newman, by kind permission of Messrs. Longmans, Green & Co. |
| FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE | facing | 119 |
| Reproduced from a photograph, by kind permission of the owner. |
| DR. ARNOLD | facing | 183 |
| Reproduced from a stock engraving in Stanley's Life of Arnold, by kind permission of Mr. John Murray. |
| GENERAL GORDON | facing | 217 |
| MR. GLADSTONE | facing | 272 |
| Reproduced from Gladstone's Correspondence on Church and Religion, edited by D. C. Lathbury, by kind permission of Mr. John Murray. |
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1929.
The longest-living author of this work died in 1932, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 91 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
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