Eminent Victorians
by Lytton Strachey
1918
This book includes the biographies of four prominent personalities of the Victorian Era: Cardinal Manning, an ecclesiastic, Florence Nightingale, a woman of action, Dr. Thomas Arnold, an educational authority, and General Gordon, a man of adventure.
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The stories of each these individuals combine to give us a peek into parts of the Victorian Era, itself.
Cardinal Henry Edward Manning (1808-1892), among many accomplishements and accolades, was instrumental in the evolution of the modern Catholic Church, and other doctrines.
Florence Nightingale (1820-1910) was a leading advocate for improved medical care for the poor and indigant, and is best known for her work in treating the sick and wounded on the battlefield, and fighting for ever improving conditions. This biography is an eye opener; this lady was a very tough and effective fighter who devoted her life to her cause. This is a must read.
Dr. Thomas Arnold (1795-1842) was responsible for many changes in the then existing educational system. He introduced many inovations into the existing cirrculum. Mathematics, modern languages, and modern history were added to the otherwise traditionally classic curriculum. He instituted the monitorial system, and encouraged the idea of independent thought.
General Charles Gordon (1833-1884) was a military hero who was famous for his exploits in China, and, later his ill-fated defense of Khartoum against Sudanese rebels, where he has killed.
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PREFACE to Eminent Victorians
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 grand-fathers 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 precis of the truth about the Victorian age, for the shortest precis 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 master-pieces, but we have never had, like the French, a great biographical tradition; we have had no Fontenelles and Condorcets, with their incomparable eloges, 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 cortege of the under-taker, 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 be-coming 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."
Lytton Strachey
End of Preface
