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Loading... Eminent Victoriansby Lytton Strachey
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. Strachey's intent is to criticize Victorian England by presenting humorously satirical biographies of the age's heroes. I think he is successful, except in the case of Florence Nightingale, who comes off as a great, brave woman in spite Strachey's revelation of her flaws (which seem to me rather typical of those who achieve great things in spite of huge obstacles). Now I want to read a good biography of Nightingale. (  ) xine2009 | Jun 13, 2009 |  Lytton Strachey published his quartet of biographical sketches in 1918. Witty, irreverent, and not entirely accurate, they're still great fun to read. Strachey picked four heroes of the Victorian age and viciously chronicled their deeds and faults. His sketch of Cardinal Manning contains an examination of the Oxford Movement and a time of renewed religiosity. The following sections give us narratives about Florence Nightingale, Thomas Arnold, and General Gordon. A peculiar piety is shared by all his subjects. Because they were all eminent in their day, their influences and acquaintances sometimes overlapped. The repeated mention of some of the "supporting cast" add to the joy of reading these in order. This is a snapshot of the nineteenth century by a man of the twentieth who, along with his readers, was ready to make a break with the past. ( )1  literarysarah | Feb 4, 2009 | 3561. Eminent Victorians, by Lytton Strachey (read 23 Mar 2002) I had never read this famed 1918 book, though I remember browsing in it in high school. It is on a list of the "Best 100 Nonfiction Books of the 20th Century" (of which I have only read 28 now). The book consists of caustic biographical sketches of Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Dr. Thomas Arnold (father of the matchless poet Matthew Arnold, and immortalized in his great poem, Rugby Chapel ("Coldly, sadly descends/ The autumn-evening. The field / Strewn with its dank yellow drifts/ Of withered leaves, and the elms,/ Fade into dimness apace,/ Silent;--hardly a shout/ From a few boys late at their play!,,,Through the gathering darkness, arise/ The chapel walls, in whose bound/ Thou, my father art laid..."), and General "Chinese" Gordon. Strachey is a cynic, but writes a limpid prose easy to read. (  ) Schmerguls | Nov 19, 2007 | Perhaps more a literary classic than good history. Probably unfair to its subjects, but notoriously clever about saying it. (  ) antiquary | Aug 31, 2007 | A little man's attempts to pull down his betters so as to salve his fragile ego; he fails. Maybe it just me, but what person with half a wit doesn't know everyone is screwed up somehow! This is news to Strachey? I just assume people are screwed up from the git go and then see what they do from there. I'm no Anglophile, but Strachey made Gordon a human character to me, I'm sure that wasn't his intent, just goes to show. (  ) ocianain | Apr 7, 2007 |  no reviews | add a review
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None of Strachey's Victorians emerge unscathed. In his hands, Florence Nightingale is not a gentle archangel descended from heaven to minister sweetly to wounded soldiers, but rather an exacting, dictatorial, and judgmental crusader. Her "pen, in the virulence of its volubility, would rush ... to the denunciation of an incompetent surgeon or the ridicule of a self-sufficient nurse. Her sarcasm searched the ranks of the officials with the deadly and unsparing precision of a machine-gun. Her nicknames were terrible. She respected no one." Dr. Thomas Arnold, the man appointed to revamp the very private British public school system, fares little better: in Strachey's acid ink, he became "the founder of the worship of athletics and the worship of good form." In this same vain, military hero General Gordon is portrayed as a temperamental, irascible hermit, occasionally drunk and often found in the company of young boys--a man who tended to forget and forgo the tenets found in the Bible he kept with him always. And the powerful and popular Cardinal Manning, who came within a hair's breadth of succeeding Pope Pius IX, belonged, Strachey writes, "to that class of eminent ecclesiastics ... who have been distinguished less for saintliness and learning than for practical ability."
As he offered up indelible sketches of his less-than-fab four, Strachey was intent on critiquing established mores. This effortlessly superior wit knew full well that deep convictions and good deeds often go hand in hand with hypocrisy, arrogance, and egomania. His task was to pique those who pretended they did not. --Jordana Moskowitz
(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:22 -0400)
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