<em>Eminent Victorians</em> at One Hundred: Introduction

Abstract

Eminent Victorians at One Hundred: Introduction Lara Kriegel (bio) It is a truism now, at the end of the cataclysm’s centenary, to say that World War I marked the birth of a new age. It is less of a commonplace to contend that the Great War occasioned the birth of Victorian studies. The conflict did, however, provide the backdrop for the writing and publication of Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians (1918). The Bloomsbury luminary wrote the four sketches that comprise the text—those of Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Thomas Arnold, and General Gordon—as the Great War unfolded. He sought, in so doing, to reckon with the legacies of nineteenth-century Britain in the context of his own present of twentieth-century destruction. The unintended result of Strachey’s efforts was a landmark text in Victorian studies, published in 1918. The preface to Strachey’s text begins, “the history of the Victorian Age will never be written: we know too much about it” (5). To meet this seemingly impossible task, Strachey looked to the practice of collective biography. He sought to understand the epoch, in its proximity and vastness, through an assemblage of nineteenth-century lives, or “Victorian silhouettes,” as he initially imagined them (qtd. in Sutherland xii). Ultimately, Strachey settled on four individuals: an ecclesiastic, a heroine, a schoolmaster, and a seeker. Seemingly disparate personages, Strachey’s protagonists were beloved figures who played leading roles in forging a Christian, civilized, martial, and imperial Britain. As he recast their stories for his twentieth-century audience, Strachey sought to unburden his generation of the household gods of the Victorian age. To call into question the legacies of these figures was, thus, to cast stones at the institutions and the causes that propelled the First World War. [End Page 83] What does it mean to remember Strachey’s landmark text one hundred years on? What sort of archive of the past of Victorian studies does it contain? What sorts of diagnostics of the field’s present moment does it disclose? What paths forward can engagement with the text lay bare? To mark the centenary of the collective biography’s publication, we asked four eminent Victorianists—Albert D. Pionke, Alison Booth, James Eli Adams, and Ryan D. Fong—to reflect on Strachey’s work. We tasked them with thinking, as Strachey had, both biographically and interpretively. We charged them with explaining the work that Strachey’s text performed in its own moment; we asked them to address the ways we might interpret Eminent Victorians now. Albert D. Pionke locates, in Strachey’s introduction and in his sketch of Cardinal Manning, a critical moment in the reinvigoration of the practice of biography. James Eli Adams demonstrates the ways in which this biographical pursuit relied on simplicity—and often on misrepresentation—rather than on complexity, as he considers Strachey’s take on Thomas Arnold. Alison Booth points to the limits of Strachey’s enterprise in debunking the Victorians as she traces the life and afterlife of Florence Nightingale. And, in his rereading of General Gordon, Ryan D. Fong shows Strachey’s use of biography to condense space across continents and produce intimacy across the ages. Taken together, these elegant contributions point to the unintended effects of Eminent Victorians. Strachey may have intended to cast aside the pieties of the preceding epoch. Instead, he played a role in the making of Victorian studies. Frequently cited yet often misunderstood, Eminent Victorians has been reprinted time and again. Across its century-long career, it has given renewed life to the men, and the woman, it intended to discount. Even more significantly, Eminent Victorians forecast and shaped the disciplinary practices and the affective stances that have characterized our field. In his preface, Strachey placed the enterprises of history and literature in opposition, if not in dialogue, as he sought to rescue biography from the forensic hand of the historian and to enliven it with the fanciful touch of the literary critic. Throughout his text, Strachey grappled with affection and ambivalence as he sought to understand, chronicle, and castigate the Victorian age. In other words, Strachey’s text sooth-says and unfolds many of the disciplinary and affective...