The Intimacies of General Gordon’s Continents Ryan D. Fong (bio) Upon reaching the final biographical sketch in Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians (1918), that of Charles George Gordon, readers immediately encounter a small difference from what has preceded it. While the first three portraits in Strachey’s book take their titles from the names of their respective individuals of focus, the last section strays from this pattern, instead presenting its topic as “The End of General Gordon.” Although this is a subtle shift, to be sure, it significantly re-frames Strachey’s ensuing account as one focused less on an individual’s life than on a major—in fact, the final—event within it. Rather than promising simply to present the record of a personage, the title instead signals an emphasis on process and eventual culmination, and sets up the expectation that the ensuing narrative will detail the conditions that led to the General’s death in colonial Sudan. Given the peripatetic nature of the General’s life, it makes sense that Strachey would structure his account of Gordon around a dynamic set of actions and circumstances. Certainly one of the distinguishing features of Gordon’s biography is the kinetic energy that seemed to propel him into a near-constant state of movement across his fifty-one years. Gordon was a part of so many military campaigns and significant world events that they could have filled many lifetimes. Travelling across the far-flung places of the British Empire in the service of Queen and country, with his own apparent wander-lust motivating additional journeys abroad, Gordon resists any attempts to construct him in singular or even stable terms. Indeed, the many monikers that he accrued from his disparate global associations—including, most famously, “Chinese Gordon” and “Gordon of Khartoum”—bear out this multiplicity. As a result, the trajectory of Gordon’s life provides a template for Strachey’s own [End Page 106] emphasis on action and movement, as his narrative wanderings track alongside Gordon’s. The chapter follows the General’s wide and varied itinerary by beginning in Jerusalem, then cycling back to Gordon’s early life in England, and finally moving to his military service in the Crimea, China, and various parts of the African continent. Framed in this way, Strachey’s reconstruction of Gordon’s life illustrates how the biography of a single man can encompass what Lisa Lowe has called the “intimacies” of the globe’s continents; Gordon’s career and many travels provide insight into “the relationships between” those geographic spaces that have been “classified within distinct shores” and historically framed as “separately studied ‘areas’” (Lowe 5). As a figure who traversed several continental spaces within a remarkably small amount of time—especially given the transportation technologies that were available during the period—Gordon serves as a traceable vector within the global networks that were built during the Victorian era. To follow his career is to follow a trajectory that demonstrates the “relationality and differentiation of peoples, cultures, and societies, as well as the convergence and divergence of ideas, concepts, and themes” that circulated within the discourses and practices of British imperialism (Lowe 6). Furthermore, since Gordon’s biography stages these connections within the scope of an individual life, it also provides an occasion to understand differently the intimacies between Europe, Asia, and Africa, in a way that underscores how Lowe’s framework operates across multiple scales. It does so by invoking both the intercontinental networks of global trade and conquest and the more interpersonal terms of “interiority or domesticity” with which biography traditionally has been aligned (Lowe 18). In this context, then, Gordon and his life function as productive sites for understanding not only the broad terrain of Victorian geopolitics, but also the particular ways in which these global dynamics come to be enacted within the experiences and encounters of an individual person across a single lifespan. Strikingly, however, one of the central ironies of Strachey’s portrait of Gordon—aside from the irony-laced prose that is characteristic of the author’s style more generally—lies in its persistent movement away from Gordon as the sketch develops and, hence, away from the...