Eminent Victorians
by Giles Lytton Strachey · first published 1910
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“He has chosen for the subjects of his full-length portraits, not artists nor men of original genius, but three men, and one woman, of action—Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Dr Arnold, and General Gordon. But with these full-length portraits he gives smaller sketches of many of their contemporaries—of Gladstone. Sidney Herbert, Lord Hartington, Lord Acton and Lord Cromer; of Keble and Clough and Newman and Cardinal Wiseman.” “The whole forms an interesting picture and a pungent criticism of the Victorian age.” “It is human nature he is interested in, and he pierces through the most s
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…sparks of genius that slowly advanced civilization, the Victorians were maybe the first Western society - maybe anywhere - that devoted itself to relentless self-improvement as a moral imperative. In Eminent Victorians alone, we have the biography of the woman who almost single-handedly modernized nursing into what we can still recognize as "nursing" today, and pioneered new uses of statistics; and the biography of…
on “How did the Victorians become a reference point for joyless prudery?” ↗I have read "Eminent Victorians", but might I suggest that some of the people described there are best shown in "Tom Brown's Schooldays" and the "Flashman" novels? Novels always seem closer to history, somehow, and it's a shame that…
on “How did the Victorians become a reference point for joyless prudery?” ↗