Eminent Victorians

Lytton Strachey’s slim, sardonic quartet of biographies took an axe to the Victorian habit of hero worship. Instead of reverent doorstop lives, he offers four compact, ironic portraits: Cardinal Manning the ambitious churchman, Florence Nightingale the driven and difficult reformer, the earnest headmaster Thomas Arnold, and General Gordon, whose death at Khartoum he treats with cool skepticism rather than awe. Beneath the wit runs a serious argument that the age’s revered figures were stranger, vainer and more human than their monuments admitted. Published in 1918, just as the First World War had shaken faith in Victorian certainties, the book reinvented English biography and made Strachey famous overnight. This free PDF and EPUB edition contains all four studies.