What I Am Reading: "Eminent Victorians" by Lytton Strachey
I have read that, historiographically, this book is very important: it ushered in a new wave of biography that incorporated psychological insights and caused people to cast a more jaundiced eye on the Victorian era. I cannot speak to that yet, as my knowledge of historiography isn't as extensive as I hope it will be, but I can definitely say that this book did not live up to the potential I perceived in it.
Lytton Strachey was a member of the Bloomsbury Group, a literary circle that I know nothing about save that they were in the interwar period and that Virginia Woolfe was a member. He had planned for a long time to write a book about the Victorians, roughly the generation before his. He put it off and put it off until, aghast by the horrors of World War 1, he set forth to write a fiery condemnation of those who had left the world in such a combustible state. In the year 2020, condemnation of past generations is certainly not in short supply, and I was hoping that this book would serve as an acerbic salve to the same mentality (if not quite the same people) who exercised judgement in The Dream of the Celt.
Unfortunately, the main historiographic lesson that I took from this book is that a focus on historical personages is inferior to a more systemic analysis. Strachey introduces the book modestly; it is not meant to be an exploration of the entire Victorian era, but merely an illumination of a few choice corners. I was actually a good test case for this method, as I was completely unfamiliar with two of the subjects, Cardinal Manning and Doctor Arnold, the first and third targets. The other two were Florence Nightingale and General Gordon.
To present my own brief biographic sketch on each:
Cardinal Manning was the boss Catholic of Britain in the mid-to-late Victorian period, but in fact he started out as an Anglican Archdeacon. He was part of a movement in Anglicanism in the pre- and early-Victorian days wanting to do away with secular (i.e. royal) control of the church, and move closer to Catholicism. After much internal religious debate and out of, perhaps, an abundance of ambition, Henry Manning converted to Catholicism, and swiftly moved up the ranks while looking after the Pope's interest . This included doing so somehow at a conclave convened to, ultimately, equivocate on the question of papal infallibility in 1870. He boxed out his unfortunate predecessor in the Anglican movement toward Catholicism, John Henry Newman, though the latter became a Cardinal as well. Manning went on to be a respected figure, including famously helping to negotiate the end of a strike in 1889.
Florence Nightingale was, famously, the originator of nursing as an organized profession. She was called to it from an early age, and was in a good position to go to Crimea during the war when hospital arrangements in the British army were found to be woefully inadequate. With an iron discipline and high logistical skill (as well as the support of the domestic public), she organized and reformed the army hospital system. She returned to Britain after this, and embarked on other social reforms, mainly of medical and sanitary areas. She was driven by religious zeal, and produced innumerable books on the topic. She also worked her disciples very hard, a clear workaholic herself.
Dr. Thomas Arnold was a bourgeoisie fellow who, after his education and a few years as a dilettante tutor, was put in charge of the Rugby public school for boys (and yes, the sport is named after the school, I had to check). He reformed the curriculum to some extent, and this became a model for British public schools. Previously, these schools had a strong focus on teaching ancient languages and on religious instruction; he introduced a little math, a little science, a little history, and some contemporary languages. Nevertheless, they maintained a strong religious focus. British schools took on the form that we are all somehow very familiar with through innumerable portrayals in fiction, from Harry Potter (which we will speak of no further) to Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall;” to my own personal landmarks of recent reading of the Newfoundland school in The Colony of Unrequited Dreams and the school Percy Alleline teaches at in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. In fact, the only positive portrayal I can think of of a British school is Lyra's time at Jordan College in The Golden Compass. Anyway, the progenitor of these novels is apparently a book called Tom Brown's Schooldays, which was in fact written by someone who went to Rugby under Arnold. The world Arnold created was one where the headmaster is omnipresent and an object of great respect, "sixth-form" boys are in charge and officially sanctioned to discipline (and bully), and boys get up to all kinds of mischief on their own time. Teaching is meant to "instill character" rather than knowledge, and turn everyone into an honest, stolid, upstanding Englishman. Dr. Arnold, also religiously fervent, died at a fairly young age. It is my assumption that Lytton went through one of these schools, as it is in this segment that he is the most wistful and condemnatory:
"Under him, the public school remained, in essentials, a conventional establishment, devoted to the teaching of Greek and Latin grammar. Had he set on foot reforms in these directions, it seems probable that he might have succeeded in carrying the parents of England with him. The moment was ripe; there was a general desire for educational changes; and Dr. Arnold's great reputation could hardly have been resisted. As it was, he threw the whole weight of his influence into the opposite scale, and the ancient system became more firmly established than ever.
The changes which he did effect were of a very different nature. By introducing morals and religion into his scheme of education, he altered the whole atmosphere of public-school life. Henceforward the old rough-and-tumble, which was typified by the regime of Keate at Eton, became impossible. After Dr. Arnold, no public school could venture to ignore the virtues of respectability. Again, by his introduction of the prefectorial system, Dr. Arnold produced far-reaching effects—effects which he himself, perhaps, would have found perplexing. In his day, when the school hours were over, the boys were free to enjoy themselves as they liked; to bathe, to fish, to ramble for long afternoons in the country, collecting eggs or gathering flowers. 'The taste of the boys at this period,' writes an old Rugbaean who had been under Arnold, 'leaned strongly towards flowers'. The words have an odd look today. 'The modern reader of "Tom Brown's Schooldays" searches in vain for any reference to compulsory games, house colours, or cricket averages. In those days, when boys played games they played them for pleasure; but in those days the prefectorial system—the system which hands over the life of a school to an oligarchy of a dozen youths of seventeen—was still in its infancy, and had not yet borne its fruit.
Teachers and prophets have strange after-histories; and that of Dr. Arnold has been no exception. The earnest enthusiast who strove to make his pupils Christian gentlemen and who governed his school according to the principles of the Old Testament, has proved to be the founder of the worship of athletics and the worship of good form"
Finally, there is General Charles Gordon, a very interesting figure. Gordon is actually who brought me to this book from his Wikipedia page; a mention of the Red River Rebellion on the same was what sent me to the book on Louis Riel earlier in the year. Anyway, Gordon was a fairly normal, rambunctious military officer who received, early in his career, a posting to China. The Qing Dynasty was at the time in conflict with the millenarian Taiping Rebellion, and requested the use of a British officer to command their army. They received Gordon, who used the ragtag Ever Victorious Army to gain the initiative, and skillfully maneuvered through the complicated geography of the Yangtze River Valley to put the Taiping rebels on their heels. This let the main Chinese army to finish them off. (Not enough for you? A book about this is on my list for sometime in the future). Gordon was hailed as a hero, but returned to England and lived quietly for a few years at some boring domestic posts. Strachey here, describing his life, makes apparently the first historical insinuation of Gordon's homosexuality, subtle though it may be. Anyway, whilst off at a cartography conference, “Chinese Gordon” accepted an offer from the Khedivate of Egypt, a semi-independent nominally-Ottoman functionally British vassal state. They asked him to run a province in Sudan, which they are in the process of "developing" (exploiting). Gordon took this post for three years, dealing with a thousand military and administrative issues and showing an increasing number of flashes of drunken melancholia. When he tried to resign, the Khedivate put him in charge of the entire Sudan province, where he did not help them settle their financial affairs but did put down an entire rebellion through sheer force of will by showing up at the rebel camp and ordering them to disperse. By 1880, he was frustrated with the Egyptian government, and had an acrimonious departure. He flitted around to other mercenary postings for years, in the British Empire and outside of it. The fourth of these four religious fanatics, in his case very idiosyncratic and based on solo bible study, he was "tripping" (as Strachey describes his gait) around Jerusalem, waiting for a job in the Congo from Leopold II, when word came that another millenarian rebel, the alleged Mahdi, was rising in the Sudan, acting against the decadent existing powers. Ironically, discontent with the Egyptian government may have been fanned by Gordon's criticisms and his alienation of local powerbrokers who depended on the slave trade. The British had intervened around the same time in Egypt to prop up the government against another nationalist rebellion, but the government could not decide what level of involvement it wanted to take in Sudan. Eventually, in Strachey's (reasonable) analysis, the pro-imperialists manufactured a newspaper campaign to put Gordon in charge of the situation as the Mahdi's army advanced toward the regional capital of Khartoum. The imperialist faction in the ruling Liberal Party knew he would work his grandiose magic on the situation, but officially, and in the eyes of Prime Minister Gladstone, he was only there to observe. From there, history took its romantic course: Gordon assumed control in Khartoum and determined to hold out instead of evacuating, while some forces in Britain agitated for a relief expedition as the situation deteriorated. Eventually, this came about after Lord Hartington, who had connived to send Gordon there, came around and threatened to resign; meanwhile, Gordon descended further into madness, filling and dispatching journals with alternating anger, defiance, philosophical reflections, and observations of everyday life. The Mahdi pressed the siege and assault, and the British relief expedition arrived two days too late. Gordon became a martyr, though he did not achieve his ultimate goal. Gladstone, who had perceived that Gordon was trying to force his hand to take over the Sudan, did not keep the troops there long enough to do so. That would need to wait another 13 years.
Gladstone is, in my mind, the actual most interesting Victorian figure, and one I would like to read a biography on. He occasionally walks onstage in the book: he was friends as a young man with Manning, only to become estranged after the latter's conversion. He was an impressive political figure by Gordon's day, standing for democracy and anti-colonialism within the Victorian framework (we would conceive of these things differently, of course); a wily and calculating figure, loved and hated in a way that Strachey seems to find unusual for a politician but I do not. A “chimera of the spirit” who often changed positions and enjoyed a considerable amount of flexibility.
So as noted in each section, there is a little bit of criticism of each of these figures, especially Gordon and Arnold; but I am denied my hoped-for systematic picture of the myriad ways the Victorians laid the ground for the Great War, and for the most part denied the acid tongue I expected as well. The book is pop history; unlike other pop history (yes I am still on this kick) it is written for a different audience than mine. In fact, the opening sentence is the hilariously anachronistic "[t]he history of the Victorian Age will never be written; we know too much about it." Maybe Lytton Strachey did, but I would like to know more.