Lytton Strachey’s
Eminent Victorianswas published by Chatto and Windus in May 1918. Comprising four mini-biographies (Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Matthew Arnold, and General Gordon), Strachey’s book used satire and irreverent humor to undermine the pillars of the Victorian establishment represented by each of his subjects: religion, humanitarianism, education, and imperialism. An immediate best-seller,
Eminent Victoriansspoke to a war-weary population which, like Strachey (1880-1932), blamed the devastation of the Great War (1914-18) in part on the values of his parents’ generation.
As one of the founders of the modernist Bloomsbury Group that included his fellow ‘Cambridge Apostles’ John Maynard Keynes and Leonard Woolf, as well as sisters Virginia and Vanessa
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Citation: Taddeo, Julie. "Eminent Victorians". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 07 October 2019 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=29472, accessed 26 November 2024.]