On the very first page of Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians he manages to get a date wrong. For any normal work of biography this would be a death sentence. But Eminent Victorians is not a normal work of biography – it comes to me, via the wonderful Richard Holmes, as an Oxford World’s Classic. This collection of four biographical portraits – of Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Thomas Arnold, and General Gordon – is a brilliantly written takedown of the great mythic figures of Victorian Britain. Empire, Church, and Public School are rent asunder. We should read this book not for the facts – which, to be fair, are generally accurate – but for the feelings, for the mood. In this conflict between visions of the world – Strachey’s ironic modern view, and the earnestness of the Victorians – lies its great interest. And the prose is the most brilliant vehicle for bringing it all to us.
Introduction to the Players
Of the list – Manning, Nightingale, Arnold, and Gordon – I knew Gordon and Nightingale before I started reading. Manning was one of the most famous converts from Anglicanism, the state religion of England, to Roman Catholicism. His story centres around the finer points of religious doctrine, and the power politics of the Church. Florence Nightingale -perhaps the most famous nurse of all time – we know her particularly for her work in the Crimean War, but Strachey explores the whole of her long and rich life in his piece. Dr Arnold I should probably have known – he was a great reformer of the public school, Rugby. Gordon, Gordon of Khartoum, is one of Britain’s greatest Imperial heroes – which is perhaps not as great an honour now as it once was. Gordon’s claim to posthumous fame was dramatically dying in the Sudan while protecting British interests.
I shall go through each piece briefly, highlighting both its interest to the modern reader – after all, who cares about the finer points of Anglican doctrine? – and its sparkling prose.
Cardinal Manning
I am not entirely familiar with the finer points of church doctrine. One thing that strikes one, reading Eminent Victorians, is just how obsessed all of these people were over religion. Already by Strachey’s time one has the impression that people did not care. But back then, there were real crises of faith, real discussions – and dissentions – over baptism and all the rest of it. This Manning fellow was terrified by God from the age of four. He grew up well connected, was friends with Gladstone. “Were they not rich, well-connected, and endowed with an infinite capacity for making speeches?” – what more, indeed, even today does an Englishman need? But Manning’s family ran out of money, and the ambitious young man had to settle with becoming a churchman, rather than a politician.
Anglicanism is often divided in High Church and Low Church. These two terms refer to its interpretation – are we to be closer to the Protestants, or to the Roman Catholics? The former term denotes a preference for Rome, the latter a preference for Geneva. Manning was always a High Churchman at heart, but this position always leaves one open to the temptation to go all the way – to become, in short, a Papist. This is what happens. Manning becomes convert, manipulates the workings of power at the Vatican, and raises himself through the ranks, all while continuing to be tormented by his bad conscience. At one point he appears to be on the verge of becoming pope but refuses to let his ambition get the better of him.
How strange all this reads to us, in our godless age. Not that these people were any different from us. If anything, Strachey’s account reveals that the petty power politics of the church are just the same as they are anywhere else. But their concerns seem so distant from our own. It’s hard to imagine these days the horror that swept over Europe when Papal Infallibility was affirmed and explained in 1870. But so it was. The whole piece, rather too long, is still an interesting window into another world.
Florence Nightingale
Florence Nightingale is another one of the Eminent Victorians who was religiously insane. The popular image of her heroically giving up a life of riches and privilege to be a nurse is, to Strachey’s mind, slightly inaccurate. Instead, “A Demon possessed her”. Nightingale’s story I feel is particularly relevant to our own age, where activism often drives people to self-destruction. For she was an activist who knew no limits. She had been born into great wealth and privilege, but she also suffered from a religious mania. Strachey notes that “she could not bear to smile or to be gay, ‘because she hated God to hear her laugh, as if she had not repented of her sin’”. And so she works, and she works hard. Admittedly, “it sometimes happens that the plans of Providence are a little difficult to follow”, but with the Crimean War all was plain.
She went to the wretched hospitals of Constantinople and Crimea and fought the most deadly enemy of all – the British bureaucracy. She introduced many and serious improvements to the administration of these hospitals and cared for soldiers’ mental wellbeing just as much as for their physical one. But then we are finished with Crimea – the life we know as legend has ended, and Strachey keeps going. We learn of her tireless work back in Britain, to reform the army, then the hospitals of India, and hospitals more broadly.
We meet the great enemies of progress, such as Lord Panmure, for whom “duty was paramount; and he set himself, with a sigh of resignation, to the task of doing as little of it as he possibly could” and Ben Hawes, “a man remarkable even among civil servants for adroitness in baffling inconvenient inquires, resource in raising false issues, and, in short, a consummate command of all the arts of officially sticking in the mud”.
We learn that her great successes were not only thanks to her devotion to the cause, but also due to class. Yes, she was from the highest steps of society, and that counts for something. She may be a woman, but class can balance that out somewhat. We learn that Lord Palmerston, the Prime Minister, happened to have been a neighbour of her father’s in the New Forest. Nightingale was a success, but she had plenty of help.
And then there is the matter of how she treated those nearest to her. She was an invalid for much of her life, even though it barely stopped her from working the whole time. Still, she was dependent upon the help of others. Sidney Herbert, perhaps her closest friend, falls ill because of her demands of him. But she keeps demanding, and soon enough she breaks his spirit and he dies. Her friends draw away from her, but still, she keeps working. Strachey notes that “when the onward rush of a powerful spirit sweeps a weaker one to its destruction, the commonplace of the moral judgement are better left unmade”. But of course, that is not the case – he knows it too.
Nightingale’s words on receiving the Order of Merit, “too kind – too kind” sum up her life. She made the mistake we all are vulnerable to, of forgetting the individual in one’s duty to the whole. Failing to care for those closest to her rather makes her drive, her “demon”, a little suspect. She did good, yes, but at what cost?
Dr Arnold
Ah, school! Dr Arnold was made headmaster of Rugby at a time when public schools like Eton or Winchester were dens of depravity and lawlessness – but still the place to be, if you wanted to make a Cabinet Minister. Arnold was as religious as the rest of our Victorians, but he had an ingenious solution to the problems of faith – he ignored them. The result was that “he soon found himself blessed with a perfect peace of mind, and a settled conviction.” In those days, “sheer force of character” was key to being a head man at a public school, those “very seats and nurseries of vice”, as Mr Bowdler, from whom we get the word Bowdlerize, described them, and Arnold certainly had something like that.
Arnold had a chance to reform public education. But in Strachey’s view, he messed up. Instead of broadening children’s minds, bringing them into contact with educated men and women, or building an enlightened community, he focused on making the school “a place of really Christian education”. School became a theocracy, “the boys were to work out their own salvation, like the human race”. All this is very funny, but not what people want. Once, Arnold even makes a newspaper – “the paper was not a success, in spite of the fact that it set out to improve its readers morally and that it preserved, in every article, an avowedly Christian tone”. Strachey enjoys pointing out that these religious people have a rather poor understanding of what people actually want from life.
Even the religious-educational side of things did not really work. Arnold, who naturally preached to the children often enough, like my own dear headmaster at my old public school, managed to make something of a cult around himself. Strachey leaves the whole thing smelling of idolatry and children, not knowing better, drawn in by a strong character. Arnold failed in his reforms, and he failed to reform man himself too. Oh well. At least the piece is hilarious.
General Gordon
My favourite of the Eminent Victorians Gordon of Khartoum. How could it be otherwise? Gordon’s story reads like a curious mixture of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Tolstoy’s Hadji Murat. We are introduced to a wanderer in Palestine, a man with childish sincerity in his eyes and the “sunburnt brick-red complexion” of any Englishman abroad. Strachey warns us immediately that the man’s peace – he has spent the year reading the Bible and solving millennia-old riddles – will soon be broken, and he will be destroyed. Conrad here, for sure, is visible in the murky style Strachey employs – “one catches a vision of strange characters, moved by mysterious impulses, interacting in queer complication, and hurrying at last – so it almost seems – like creatures in a puppet show to a predestined catastrophe”. Yes, here is Conrad – the smallness of the individual, the unknowability of the truth, the sense of doom.
But who was Gordon? Like the others, he was a fanatic. Not for Empire, like the monstrous Cecil Rhodes, but for God. He feared His retribution, was all-too-aware of his own fallenness. But he was an adventurer and an Englishman, all the same. He fought in China, he destroyed the slave trade in Sudan (“the savage inhabitants were to become acquainted with freedom, justice, and prosperity. Incidentally, a government monopoly in ivory was to be established”), helped the government accidentally annex Egypt.
What one gets from Gordon’s story is a sense of the bankruptcy of Empire. Gordon is a chess piece, played among different members of the Liberal Party back in Britain – some wanting still more Empire, the others trying to leash the dogs of war. The press, too, play a role in demanding war, in puffing up Gordon, in forcing the government to let him get to work. Gordon goes to the Sudan a second, final, time, to deal with a religious rebellion that is threatening the government in Egypt. Ironically, his abolition of the slave trade helped foment this rebellion to begin with – and the only way he can put it down is by reinstating the trade. A lesser evil, he might have said. Once he is there, in Sudan, Gordon is Gordon Pasha anyway. Like Lord Jim, he has become a new person, free from the old world.
In Khartoum, Gordon is besieged. Communication lines are cut, and he has to hold out. He goes increasingly insane – no small feat, since he didn’t exactly seem normal earlier. He is convinced that Ernest Renan – the author of the ground-breaking Life of Jesus – is out in the desert, waiting for him. He continues noting down ramblings directed to God. They run out of food, morale wavers. Two days before a relief force arrives, Gordon is killed. If the government had acted sooner – and Strachey shows wonderfully the workings of government with the telling phrase “surely, firmly, completely, in the best English manner, and too late” – he would have survived. Instead, he became history.
Things work themselves out. Really, “it had all ended very happily – in a glorious slaughter of twenty thousand Arabs, a vast addition to the British Empire, and a step in the Peerage for Sir Evelyn Baring”. For the individuals like Sir Evelyn, the villain of the story, the lives of the Arabs do not matter. Indeed, nobody matters except themselves and increasing the amount of British pink upon the map. Strachey both tells the story of a heroic life, but as with all the rest, it is one that is consumed by madness of a certain sort, given up in service of something not entirely good on retrospect. But hey, it’s a cracking story.
Conclusion
One comes away from Eminent Victorians with a sense of the sheer power of these men and woman’s convictions, and the sheer irrelevance of most of them. If only they put their energies into bettering the world by our modern standards. But we should not judge them too harshly. Did they not, at least, have faith and convictions – the things most of us lack these days? They were manic, many of them, yes. But even through Strachey’s irony it is impossible to avoid the sensation that these were people who would crush us now by their sheer force of character. The Victorians may have been prudes, but they had their power. Indeed, they have it still.
For another Victorian character not spared a certain madness, I have written on Thomas Carlyle here.