John Sutherland's full commentary remedies the one defect - carelessness with factual detail - that mars Strachey's fascinating and informative biographies of four eminent Victorians. However, Sutherland himself, like all other commentators I have read, has a serious fault, which could distort readers' understanding of what Strachey was doing. He assumes that Strachey "spectacularly subverted the certainties on which the Victorian age was founded" (page viii); that he "portrayed" "all four" as "neurotics"; was "examining the dark and dirty labyrinth of Victorian unconsciousness" (page xi); that he "spatters" "ridicule" on his subjects (Page xii); or, as the blurb on the back cover alleges, "Debunking Church, Public School, and Empire ..."
Strachey says in his preface that his biographies differ from "[t]hose fat two volumes ... with their tone of tedious panegyric." Anyone who has read Monypenny and Buckle's SIX volume biography of Disraeli, which goes out of its way to attribute to Disraeli every imaginable virtue (e.g., he loved children), knows what Strachey means.
However, if the reader ignores the allegations of generations of commentators and looks at what Strachey wrote without preconception, he will see that he admired all four of his subjects and meant for his readers to admire them. "[A] perfect English gentleman" is the way Strachey describes Sydney Herbert (page 121), and Strachey's description of him in that paragraph and the following pages shows that he meant that as the highest praise. Strachey even treats with impartiality and often empathy the aspect of Victorian life that by the time he was writing must have already seemed strange: the centrality of "old time religion" in the thought and lives of educated Victorians. (From the inception of printing through the year 1900, more books were published in the United Kingdom on religion than on all other subjects combined.)
Different as Strachey's subjects are from each other, they have one thing in common. All were rebels. Manning deserted the Church of England, one of the central pillars of the Victorian establishment. Nightingale defied the expectations of the way an upper-class woman should lead her life to challenge relentlessly and adamantly the British army and radically reform the nursing profession and army hospitals. Arnold radically reformed another bastion of the establishment: the public (i.e., private) schools. Gordon was an eccentric loner, who followed the opposite policy from the one he was sent to Khartoum to implement.
Nevertheless, all were greatly admired by those whom they led or cared for: Manning by British Catholics, Nightingale by the soldiers under her supervision, Arnold by his students (page 165), and Gordon by the people of the Sudan (page 208). More strikingly, these rebels, radicals, and eccentrics were heroes of British society; they were "eminent Victorians" in their own time. This fact must force the reader to re-assess one of the most prevalent stereotypes about the Victorians: their supposed insistence on conventionality and conformity.
In fact, Strachey achieved what Collingwood stated was the goal of history in his classic study The Idea of History (pages 231-49). He reconstructed a plausible and coherent account of what his four subjects (and several of the people with whom they interacted) were like, what motivated them, what "made them tick." It must be added (and this also fulfilled Collingwood's requirement) that Strachey's account is not plausible of human beings in general. Rather, it is historically plausible; it is plausible considering the specific time and place in which his subjects lived; and by providing it, Strachey illuminated important aspects of Victorian life and thought.
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Top reviews from other countries
Elizabeth Mary Higgins
Not exactly an easy request! So I did a bit of research ...
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 17, 2015ANONYMOUS
Intéressant mais un peu trop détaillé si on n'est pas féru d'époque victorienne
Reviewed in France on August 20, 2019Ian Brawn
Biographies masquerading as history
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 19, 2013
