Strachey was born, in 1880, into a rather grand and pr
osperous English family. His father, Sir Richard, was a general; the Earl of Lytton, the godfather after whom he was named, was Viceroy of India. At Cambridge University he was a much loved member of the ultra-elite and secretive ‘Apostles’: a group of the twelve most intellectually and socially distinguished undergraduates who met on Saturday evenings to discuss ideas and eat sardines on toast. Eminent Victorians, which Strachey worked on for several years and which came out shortly after his 38th birthday, was his masterpiece: in a quiet, funny and immensely elegant way, it dismantles all that his parent’s generation had assumed was centrally important. In the book he selects four of the most revered characters of the previous era. His first target, Cardinal Manning, was the leader of the English Catholics: a brilliant administrator, string-puller, oily manipulator and (in Strachey’s unbelieving eyes) an absurd character, devoting his life to an irrational figment. Next he turns his fire on the preposterous General Gordon who — to vast public acclaim — extended the British Empire into the Sudan, guided, as he imagined, by obscure passages in the Old Testament. The third to be annihilated is Thomas Arnold who had instigated a massive — and utterly misguided — reform of education, training up a generation of self-righteous military officers and colonial administrators. Finally, Strachey took aim at Florence Nightingale, who had (he admits) improved the nursing profession but who, while she advocated fresh air and exercise and equality as the cure for all ills, spent her entire adult life lying on a sofa in darkened room in the most fashionable and exclusive street in London. Strachey was right: they were indeed all bizarre characters, and his calmly vicious prose is delightful. But there’s an extraordinary irony to his project. For he, too, is — to us — an extremely strange and exotic individual. He, like those he excoriates, is a creature of his time: aloof (he often lamented the shortcomings of ‘ill-bred;’ persons), vastly privileged and narcissistic (he was immensely proud of his chestnut coloured beard), whose knowledge of ‘real life’ was limited to occasional trysts with postmen and burly gardeners. But it is Strachey’s own vulnerability to precisely the same attack he unleashed on others that makes his book so important and poignant. Every generation deserves to be shown up in its weakness and be condemned for its sincerely intended stupidity. The same will apply, inevitably, to our own times. The people who are righteous now will strike the intelligentsia of the future as buffoons and pedants; their most ardent convictions will look demented; their deepest values will seem trivial, embarrassing or cruel; their victories will look like defeats for civilisation. He was an Eminent Edwardian just a generation away from heartless ridicule. We read Strachey when we are at odds with our times: the grander, unintended message of his work is that all times are mad. We are not unfortunate to live when we do, we are simply meeting the eternal madness of the world in its current guise.
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