The Bloomsbury Group with its writers, artists, philosophers and intellectuals challenged Victorian and Edwardian values and Strachey’s witty and ironic reckoning with prominent characters such as Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Thomas Arnold and General Gordon was certainly shocking for the reader of the early 20th century. My motivation to read this book has been generated from my interest in the Bloomsbury Group, which the eccentric Lytton Strachey (1880 – 1933) was a prominent member of. One should rather read Lytton Strachey’s ‘Eminent Victorians’ if one is interested to gain an insight into how Strachey dismounts with relish Victorian heroes and values. Leavis said, we are all part of the milieu of the Great Tradition. These upstanding Victorians he wrote about worked hard for their faith, and deserve our gratitude and respect, not our sneers. Many of us who laughed with Strachey when young now see a far greater value in the middle way he mocked. If you want to reach the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, you don’t go around with a chip on your shoulder.
There has to be a middle ground in life, because extremes have no staying power. And you don’t get into heaven on irreverence. Substance was the very balloon he wished to burst!īut wit doesn’t always pay the bills. Indeed, his cleverness was never an adjunct of substance. He turned Oscar Wilde’s dandyism into a form of cackling self-caricature in his stovepipe hat, collar-length black beard, and granny glasses, loping down London boulevards with a John Lennon grin.Īnd he’s not widely read now.
To the bohemian denizens of London’s Bloomsbury District, Strachey’s oddly iconoclastic vantage point, his languid and world-weary witticisms and his immense mastery of his subject matter must have elevated him to urban myth status in their eyes. I read it as a young guy and laughed uproariously at its irreverence, delighting all the while in Strachey’s finely pointed prose. A wonderfully witty book that, a century ago, forever burst the bubble of glory that had up till then so reverently encased the shimmering Victorian Empire.
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