Eminent Victorians

Eminent Victorians is a book by Lytton Strachey (one of the older members of the Bloomsbury Group), first published in 1918 and consisting of biographies of four leading figures from the Victorian era. Its fame rests on the irreverence and wit Strachey brought to bear on three men and a woman who had till then been regarded as heroes and heroine. They were:

The book made Strachey's name and placed him firmly in the top rank of biographers.

Strachey developed the idea for Eminent Victorians in 1912, when he was living on occasional journalism and writing dilettante plays and verse for his Bloomsbury friends. He went to live in the country at East Ilsley and started work on a book then called Victorian Silhouettes containing miniature biographies of a dozen notable Victorian personalities. In November 1912 he wrote to Virginia Woolf that their Victorian predecessors "seem to me a set of mouth bungled hypocrites". After his research into the life of Cardinal Manning, he realised he would have difficulty managing twelve lives. In the following year he moved to Wiltshire where he stayed until 1915, by which time he had completed half the book. One of the subjects he considered but rejected was Isabella Beeton. He chose not to write about her because he could not find sufficient material about her.

By then it was wartime, and Strachey's anti-war and anti-conscription activities were taking up his time. He changed his views and concluded that the Victorian worthies had not just been hypocrites, but that they had bequeathed to his generation the "profoundly evil" system "by which it is sought to settle international disputes by force".

By 1917, the work was ready for publication and Strachey was put in touch with Geoffrey Whitworth at Chatto. The critic Frank Swinnerton was taken with the work and it was published on 9 May 1918 with almost uniformly enthusiastic reviews.

Each of the lives is very different from the others, although there are common threads—for example the recurrent appearance of William Ewart Gladstone and Arthur Hugh Clough. Each story is set against a specific background.

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