Author Archives: oook

Imminent Victorianism

Several odd twists of interests (and via Richard D. Altick’s Victorian People and Ideas: A Companion for the Modern Reader of Victorian Literature) led me to a reading of Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians, a book I’ve owned at least once but hadn’t actually read. What a treat, what a wonderful romp through pecksniffianreligious manias and backstage politics of power. And how very a propos to culture wars of the present, in which a lot of the same cant is dressed up in new duds.

It’s difficult to select among the passages that might inspire you to read it (or read it again) for yourself, but I think this one is among the most inspired bits of naughtiness:

The Oxford Movement was now ended. The University breathed such a sigh of relief as usually follows the difficult expulsion of a hard piece of matter from a living organism, and actually began to attend to education. As for the Church of England, she had tasted blood, and it was clear that she would never again be content with a vegetable diet. Her clergy, however, maintained their reputation for judicious compromise, for they followed Newman up to the very point beyond which his conclusions were logical, and, while they intoned, confessed, swung incense, and burned candles with the exhilaration of converts, they yet managed to do so with a subtle nuance which showed that they had nothing to do with Rome. Various individuals underwent more violent changes. Several had preceded Newman into the Roman fold; among others an unhappy Mr. Sibthorpe, who subsequently changed his mind, and returned to the Church of his fathers, and then– perhaps it was only natural– changed his mind again. Many more followed Newman, and Dr. Wiseman was particularly pleased by the conversion of a Mr. Morris, who, as he said, was ‘the author of the essay, which won the prize on the best method of proving Christianity to the Hindus’. Hurrell Froude had died before Newman had read the fatal article on St. Augustine; but his brother, James Anthony, together with Arthur Clough, the poet, went through an experience which was more distressing in those days than it has since become; they lost their faith. With this difference, however, that while in Froude’s case the loss of his faith turned out to be rather like the loss of a heavy portmanteau, which one afterwards discovers to have been full of old rags and brickbats, Clough was made so uneasy by the loss of his that he went on looking for it everywhere as long as he lived; but somehow he never could find it. On the other hand, Keble and Pusey continued for the rest of their lives to dance in an exemplary manner upon the tight-rope of High Anglicanism; in such an exemplary manner, indeed, that the tightrope has its dancers still.

Since Eminent Victorians was first published in 1918, it’s well out of the copyright stranglehold and so is available online. I do wish I could get my paws on Oxford U.P.’s new edition, with annotations. Their summary of the book’s significance:

Lytton Strachey’s biographical essays on four ’eminent Victorians’ dropped a depth-charge on Victorian England when the book was published in 1918. It ushered in the modern biography and raised the genre to the level of high literary art. Lytton Strachey approached his subjects with scepticism rather than reverence, and his iconoclastic wit and engaging narratives thrilled as well as shocked his contemporaries. Debunking Church, Public School and Empire, his portraits of Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Dr Arnold of Rugby, and General Gordon of Khartoum changed perceptions of the Victorians for a generation.

Rural Maine isn’t a particularly good locale for finding a book like Eminent Victorians, but Camden’s ABCD Books had the Modern Library edition, complete with ca. 1955 dust jacket. Reading it in that clothing sure did take me back…

I’ve done some looking around for more or less current Web mentions of Eminent Victorians and found quite a few that enlarge on my own reading. One of the most useful is Martin Tulic’s Index to Eminent Victorians, which inspires a whole different sort of reading of the text. Also useful is Lincoln Allison’s posting (“Lincoln Allison has recently retired as Reader in Politics, University of Warwick. He is continuing his education by reading those classics he has previously neglected. His previous Retrospective Reviews can be read here“).


Toby Litt’s Cult Choice begins with this stirring sentence:

It would be an exaggeration, but only a slight one, to say that all contemporary non-fiction starts with Eminent Victorians…

And Paul Levy has a very nice piece in The Guardian (July 20, 2002): Rereadings: A string quartet in four movements …which provides a lot of useful background to how the book came to be written, and concludes with this Stracheyan postscript:

The standard historian’s complaint with the work has been that Strachey used only secondary sources, consulted no unpublished sources, and gave no references. Moreover, scholars have made specific complaints about the sources he did use. Modern scholarship holds that some of these objections are well-founded, others less so. But these are matters for specialists, providing them with gainful employment, and do not much affect the present-day reader’s enjoyment of the book.

R J Keefe’s Portico has a nice essay titled Victorians Immense, which characterizes Eminent Victorians as

a book that changed the shape of biography forever …In Eminent Victorians, Strachey combines heavy irony with boy’s-own-adventure writing to produce an account that can’t be put down…

Yup, that says it pretty well.

If you’ve got this far in this posting and have a taste for deflation of hypocrisies, you deserve a reward. Here it is, thanks to a link in today’s posting by Benjamin Zimmer on the absolutely essential Language Log: A Psalm of Montreal (Samuel Butler). Two delectable stanzas to convince you to read the whole thing:

“The Discobolus is put here because he is vulgar –
He has neither vest nor pants with which to cover his limbs;
I, Sir, am a person of most respectable connections –
My brother-in-law is haberdasher to Mr. Spurgeon.”
     O God! O Montreal!

Then I said, “O brother-in-law to Mr. Spurgeon’s haberdasher,
Who seasonest also the skins of Canadian owls,
Thou callest trousers ‘pants’, whereas I call them ‘trousers’,
Therefore thou art in hell-fire and may the Lord pity thee!”
     O God! O Montreal!

Skewered and hung out to dry

Don’t miss today’s delicious posting by Gardner Campbell, in reaction to a piece on the Beatles by WSJ/Commentary critic Terry Teachout (see also Critic Terry Teachout Consumes Too Much Art, Violently Explodes). One bit of Gardner’s prose that I especially envy:

…yet another example of the disconnect between a thriving and important culture and the dessicated culture that mediates it to the industry of education. There is indeed a freeze-dried quality to Teachout’s analysis that, coupled with its gobsmacking superficiality, simply betrays the energy and value of its subject…

This (in the context, no doubt, of my recent wander through George Orwell’s works) reminded me of three fragments I’d tucked away for future reference, for use when feeling oppressed by academic foolishments:

“The onanistic pursuit of academic similacritude” (Garth Boomer in Goswami and Stillman Reclaiming the Classroom, pg. 6)

Oh, how he hated grant proposals. The hollow promises; the vaunting celebration of past success; the self-advertising emphasis on importance and significance; the absence of understatement; the omnipresence of exaggeration; the servile allegiance to tradition, formula, and established procedure; the utter predictability of every other sentence; the implicit greed of the genre… (David Carkeet Double Negative, pg. 31)

“It was much pleasanter at home,” thought poor Alice, “when one wasn’t always growing larger and smaller, and being ordered about by mice and rabbits–I almost wish I hadn’t gone down that rabbit-hole, and yet, and yet–it’s rather curious, you know, this sort of life…” (Lewis Carroll, from Chapter 2 of Alice’s Adventures Underground)

Watching Preston Reed

One of my identities is ‘musician’, which basically means that I spend a fair bit of time messing with musical instruments and imagining virtuosities I don’t possess and envying the skills of others. Most of it is conducted via hearing –I don’t see that many live acts, and generally when I do have live-act opportunities I’m not close enough to see the fine details of performance. Most video of musicians is done by people who don’t have the musician sensibilities that want to see the HANDS… An example of unadorned video of an amazing musician is a recent performance by Preston Reed at the Kennedy Center. It’s more than an hour of streaming, and seeing him play adds another dimension or two, for even the most jaded guitar player. Turns out that he’s blogging too, about music…

More on Orwell

Bryan’s comment pointed me to Orwell’s Politics and the English Language (1946), which I had never read. It’s truly delicious, should be in everybody’s experience as a reader and writer, and I can’t work out how it eluded me for ummmm 62 years… I’m thinking of reading it aloud, as a podcast, if only to savor it more fully.

I vaguely knew the outines of the biography of Eric Blair/George Orwell, but wasn’t aware that there’s an online Complete Works of George Orwell.

Here are a few delicious bits from Such, such were the joys, which opens with a never-to-be-forgotten description of himself as an 8 year old bed-wetter at St. Cyprian’s. The essay is a succession of pedagogical and social grimnesses, some with present-day connections:

This business of making a gifted boy’s career depend on a competitive examination, taken when he is only twelve or thirteen is an evil thing at best, but there do appear to be preparatory schools which send scholars to Eton, Winchester, etc. without teaching them to see everything in terms of marks. At St Cyprian’s the whole process was frankly a preparation for a sort of confidence trick. Your job was to learn exactly those things that would give an examiner the impression that you knew more than you did know, and as far as possible to avoid burdening your brain with anything else. Subjects which lacked examination-value, such as geography, were almost completely neglected, mathematics was also neglected if you were a ‘classical’, science was not taught in any form — indeed it was so despised that even an interest in natural history was discouraged — and even the books you were encouraged to read in your spare time were chosen with one eye on the ‘English paper’. Latin and Greek, the main scholarship subjects, were what counted, but even these were deliberately taught in a flashy, unsound way. We never, for example, read right through even a single book of a Greek or Latin author: we merely read short passages which were picked out because they were the kind of thing likely to be set as an ‘unseen translation’. During the last year or so before we went up for our scholarships, most of our time was spent in simply working our way through the scholarship papers of previous years.

But the greatest outrage of all was the teaching of history… History was a series of unrelated, unintelligible but — in some way that was never explained to us — important facts with resounding phrases tied to them. Disraeli brought peace with honour. Clive was astonished at his moderation. Pitt called in the New World to redress the balance of the Old. And the dates, and the mnemonic devices. (Did you know, for example, that the initial letters of ‘A black Negress was my aunt: there’s her house behind the barn’ are also the initial letters of the battles in the Wars of the Roses?)

…Whoever writes about his childhood must beware of exaggeration and self-pity. I do not claim that I was a martyr or that St Cyprian’s was a sort of Dotheboys Hall. But I should be falsifying my own memories if I did not record that they are largely memories of disgust. The over crowded, underfed underwashed life that we led was disgusting, as I recall it. If I shut my eyes and say ‘school’, it is of course the physical surroundings that first come back to me: the flat playing field with its cricket pavilion and the little shed by the rifle range, the draughty dormitories, the dusty splintery passages, the square of asphalt in front of the gymnasium, the raw-looking pinewood chaplet at the back. And at almost every point some filthy detail obtrudes itself. For example, there were the pewter bowls out of which we had our porridge. They had overhanging rims, and under the rims there were accumulations of sour porridge, which could be flaked off in long strips. The porridge itself, too, contained more lumps, hairs and unexplained black things than one would have thought possible, unless someone were putting them there on purpose. It was never safe to start on that porridge without investigating it first. And there was the slimy water of the plunge bath — it was twelve or fifteen feet long, the whole school was supposed to go into it every morning, and I doubt whether the water was changed at all frequently — and the always-damp towels with their cheesy smell: and, on occasional visits in the winter, the murky sea-water of the local Baths, which came straight in from the beach and on which I once saw floating a human turd. And the sweaty smell of the changing-room with its greasy basins, and, giving on this, the row of filthy, dilapidated lavatories, which had no fastenings of any kind on the doors, so that whenever you were sitting there someone was sure to come crashing in. It is not easy for me to think of my schooldays without seeming to breathe in a whiff of something cold and evil-smelling — a sort of compound of sweaty stockings, dirty towels, faecal smells blowing along corridors, forks with old food between the prongs, neck-of-mutton stew, and the banging doors of the lavatories and the echoing chamber-pots in the dormitories.

…What counted was football, at which I was a funk. I loathed the game, and since I could see no pleasure or usefulness in it, it was very difficult for me to show courage at it. Football, it seemed to me, is not really played for the pleasure of kicking a ball about, but is a species of fighting. The lovers of football are large, boisterous, nobbly boys who are good at knocking down and trampling on slightly smaller boys. That was the pattern of school life — a continuous triumph of the strong over the weak. Virtue consisted in winning: it consisted in being bigger, stronger, handsomer, richer, more popular, more elegant, more unscrupulous than other people — in dominating them, bullying them, making them suffer pain, making them look foolish, getting the better of them in every way. Life was hierarchical and whatever happened was right. There were the strong, who deserved to win and always did win, and there were the weak, who deserved to lose and always did lose, everlastingly.