Lytton Strachey — Eminent Victorians
One of the most eminent of Edwardians, Lytton Strachey, was a writer of wit and charm, with an ability to deliver a razor sharp critical analysis to any subject or person he chose to settle upon. He was a literary breath of fresh air who changed, forever, how biography should, must be written, with his most successful book, Eminent Victorians, a huge best-seller when it was first published in 1918.
My rather crumpled Penguin edition from 1948, bought at a jumble sale in St.Ives, Cornwall, thirty odd years ago, for 20p, is a book that has been a brilliant ‘How To’ writing guide ever since.
In his preface to that first 1918 edition Lytton Strachey writes:
“ The history of the Victorian Age will never be written: we know too much about it. For ignorance is the first requisite of the historian — ignorance, which simplifies and clarifies, which selects and omits, with a placid perfection unattainable by the highest art. Concerning the age which has just passed, our fathers and our grandfathers have poured forth and accumulated so vast a quantity of information that the industry of a Ranke[Leopold von Ranke, meticulous German historian, 1795–1886] would be submerged by…
