![]() ![]() ![]() Arnold appears less the champion of public school reform than an intellectual theocrat. The Crimean War nurse Nightingale is a hard-bitten health advocate haunted by memories of dying young men. Cardinal Manning, the leader of the Catholic Church in England, becomes a merciless if conflicted self-promoter. Instead, he presents the facts of their lives “dispassionately, impartially, and without ulterior intentions.” These mythic characters take on human proportions and they prove all the more interesting for their ambition, pettiness, hypocrisy, and peculiarity. Unlike previous biographers of the time, Strachey consciously rejects romanticized images of these figures. The author chooses four notable personalities – Henry Manning, Florence Nightingale, Thomas Arnold, and Charles George Gordon – and uses their lives to illuminate the broader history of Victorian England. ![]() Almost a century after its publication, Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians remains a landmark work in the field of biography. ![]()
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