Description

ORIGINAL FRENCH EDITION,
ONE OF 88 NUMBERED COPIES on vellum pur fil Lafuma Navarre, the only large paper.
Translated by Jacques Dombasle, with a preface by André Maurois.

This quadruple biography, to which Lytton Strachey owes his fame, first appeared in 1918. It marked a new approach to biography, Eminent Victorians delighted his audience as much as it scandalised them: while Strachey painted a laudatory portrait of Florence Nightingale, he was more ambivalent about his three other subjects: Cardinal Manning, Doctor Thomas Arnold and General Charles Gordon.

[These figures] had hitherto been held by most Englishmen to be very eminent Victorians, almost sacred figures, already embalmed by legend for the eternal edification of the faithful. Strachey, however, did not accept this legend; beneath the ritualistic attitudes of the mummy, he claimed to find the memory of a living, fallible being; he showed that these 'eminent' figures had been poor men, close in many ways to the common level of the race. Many minds had suffered from the historical convention which for so long had protected the Victorians. Strachey's book was for them a deliverance, all the more freely savoured because the violence of the attack was veiled in apparent candour and the wickedness of the line wrapped in exquisite form. (Preface)