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Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians
From: London School of Economics and Political Science
| By:
William Lubenow |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
In 1918, Lytton Strachey published Eminent Victorians, four artful biographies of Victorian pillars of society. Following on from the lengthy tracts of the nineteenth century this amounted to a revolution and a departure from the traditional, more adoring mode of biography. In his preface to Eminent Victorians, Strachey wrote: "I impose nothing, I propose nothing, I expose."
William Lubenow, professor at Stockton College in New Jersey, argues that Strachey's work amounted to more than a liberation from traditional biographical forms. He says that Eminent Victorians should be seen as a tract for the times, a polemic that charted the rise and fall of families like his within the intellectual aristocracy, and described the fragmented world of late nineteenth-century England. This lecture was given at the Locating the Victorians Conference held at the Science Museum in June 2001. |
William Lubenow discusses the radical nature of Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians |
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