Eminent Victorians: Outrageous Strachey? The Indecent Exposure of Victorian Characters and Mores

• Main Author: Floriane Reviron-Piégay
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée 2013-10-01
• Series: Études Britanniques Contemporaines
• Subjects: Victorianism; Victorian biography; the New Biography; iconoclasm; outrage; decency
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/ebc/638
• ISSN: 1168-4917; 2271-5444

There was a consensus at the time Eminent Victorians was published (1918) to welcome it as a groundbreaking study of Victorian character and mores. The book was as much the result of personal outrage on Strachey’s part as it was the result of the spirit of the times. But Strachey’s attitude towards the Victorians was perhaps not as straightforward and simple as it seemed. Indeed he was very much torn between outrage at their earnestness, hypocrisy and attitude to life in general and a kind of sympathetic deference for some of their representatives. This article explores this fertile paradox: far from condemning his biographees to the limbo of oblivion, his four biographical essays granted them eternal life and fame. Eminent Victorians launched a new biographical hero, between caricature, stereotypes and a surprisingly new psychological insight into the human psyche. This article also assesses to what extent his vision revolutionized not just the ethos of the times but also the genre of biography An experiment in style written from a slightly cynical point of view it ended up revolutionizing the art of biography thanks to its inspirational preface and to its rhetorics. A blend of satire, irony and iconoclasm, it is teeming with metaphors and hyperboles, which have become the hallmark of the author’s wit. Strachey was a man caught between his sympathies and dislikes, torn between classicism and romanticism, but in the end a forerunner of modernist theories and art and Eminent Victorians is an apt reminder that outrage is an essential component of art.