Lytton Strachey

Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Giles Lytton Strachey

(born March 1, 1880, London, Eng. — died Jan. 21, 1932, Ham Spray House, near Hungerford, Berkshire) English biographer and critic. After studying at Cambridge, he became a leader in the Bloomsbury group. Though a self-identified homosexual, he was engaged very briefly to Virginia Woolf. Adopting an irreverent attitude to the past, he opened a new era of biographical writing with his Eminent Victorians (1918), consisting of four sketches of Victorian idols whom he portrayed as multifaceted, flawed human beings. Fascinated by personality and motive, he treated his subjects idiosyncratically and somewhat cynically. He also published Queen Victoria (1921), Elizabeth and Essex (1928), Portraits in Miniature (1931), and critical writings, especially on French literature.

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Giles Lytton Strachey (1880-1932) was an English biographer and critic known for his satire of the Victorian Era.

Lytton Strachey was born in London on March 1, 1880. He was the eleventh of thirteen children of an upper-middle-class family. His father, Sir Richard Strachey, was a colonial Indian civil servant and civil engineer and a British army general; he was a typical Victorian explorer/ scientist. Sir Richard's second wife, Lytton's mother, was the daughter of Sir J. P. Grant of Rothiemurchus and was keen on French literature; she influenced Lytton's precocious literary talent. Even though Lytton's family members on both sides were well-connected and prosperous, the large parental home in unfashionable Bayswater was "suffocating" to him. He was a spoiled child, of frail health, and always withdrawn. Even so, he had an iron will and sat in cultural judgment of the world his parents inhabited: the Victorian era.

For primary education Strachey went to uncongenial upper-class boarding schools in Derbyshire and to Leamington College. He left the "petticoat world of Victorian schoolrooms" for Liverpool University in 1897, where Professor Walter Raleigh, his tutor in history and literature, was the main object of Lytton's hero worship. He began a new six-year phase of his life at Cambridge: the world suddenly opened up in 1899.

It was at Trinity College, and later at King's College, that he met most of his intellectual friends, among them the philosopher G. E. Moore (1873-1958), the economist John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946), the novelist E. M. Forster (1879-1970), the critic and publisher Leonard Woolf (1880-1969), and the art critic Clive Bell (1881-1964). As Cambridge undergraduates they were privileged to join a society called "The Apostles", an elite, exotic group devoted to the arts and an ambivalent way of life in which traditional wisdom and customary middle-class morals were discarded, especially where sex was concerned. The Apostles were personally affected by the philosophy of G. E. Moore. Lytton Strachey saw in Moore's doctrines the importance of aesthetic experience and the gospel of personal friendship. These were the attributes of the "good life." But "friendship" meant, for Strachey, homosexual love. He turned a blind eye to Moore's inherent puritanism. Strachey and Maynard Keynes were often furiously in love with the same male students, and often Keynes won the upper hand.

After partly failing in Cambridge (with a second-class degree and no fellowship at Trinity), Strachey went to London to endure 13 years of penny-pinching frustration as a weekly reviewer for the Spectator, edited by his pedigreed cousin. He fell in with the Bloomsbury Group, the same sort of society in London as the Cambridge Apostles (their leading members were the same). One of the leading "Bloomsberries" was the "stream of consciousness" novelist Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), the sister of Vanessa Bell. Lytton had previously proposed marriage to Virginia (which he did not mean), but she had turned him down. Of all the Bloomsberries, Strachey took precedence (for instance, the Bloomsbury Group began to decline after his own death in 1932).

In 1912 Strachey published his first book, on French literary history, Landmarks in French Literature, designed to awaken English readers to the charms of Racine and French classics. Two years later, World War I broke out. The war was a direct challenge, as Lytton saw it, to Bloomsbury pacifist principles. He managed to be a "conscientious objector" to the war. To the standard question; "If a German soldier tried to rape your sister, what would you do?" Strachey slyly replied; "I would try to interpose my own body." The war was of no consequence to Lytton's endless "partying" in country houses, nor to his writing schedule. He published his major book, Eminent Victorians, in 1918.

"Eminent" in the book's title was satirical. The themes, common to the four biographical sketches of the volume, were the sacred icons of Victorian sentiment: patriotic fervor and Christian messianic zeal, the ideal of the "public" school, and humanitarianism, as opposed to what Strachey thought were the perils of upper-class education, self-interested do-goodism, and, above all, the sins of Victorian imperialism. The four objects of Strachey's satire were Cardinal H. E. Manning, formerly a prominent Anglican member of the Oxford Movement, converted to Catholicism in 1851; Florence Nightingale, the "Lady with the Lamp," a founder of nursing and active with the wounded in the Crimean War; Thomas Arnold of Rugby School; and General C. G. "Chinese" Gordon, the pious hero killed by Mahdi raiders in the siege of Khartoum in 1885.

Strachey's book of polemical essays caused a popular sensation. Almost instantly the postwar era plunged into "anti-Victorianism." The war-weary generation wanted to hear this wholesale assault on past idols. But in his next book, Queen Victoria (1921), Strachey was seduced by his subject. "Mordant irony" was replaced by grudging respect for the queen, even though Strachey felt himself amused by her antics. Seven years later he produced Elizabeth and Essex (1928), a book full of vulgarized Freudianism that tampered with actual Tudor history. Strachey was not a historical revisionist; for that he would have to have been a scholar. He was rather an artist with words.

His biographical creed was to paint a picture of the person from the author's viewpoint - never mind the scholarly inhibitions, never mind the search to find "the truth" of any human situation so far as is possible. He had a "laughing admiration" for the satirists of the 18th century, like Voltaire (1694-1778). He saw religion as Voltaire saw it, as a "ludicrous anachronism." Careers in public service were mainly full of political intrigue. But human relationships were the nexus of life itself. Strachey eschewed the standard "two fat volumes" of Victorian biographies (he saw these tomes as "hagiographies": treatment of the illustrious dead). He favored for himself brief biographies, the art of which rested on the subject's motive and personality as he saw it.

Strachey was fairly tall and excessively thin, with a disguising rust beard and a shrill voice. He wore bookworm spectacles. He had an air of sick, melancholic sadness; he sagged. With true friends he was quick of mind, caustic, and conspicuously, bitingly witty. In addition, he was overtly, ardently homosexual. The conspiracy of public silence by which the Apostles, Bloomsbury Group, and other circles in England kept hidden from the world their sexual proclivities is yet to be studied. Strachey's painstaking biographer, Michael Holroyd, revealed the Strachey letters, laying it all out in two volumes in 1967 and 1968 ("two fat volumes," as Strachey would have said). The Bloomsberries would "jump from sex to sex in making love."

The decline of Strachey's reputation came soon after his death. The humbug of the "eminent" Victorians was an easy target for Strachey to satirize, but it led critics to accuse him of caricature. It is hard for the satirist not to treat the world and its problems as pure comedy. There was an element of theater, of almost pantomime, in Strachey's treatment of the Victorians. One critic in 1931 isolated one word, "preposterous," which Strachey used over and over again, about his stick-figure characters. Leonard Woolf (1960) was on target, when he described the critic as "a strange character."

Irony is one thing; but it conceals too much from the author himself. Strachey was one of the literary influences that partly destroyed the ghost of the Victorian era in the 1920s.

Strachey died of cancer on January 21, 1932, surrounded by his friends, at Ham Spray House, Hungerford. Carrington committed suicide immediately after his death.

Lytton Strachey
A study of Strachey's face and hands by Carrington
Born	1 March 1880(1880-03-01) London
Died	21 January 1932 (aged 51) Ham, Wiltshire
Occupation	Author, critic

Life and career

Youth

Strachey was born on 1 March 1880, at Stowey House, Clapham Common, London, the fifth son and the eleventh child of Lieutenant General Sir Richard Strachey, an officer in the colonial British armed forces, and his 2nd wife, the former Jane Grant, who became a leading supporter of the women's suffrage movement. He was named "Giles Lytton" after an early sixteenth-century Gyles Strachey and the first Earl of Lytton, who had been a friend of Richard Strachey's when he was Viceroy of India in the late 1870s. The Earl of Lytton was also Lytton Strachey's godfather.^[1] The Stracheys had thirteen children in total, ten of whom survived to adulthood, including Lytton's sister Dorothy Strachey.

When Lytton was four years old, the family moved from Stowey House to 69 Lancaster Gate, north of Kensington Gardens.^[2] This would be their home until Sir Richard Strachey retired twenty years later.^[3] Lady Strachey was an enthusiast for languages and literature, making her children perform their own plays and write verse from early ages. She thought that Lytton had potential to become a great artist so she decided that he would receive the best education possible in order to be "enlightened".^[4] By 1887 he had begun the study of French, a culture he would admire during his entire life.^[1]

Strachey was educated at a series of schools, beginning with one at Parkstone, Dorset. This was a small school with a wide range of after class activities, where Strachey would exceed the other students' acting skills, being particularly convincing when portraying female parts. He would even tell his mother how much he liked dressing as a woman in real life so as to confuse and entertain others.^[5] Lady Strachey decided on 1893 that her son should start getting a more serious education, sending him to the Abbotsholme School in Rocester, Derbyshire where students were required to do manual work on a daily basis. Strachey's fragile physique couldn't take it and after few months he was transferred to Leamington College, where he would be victim of savage bullying.^[1]^[6] Sir Richard was tired of his son's delicate personality so he told him to "grin and bear the petty bullying".^[7] Strachey did eventually adapt to the school's life, becoming one of its best students. His health also seemed to improve during the three years he spent at Leamington, although various illnesses continued to plague him.^[8]

When in 1897 Strachey turned 17, Lady Strachey decided that her son was ready to leave school and go to university, but because she thought he was yet too young for Oxford she decided that he should first attend a smaller institution - the University of Liverpool. At Liverpool Strachey befriended his Professor of Modern Literature, Walter Raleigh, who, besides being his favourite lecturer, also became the most influential figure in his life before he went up to Cambridge. In 1899 Strachey took the Christ Church scholarship examination, wanting to get into Oxford's Balliol. The examiners determined that Strachey's academic achievements were not remarkable, plus they were struck by his "shyness and nervousness".^[9] They recommended Lincoln College as a more suitable institution for Strachey, an advice that Lady Strachey took as an insult, deciding then that her son would attend Cambridge's Trinity College instead.^[10]

Cambridge

Sons and daughters of Sir Richard Strachey and Lady Strachey. Left to right: Marjorie, Dorothea, Lytton, Joan Pernel, Oliver, Dick, Ralph, Philippa, Elinor, James.

Strachey was admitted as Pensioner at Trinity College, Cambridge, on 30 September 1899.^[11] He became an Exhibitioner in 1900 and a Scholar in 1902. He won the Chancellor's Medal for English Verse in 1902 and was given a B.A. degree after he had won a second-class in the History Tripos in June 1903. He did not, however, take a leave of Trinity but remained there until October 1905 to work on a thesis which he hoped would gain him a Fellowship.^[1] Strachey was often ill and had to leave Cambridge repeatedly in order to recover from the palpitations that would subdue him.^[12]

The Cambridge period was a happy and productive one in Strachey's life. Among the freshmen at Trinity there were three with whom Strachey soon became closely associated: Clive Bell, Leonard Woolf and Saxon Sydney-Turner. Together with one undergraduate, A. J. Robertson, the five students formed a small society called "The Midnight Society" which, in the opinion of Clive Bell, formed the source of the Bloomsbury Group.^[13] Strachey also belonged to the "Conversazione Society," the famous "Cambridge Apostles" to which Tennyson, Hallam, Maurice, and Sterling had once belonged. The Cambridge period was also one in which Strachey was highly prolific in writing verse, much of which has been preserved and some of which was published at the time. At Cambridge Strachey also became acquainted with other men who would greatly influence him like G. Lowes Dickinson, John Maynard Keynes, Walter Lamb (brother of painter Henry Lamb), George Mallory, Bertrand Russell, and G. E. Moore. Moore's philosophy, with its assumption that the summum bonum lies in achieving a high quality of humanity, in experiencing delectable states of mind, and in intensifying experience by contemplating great works of art, was a particularly important influence.^[1]

In the summer of 1903 Strachey applied for a position in the Education Department of the Civil Service. Even though the letters of recommendation written for him by those under whom he had studied showed that he was held in high esteem by those at Cambridge, he failed to get the appointment and decided to try for a fellowship in Trinity College.^[1] He spent from 1903 to 1905 writing his 400-page thesis on Warren Hastings, which wasn't very well received among the scientists of his time.^[1]

Beginnings of his career

A painting by Carrington of the "Mill House", Tidmarsh, Pangbourne, on the upper Thames, where much of Queen Victoria was written.

When in the autumn of 1905 he left Trinity College, his mother assigned him a bed-sitting room at 69 Lancaster Gate. After the family moved to 67 Belsize Gardens in Hampstead and later to another house in the same street, he was assigned bed-sitters.^[1] But, as he was about to turn 30, family life started irritating him, and he started traveling into the country more often, supporting himself by writing reviews and critical articles for The Spectator and other periodicals. About 1910-11 he spent some time at Saltsjöbaden, near Stockholm in Sweden. In this period he also lived for a while in a cottage on Dartmoor and about 1911-12 spent a whole winter at East Ilsley on the Berkshire Downs. It would be during this time that he decided to grow a beard, which would become his most characteristic feature.^[1] On 9 May 1911, he would write to his mother:

"The chief news is that I have grown a beard! Its color is very much admired, and it is generally considered extremely effective, though some ill-bred persons have been observed to laugh. It is a red-brown of the most approved tint, and makes me look like a French decadent poet—or something equally distinguished."^[14]

In 1911, H. A. L. Fisher, onetime president of the British Academy and of the Board of Education, was in search of someone to write a short, one-volume survey of French literature. Fisher had read one of Strachey's reviews ("Two Frenchmen", Independent Review (1903)) and asked him to write a sketch of French literature in fifty thousand words, giving him J. W. Mackail's 1909 Latin Literature as a model.^[1] Landmarks in French Literature, dedicated to "J[ane] M[aria] S[trachey]," his mother, was published on 12 January 1912. Despite almost a full column of praise in its honor in the The Times Literary Supplement of 1 February and sales, that by April 1914, had reached nearly 12,000 copies in the British Empire and America, the book did not bring Strachey either the fame or the money which he so badly needed.^[1]

Eminent Victorians

Soon after the publication of Landmarks, Strachey's mother and his friend Harry Norton^[15] each provided him with £100 which, together with earning from the Edinburgh Review and from other periodicals, made it possible for him to rent a small, thatched cottage called "The Lacket" outside the village of Lockeridge, near Marlborough in Wiltshire. Here he established himself until 1916. Here also he wrote the first three parts of Eminent Victorians.^[1]

Strachey's theory of biography was now fully developed and mature. He was being greatly influenced by Dostoevsky, whose novels Strachey had been reading and reviewing as they appeared in Constance Garnett's translations. The influence of Freud would also be important on Strachey's later works, most notably on Elizabeth and Essex.^[1]

In 1916 Lytton Strachey was back in London living with his mother at 6 Belsize Park Gardens, Hampstead, whence she had now moved. In the late autumn of 1917, however, his brother Oliver and his friends Harry Norton, John Maynard Keynes, and Saxon Sydney-Turner agreed to pay the rent on "The Mill House" at Tidmarsh, near Pangbourne, Berkshire. After the success of Eminent Victorians, published on 9 May 1918, he needed no help from the outside. He continued to live at Tidmarsh until the proceeds from Queen Victoria (1921) made it possible for him to buy Ham Spray House near Marlborough, Wiltshire, to which he moved in July 1924, and which was his home for the rest of his life.^[1]

At Cambridge he had become close friends with non-Apostles Thoby Stephen and Clive Bell, and they, together with sisters Vanessa and Virginia Stephen (later Bell and Woolf respectively), eventually formed the Bloomsbury group. From 1904 to 1914 Strachey contributed book and drama reviews to The Spectator magazine.

During World War I he applied for recognition as a conscientious objector, but in the event was granted exemption from military service on health grounds. He spent much time with like-minded people such as Lady Ottoline Morrell and the 'Bloomsberries'. His first great success, and his most famous achievement, was Eminent Victorians (1918), a collection of four short biographies of Victorian heroes. This work was followed in the same style by Queen Victoria (1921). He died of (then undiagnosed) stomach cancer at age 51 at his country house, Ham Spray House, at Ham in Wiltshire.

Dora Carrington and Lytton Strachey at Ham Spray

Jonathan Pryce as Strachey, Steven Waddington as Ralph Partridge and Emma Thompson as Dora Carrington in the film Carrington.

Though Strachey spoke openly about his homosexuality with his Bloomsbury friends (he had a relationship with John Maynard Keynes, who also was part of the Bloomsbury group), it was not widely publicised until the late 1960s, in a biography by Michael Holroyd. He had an unusual relationship with the painter Dora Carrington. Allegedly, she loved him; she committed suicide two months after his death, but Strachey was much more interested sexually in her husband Ralph Partridge, as well as in various other young men.^[16] Strachey's letters, edited by Paul Levy, were published in 2005.

Cultural depictions

He was portrayed by Jonathan Pryce in the 1995 film Carrington. The film won a Special Jury Prize at Cannes in 1996, and Pryce won Best Actor at the Cannes Film Festival for his performance as Strachey. Lytton Strachey was also portrayed by James Fleet in the film Al sur de Granada.

Virginia Woolf's husband Leonard Woolf has said that in her experimental novel, The Waves, that "there is something of Lytton in Neville". Lytton is also said to be the inspiration behind the character of St. John Hirst in her novel The Voyage Out. Michael Holroyd also describes Strachey as the inspiration behind Cedric Furber in Wyndham Lewis' The Self-Condemned. In Wyndham's novel The Apes of God, here is seen in the character of Matthew Plunkett, whom Holroyd describes as "a maliciously distorted and hilarious caricature of Lytton".^[17] In the Terminus Note in E.M. Forster's Maurice, Forster remarks that the Cambridge undergraduate Risley in the novel is based on Strachey.

Bibliography

Wikisource has original works written by or about: Lytton Strachey

Academic and biographies

Landmarks in French Literature (1912)
Eminent Victorians: Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Dr. Arnold, General Gordon (1918)
Queen Victoria (1921)
Books and Characters (1922)
Elizabeth and Essex: A Tragic History (1928)
Portraits in Miniature and Other Essays (1931)

Posthumous publications

Characters and Commentaries (ed. James Strachey, 1933)
Spectatorial Essays (ed. James Strachey, 1964)
Ermyntrude and Esmeralda (1969)
Lytton Strachey by Himself: A Self Portrait (ed. Michael Holroyd, 1971) (ISBN 978-0-349-11812-3)
The Really Interesting Question and Other Papers (ed. Paul Levy, 1972)
The Shorter Strachey (ed. Michael Holroyd and Paul Levy, 1980)
The Letters of Lytton Strachey (ed. Paul Levy, 2005) (ISBN 0-670-89112-6)

Notes

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Bloomsbury Group

^ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e ^f ^g ^h ⁱ ^j ^k ^l ^m ⁿ "Lytton Strachey: his mind and art," Charles Richard Sanders. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957.
^ Since May 1959, the Strachey's old home has been part of Douglas House, the large American Forces Club which now occupies Nos. 66-71 Lancaster Gate.
^ "Lytton Strachey: A Biography," Michael Holroyd. Penguin Literary Biographies, 1971. (ISBN 0-374-52465-3)
^ "My Commonplace Book," Mary Stocks. Peter Stocks, 1970.
^ Holroyd, 72-73.
^ Holroyd, 93.
^ Holroyd, 94.
^ Holroyd, 96.
^ Holroyd, 129.
^ Holroyd, 130.
^ Strachey, Giles Lytton in Venn, J. & J. A., Alumni Cantabrigienses, Cambridge University Press, 10 vols, 1922–1958.
^ Holroyd, 147-153.
^ Holroyd, 136-137.
^ The Letters of Lytton Strachey (ed. Paul Levy, 2005) (ISBN 0-670-89112-6)
^ Henry Tertius James Norton, the "H.T.J.N." to whom Eminent Victorians is dedicated. Strachey later paid back the money.
^ Frances Partridge, Bloomsbury groupie - Guardian Unlimited Retrieved on 23 December-2007.
^ Rintoul, M.C. (1993). Dictionary of Real People and Places in Fiction. London: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-05999-2.

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Lytton Strachey

Works by Lytton Strachey at Project Gutenberg
Lincoln Allison (Reader in Politics, University of Warwick) Colourful Eminence - Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians: a Retrospective Review Social Affairs Unit Web Review, July 2005
S. P. Rosenbaum, ‘Strachey, (Giles) Lytton (1880–1932)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, September 2004; online edn, May 2006
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