The Other Strachey: Part One
Introduction. In a two part previous article I looked at the life of John Strachey, an old Etonian politician, who repeatedly switched his political allegiances and always fell on his feet. Here in this two part article I look at his cousin, the writer (Giles) Lytton Strachey of Eminent Victorians fame.
Orwell and Lytton Strachey. George Orwell first mentioned Lytton Strachey in Inside the Whale (11 March 1940) writing that:
After the War, after Housman and the nature poets, there appears a group of writers of completely different tendency – Joyce, Eliot, Pound Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis, Aldous Huxley, Lytton Strachey.
George Orwell admits that the group these authors represented does not look like a group.
Huxley worshipped Lawrence but was repelled by Joyce, most of the others would have looked down on Huxley, Strachey and Maugham, and Lewis attacked everyone in turn.
Orwell continues that:
With Strachey it is merely a polite eighteenth century scepticism mixed up with a taste for debunking.
In his review of the working class writer Jack Hilton’s book English Ways (The Adelphi, July 1940) Orwell writes that
Lytton Strachey, in his essay on Stendhal remarks that people who have their national characteristics in an exaggerated form are not always approved of by their own countrymen. [Stendhal was the pen name of Marie Henri Beyle a Frenchman who survived Napoleon’s Retreat from Moscow and became a novelist of Le Rouge et le Noir fame.]
Orwell in a 4 June 1943 letter to E. M. Forster wrote that
If this Strachey project falls through, then I think it would be quite a good idea to do the one about Plays, particularly as most of them are of a kind which might be read, if not seen, in India. We could after all return to the Strachey talk another month. [This is a reference to the 1943 Cambridge Rede lecture about Lytton Strachey given by Sir Henry Maximilian Beerbohm a literary critic, parodist and caricaturist.]
On 18 June 1943 Lytton Strachey’s name appears in a list of possible subjects of projected Indian radio talks titled Modern Masterpieces that Orwell sent to William Plomer a South African poet and novelist. On 27 September 1943 Orwell wrote to E. M. Forster:
It will be quite all right for you to do the Lytton Strachey talk on Sunday 3rd October.
Orwell in his 23 June 1944 Tribune, As I Please, column, noted that it was a French habit to vilify dying or recently dead writers. This happened to Anatole France, who was called
… a vulgar, spurious and derivative writer whom everyone could now see through….. Round about the same time similar discoveries were being made about Bernard Shaw and Lytton Strachey: but curiously enough all three writers have remained very readable, while most of their detractors are forgotten.
The 11 October 1945 Manchester Evening News carried Orwell’s review of C. E.Vulliamy’s novel Edwin and Eleanor. George Orwell writes that:
Indeed nearly every aspect of Victorian life has undergone a revaluation during the past ten or twenty years, and one can no longer get a laugh by the mere mention of peg top trousers or the Prince Consort as one could when Lytton Strachey wrote “Eminent Victorians”.
On 11 November 1945 the Observer carried Orwell’s review of an essay collection, compiled by Hsiao Ch’ien, A Harp with a Thousand Strings about China and European attitudes to it. China first came into the general European consciousness about 1600. For more than two centuries it was usually but not always respected and admired. This changed in Victorian times because of the Opium Wars and European exploitation of China. The Chinese were seen as at best quaint and at worst sophisticated but cruel. According to Orwell:
Lytton Strachey’s attitude in the Chinese passages of his essay on Gordon is essentially the same as Lamb’s i.e. amused patronage. [Lamb refers to Charles Lamb’s Dissertation upon Roast Pig about how the Chinese allegedly discovered how to cook roast pork.]
Family Background. (Giles) Lytton Strachey was born on 1 March 1880 at 130 Stowey Street in Clapham, a South London suburb. The birth was registered on 19 May 1880, more than two and a half months later. His parents were Lieutenant General Sir Richard Strachey of the Royal Engineers, sixty two; and Lady Jane Maria Strachey née Grant thirty nine. The baby’s middle name Lytton honoured his godfather Edward Robert Bulwer Lytton, the 1st Earl of Lytton the Viceroy of India.
Lieutenant General Sir Richard Strachey was a fighting soldier; an engineer involved in irrigation projects and railway building; an inventor; and an explorer. In his retirement he was Chairman of the East Indian and the Bengal-Assam Railway Companies.
Richard Strachey’s first wife had died young and childless in 1854. On 4 January 1859, forty one, he married Jane Maria Grant, eighteen, one of the eight children of Sir John Peter Grant, a humane man who was Lieutenant Governor of Bengal 1859-1862, and Governor of Jamaica 1866-1874, and died in 1893 aged eighty six. Lady Jane Maria Strachey gave her husband thirteen children. Five sons and five daughters survived infancy. Sir Richard Strachey was, to quote the Dictionary of National Biography rather detached from his children, isolated by his age and deafness. The children were largely brought up by their mother. Lady Jane Maria Strachey, a feminist, campaigned for women to have the vote; published two children’s books in 1887 and 1893, and Poets on Poets in 1894; and edited her aunt Elizabeth Grant’s Memoirs of a Highland Lady (1898). Lieutenant General Sir Richard Strachey died in 1908, aged ninety and Lady Strachey in 1928, aged eighty eight.
Of the ten of Richard and Jane Strachey’s children who survived infancy four sons and three daughters feature in the Dictionary of National Biography. The other son has a Who Was Who entry.
Apart from Lytton, the other sons were Colonel Richard John Strachey, born 1861, who served in the 1885-1887 2nd Burmese War and died in 1935; Ralph Strachey, born 1868,, who became a Civil Engineer, worked in India, and died in 1923; Oliver Strachey, born 1874, who broke German codes in both World Wars and died in 1960; and James Beaumont Strachey, born 1887, who was nicknamed Uncle Baby, was a psycho-analyst, translated Freud’s works into English; and died in 1967.
The three Lytton Strachey sisters who feature in the Dictionary of National Biography were Dorothy (Dorothea) Bussy née Strachey born 1865 a writer and translator who married a French painter Albert Simone Aimee Bussy in 1903, had one daughter, and died in 1960; Philippa Strachey born 1872 who became a feminist activist and died in 1968; and Joan Pernel Strachey born 1876 who studied French at Newnham College, Cambridge, rose to be its Principal and died in 1951.
Oliver Strachey had one daughter by his first wife but the marriage ended in divorce. He married his second wife Rachel Conn Costello in 1911 and they had two children. Rachel Ray Strachey was a feminist activist and writer. She died in 1940 after an operation for cancer. She too has a Dictionary of National Biography entry.
Education. Lytton Strachey first studied at Parkstone School in Dorset, then in 1893-1894 he studied at Abbotsholme, a Derbyshire school founded in 1889 by the Scottish academic and progressive educationalist Cecil Reddie, an admirer of John Ruskin. It taught pupils English, French and German rather than Latin and Greek; and music and painting were core subjects. Pupils had to do manual work each day. It still exists and since 2017 has been owned by a Chinese company.
Strachey objected to doing manual work because of his frail physique. From 1894 to 1897 he studied at Leamington College at (Royal) Leamington Spa in Warwickshire where he was bullied. It was founded in 1844 and the main building opened in 1848. Dr Henry Jephson, a prominent local figure, of Jephson Gardens fame, laid the foundation stone. It closed due to financial problems in 1902. The building later housed Leamington Grammar School and became a Sixth Form College in 1979. The headmaster of Leamington College Prep School 1894-1897 the Reverend Edward John Bidwell was born in 1866; studied at Bradfield College and Wadham College, Oxford; was ordained in 1892; was Bishop of Ontario 1917-1926; was married with six children; and died in 1941 aged seventy four.
Strachey studied at Liverpool University College 1897-1899. It was founded in 1881. One of his tutors was his cousin Walter Alexander Raleigh, the Professor of Modern Literature there, who was appointed the first Oxford Professor of Modern Literature in 1904; held that post until 1922 being knighted in 1911; was married with five children; and died of typhoid in 1922 aged sixty.
In 1899 Strachey entered Trinity College Cambridge. He graduated with a Second Class Honours History Degree in 1903 but remained at Cambridge until 1905. He met Clive (Arthur Howard) Bell the art and literary critic; Julian Thoby Stephen; Saxon Sydney Turner; and Leonard Woolf the publisher. Lytton Strachey, these men and others founded the Bloomsbury Group which flourished between the wars.
In 1902 Strachey joined the Apostles, a Cambridge clique which included the writer E. M. Forster; the painter and art critic Roger (Elliot) Fry; the economist John Maynard Keynes; the writer and critic Desmond MacCarthy; the philosophers George Edward Moore and Bertrand (Arthur William) Russell; and John Tresidder Sheppard. Strachey, Keynes and Sheppard and others made the Apostles into something of a homosexual coterie but not all its members were gay. Some later joined the Bloomsbury Group including E. M. Forster, Roger Fry, Keynes, and Desmond MacCarthy.
Early Literary Career. Lytton Strachey had written poetry and dialogues at Cambridge and in 1903 wrote a series of review essays on French and English literature for the Independent Review. He also wrote a dissertation on the controversial British Imperialist Warren Hastings, one of the creators of the British Raj. It failed to win Lytton Strachey a Cambridge fellowship and in 1905 Strachey moved to London and had an affair with his cousin, the painter Duncan (James Corrowr) Grant. It ended when Duncan Grant fell in love with John Maynard Keynes. In 1906 trachey’s old Cambridge friend (Julian) Thoby Stephen died, aged twenty five, of typhoid contracted on holiday in Greece.
Thoby Stephen’s death bought Lytton Strachey into close contact with Thoby’s sisters Virginia and Vanessa Stephen. Virginia Stephen, a writer, married Leonard Woolf a publisher, becoming Virginia Woolf. Vanessa Stephen, a painter, married Clive Bell. Thoby, Virginia, Vanessa and Adrian Stephen were the four children of Sir Leslie Stephen by his second wife. Sir Leslie Stephen founded the Dictionary of National Biography.
From 1907 to 1909 Lytton Strachey wrote nearly a hundred unsigned weekly reviews, mostly about the history of English poetry, for his cousin John St Loe Strachey’s Conservative journal the Spectator. Strachey also wrote drama reviews using the pseudonym Ignotus; contributed an appreciation of the French playwright (Jean) Racine to Desmond MacCarthy’s journal The New Quarterly; and wrote a blank verse play about Elizabeth I’s favourite the Earl of Essex (see part two of this article).
In 1910 Strachey became involved in a love triangle with the painter Henry Taylor Lamb; and the literary hostess Ottoline (Violet Anne) Morrell née Cavendish-Bentinck. She was the wife of Philip (Edward) Morrell, a Liberal MP.
In 1911 H. A. L. (Herbert Albert Laurens) Fisher a prominent historian asked Lytton Strachey to write a history of French literature. On 12 January 1912 Oxford University Press published Strachey’s Landmarks of French Literature. It received favourable reviews, including a nearly full column one in the Times Literary Supplement; sold twelve thousand copies in Britain, the British Empire and the USA; but did not make him rich or famous.
Thus ends part one of this article. In part two I will look at Lytton Strachey’s later life.
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