The Other Strachey: Part Two

Introduction. Part one of this article looked at George Orwell’s references to (Giles) Lytton Strachey; and at Lytton Strachey’s life from his birth in Clapham on 1 March 1880, his family background, education, and early literary career and personal life. Here I look at his later life.

The First World War and Eminent Victorians. When the First World War began in August 1914 Lytton Strachey was thirty four. Like many of his friends he was a conscientious objector; but he was not an absolutist pacifist i.e. he did not oppose all wars. A panel member reviewing Strachey’s conscientious objection claim asked what he would do if a Hun was raping one of his sisters. Strachey replied that he would try to put himself between them! He was eventually exempted on medical grounds.

During the First World War Strachey met the painter Dora de Houghton Carrington. She was born in Hereford on 29 March 1893, one of the five children of Samuel Carrington, a railway engineer. Lytton and Dora began an allegedly platonic relationship and in 1917 set up house at Mill House in Tidmarsh in Berkshire.

During the First World War Strachey wrote his most famous book Eminent Victorians, published by Chatto and Windus  in May 1918, the darkest period of the First World War. (John Camden Hotten who founded Chatto and Windus in 1855, died in 1873 aged forty. His business partner Andrew Chatto took over the firm and took William Edward Windus on as a partner. It was renamed Chatto & Windus. It is now part of a publishing conglomerate.)

The Eminent Victorians were

1. Cardinal Henry Edward Manning born in 1808; studied at Harrow and Oxford; and was ordained an Anglican priest becoming Archdeacon of Chichester. He married in 1833. His wife died childless in 1837. He became a Catholic in 1850; and was Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster from 1865 to his death in 1892 aged eighty three.

2. Florence Nightingale was born in Florence in Italy in 1820 hence her name; became a nurse; was famous as The Lady with the Lamp for her work in the Crimean War; helped reform army medical services and created the modern nursing profession; never married; was awarded the Order of Merit in 1907; and died in 1910 aged ninety.

3. Thomas Arnold was born in 1795; educated at Winchester and Oxford; ordained in 1818; married in 1820 and had nine children; and was Headmaster of Rugby from 1827 until his death in 1842 aged 46. He helped create the reformed Victorian public school system and inspired Thomas Hughes’s 1857 novel Tom Brown’s schooldays. Strictly speaking he was a Georgian not a Victorian!

4. Major General Charles George Gordon was born in 1833; commissioned into the Royal Engineers in 1852; served in the Crimean War; helped the Manchu Imperial Chinese government brutally crush the Taiping Rebellion; served in Egypt and the Sudan; in 1884 was sent to Khartoum as Governor General of the Sudan; and was killed by the Mahdi’s Islamist rebels in Khartoum in January 1885 aged fifty one.

Eminent Victorians looked at these three men and one woman realistically. It described Cardinal Manning’s clashes with Cardinal John Henry Newman who, like Manning, was an Anglican priest who had converted to Catholicism. They disagreed over various issues such as papal infallibility.

Strachey portrayed Florence Nightingale not as the saintly Lady with the Lamp but as the hard driving obsessive reformer who created the modern nursing profession. It is instructive to compare it to the French hospital Orwell was unfortunate enough to be in. Lytton Strachey wrote that Nightingale wanted Indian hospital windows kept open in the hot weather to admit fresh air. Doctors in India objected but this plan seemed likely to go ahead until, to her horror, her friend John Laird Mair Lawrence, the Viceroy of India, vetoed it. Many people reading this would see Strachey siding with the British Raj authorities against a reformer as a paradoxical reversal of the usual stereotype.

Thomas Arnold is criticised for putting teaching Christian virtues first, character second and secular knowledge third. Although he introduced modern languages and mathematics to the Rugby curriculum he refused to introduce science.

Major General Gordon was particularly fond of Boys especially street urchins and boy sailors. He was kind to them and his behaviour may have been innocent. In this period anal intercourse carried a penalty of life imprisonment with hard labour; but lower level homosexual acts were legal until 1885 when Section Eleven of the Criminal Law Amendment Act criminalised them.

Eminent Victorians got massive publicity and mixed reviews in Britain, the British Empire and the USA. The philosopher and journalist William Leonard Courtney in the Friday 24 May 1918 Daily Telegraph wrote: though Mr Strachey is very polite and complimentary he cannot conceal his opinions that nineteenth century heroes and heroines were odd and portentous aberrations, strange animals to be watched behind bars in the social menageries.

The American author and journalist William Fletcher Johnson wrote in the Saturday 14 December 1918 New York Tribune: we receive Mr Strachey’s volume with gratitude and joy. For he is himself a true Victorian though posthumous. He enters truly into the very spirit of the mighty men and women of that age and writes of them with the same authority of letters, the exquisite felicity of style, and the blending of wit and wisdom by which they themselves were distinguished.

Eminent Victorians sold more than three million copies worldwide making a fortune for Lytton Strachey and Chatto and Windus. Many older people were horrified but most of the educated younger generation welcomed it. The tale of military and political bungling that led to Gordon’s death was poignant during the First World War. Some of those horrified by this book were the type who had sneered at Thomas Arnold, and regarded Cardinals Manning and Newman as apostates.

With hindsight there are other legitimate criticisms of Eminent Victorians. Strachey used only secondary sources, usually relying on one printed source; was a plagiarist; and made glaring typos. He opens his chapter on Manning by writing that Manning was born in 1807. In fact he was born in 1808.  The revised online Dictionary of National Biography lists Strachey as a source for its Florence Nightingale entry. He is not listed as one for its entries for his other three subjects.

Major Partridge. In 1918 Major Reginald Sherring Frank Partridge twenty four, a First World War Military Cross winner, moved to live with Strachey and Dora Carrington at Mill House. Frank Partridge known in Bloomsbury circles as the Major, worked for Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press and in 1921 married Dora Carrington. The marriage was childless. The Partridges and Strachey lived together.

Queen Victoria. Chatto and Windus published Lytton Strachey’s next book Queen Victoria in 1921. It took her off her pedestal but was kinder to her than he had been to his four Eminent Victorians. Either he had mellowed or he and his publishers knew that discretion is the better part of valour.

In 1922 Chatto and Windus published Strachey’s fourth book Books and Characters: French & English. It look at various English and French literary figures including William Blake, Jean Racine, (Francois Marie Arouet) Voltaire and some less remembered names.

Ham Spray House. Lytton Strachey and the Partridges moved to Ham Spray House near Hungerford in Wiltshire in 1924. Strachey was much in demand socially and maintained his Bloomsbury friendships.

Lytton Strachey had several relationships with young men including the Honourable Philip Charles Thomson Ritchie, a First World War veteran; George Humphrey Wolferstan Dadie Rylands a literary scholar and theatre director; and Roger Henry Pocklington Senhouse, a publisher and translator. The Lytton Strachey-Roger Senhouse affair was sado-masochistic.

Dora Partridge née Carrington also had affairs. So did her husband Major Partridge, whose affairs included a long standing one with Frances Catherine Marshall a diarist and author. Life at Ham Spray House was often tense.

Elizabeth and Essex a Tragic History (Chatto & Windus, 1928) was based on Lytton Strachey’s earlier work (see part one). He looked at Elizabeth I’s relationship with her favourite Robert Devereux the 2^nd Earl of Essex. They fell out, Essex rebelled against her and was beheaded in 1601. Elizabeth I is portrayed as an aging renaissance queen and Essex as a young medieval nobleman. There are ironic descriptions of peripheral figures in the story such as Phillip II of Spain, Francis Bacon, Robert Cecil and Sir Walter Raleigh.

On Sunday 25 November 1928 the Observer printed John Collings Squire’s review of Elizabeth and Essex. It was very favourable. George Orwell disliked Squire and sneered at him (see my earlier article about Squire on this website); and would not have been impressed by a favourable review from Squire.

Elizabeth and Essex inspired (Edward) Benjamin Britten’s three act opera Gloriana. It was first performed at the Royal Opera House in London on 8 June 1953 six days after Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation. The then young Elizabeth II and her husband Prince Philip were in the audience. So were many foreign dignitaries who had watched the coronation.

Portraits in Miniature. In 1931 Chatto and Windus published Portraits in Miniature, a collection of some of the critical and biographical works Lytton Strachey had written for the journals The New Statesman, The Nation and Life and Letters. It contained many lives including those of six English historians – Thomas Carlyle, Bishop Mandell Creighton, James Anthony Froude, Edward Gibbon, David Hume and Thomas Babington Macaulay the 1^st Lord Macaulay.

The End. On 21 January 1932 Lytton Strachey, fifty one, died of stomach cancer at his home Ham Spray House in Hungerford District in Wiltshire. His sister in law Rachel Ray Strachey informed the authorities of his death. His estate was initially valued at £8,362 10s 3d but was revalued at £9,655 3s 1d. Probate went to his younger brother James Beaumont Strachey.

Lytton Strachey’s will made in 1929 had bequeathed £10,000 to Dora Partridge née Carrington, to whom he also left all his pictures and drawings; £1,000 to Major Reginald Sherring Frank Partridge; those books in Lytton Strachey’s collection published before 1841 to Roger Senhouse; and to anyone Lytton Strachey had made a personal loan to the value of the money owed. Probably some of his investments had lost value during the Great Depression.

Dora Carrington committed suicide by shooting herself on 11 March 1932 aged thirty eight. Her husband Major Reginald Frank Partridge married his long standing mistress Frances Catherine Marshall aged thirty five in 1933. They were to have one son Lytton Burgo Partridge born in 1935. Major Partridge died in 1960 aged sixty six. Lytton Burgo Partridge died in 1963 aged twenty eight. He was married and was survived by a daughter.

Frances Catherine Partridge née Marshall died on 5 February 2004 aged a hundred and three the last survivor of the Bloomsbury Group. She was survived by her granddaughter.

After Life. Chatto and Windus assisted by Lytton Strachey’s younger brother James Strachey brought out a posthumous collection of Lytton Strachey’s essays in 1933. It was titled Characters and Commentaries.

Much has since been written about Lytton Strachey but his books except Eminent Victorians are often out of print. The main focus of interest has been on his private life especially since the laws against homosexuality were repealed. This is true for most of the Bloomsbury Group.