Eminent Victorians: Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Dr. Arnold, General Gordon by Lytton StracheyMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
Really a remarkable, vintage biography anthology. I really don't care about Cardinal Manning's wrestling with the concept of immaculate conception and his conversion to Catholicism, but Strachey made it all interesting. I wonder how much energy and talent was wasted over the centuries in such theological hair-splitting?
Florence Nightingale is the attention-getting life story. Strachey really elevated here from bedside nurse to social reformer and the mother of all hospital administrators in an impressive career that spanned decades where her will, for good or ill, triumphed in a male-dominated, military and colonial empiure bureaucracy.
Dr. Arnold could have been left out as I would have advised had I been Strachey's editor; too much like Manning's life, another career political theologian.
Major-General Charles George Gordon, also known as Gordon Pasha here, was a fascinating British Army officer and administrator. He saw action in the Crimean War as an officer in the British Army, but this focuses on Service with the Khedive in Equatoria building Egypt's empire in the Great Lakes region and ultimately the Mahdist uprising, the siege of Khartoum, and his principled death refusing rescue without his garrison while Prime Minister William Gladstone neglected military affairs and did not act promptly enough to save the besieged Gordon.
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