{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.034991798797156914, 'fraction_numerical': 0.004920721705850191, 'mean_word_length': 5.1, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Eminent Victorians at One Hundred: Introduction

It is a truism now, at the end of the cataclysm’s centenary, to say that World War I marked the birth of a new age. It is less of a commonplace to contend that the Great War occasioned the birth of Victorian studies. The conflict did, however, provide the backdrop for the writing and publication of Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians (1918). The Bloomsbury luminary wrote the four sketches that comprise the text—those of Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Thomas Arnold, and General Gordon—as the Great War unfolded. He sought, in so doing, to reckon with the legacies of nineteenth-century Britain in the context of his own present of twentiethcentury destruction. The unintended result of Strachey’s efforts was a landmark text in Victorian studies, published in 1918. The preface to Strachey’s text begins, “the history of the Victorian Age will never be written: we know too much about it” (5). To meet this seemingly impossible task, Strachey looked to the practice of collective biography. He sought to understand the epoch, in its proximity and vastness, through an assemblage of nineteenth-century lives, or “Victorian silhouettes,” as he initially imagined them (qtd. in Sutherland xii). Ultimately, Strachey settled on four individuals: an ecclesiastic, a heroine, a schoolmaster, and a seeker. Seemingly disparate personages, Strachey’s protagonists were beloved figures who played leading roles in forging a Christian, civilized, martial, and imperial Britain. As he recast their stories for his twentieth-century audience, Strachey sought to unburden his generation of the household gods of the Victorian age. To call into question the legacies of these figures was, thus, to cast stones at the institutions and the causes that propelled the First World War.