Significance
With the publication of Eminent Victorians, Lytton Strachey set out to breathe life into the Victorian era for future generations to read. Up until this point, as Strachey remarked in the preface, Victorian biographies had been "as familiar as the cortège of the undertaker, and wear the same air of slow, funereal barbarism." Strachey defied the tradition of "two fat volumes....of undigested masses of material" and took aim on the four iconified figures.
British Labour politician Roy Hattersley wrote "Lytton Strachey's elegant, energetic character assassinations destroyed for ever the pretensions of the Victorian age to moral supremacy.".
Read more about this topic: Eminent Victorians
Famous quotes containing the word significance:
“Of what significance the light of day, if it is not the reflection of an inward dawn?—to what purpose is the veil of night withdrawn, if the morning reveals nothing to the soul? It is merely garish and glaring.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The hysterical find too much significance in things. The depressed find too little.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“To grasp the full significance of life is the actor’s duty, to interpret it is his problem, and to express it his dedication.”
—Marlon Brando (b. 1924)