Taking Eminent Victorians for granted ……. statues

Now the debate on who we continue to commemorate from the last three centuries rolls on and rightly so.

Prince Albert ..... thinking of Victoria? 2019

It is a discussion which gets to the heart of our past as we reflect on Britain’s involvement with the Slave Trade and Slavery, along with those we choose to see as significant and of course on those who made and wrote our history.*

Not that this is new, reinterpretations of historical events, and people goes on all the time, and one of my favourite such revisions is the book Eminent Victorians by Lytton Strachey published in 1919, which examines the lives, record and reputation of four “Victorian greats”. ** 

James Fraser, looking down on the markets, 2019

They were Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Thomas Arnold and General Charles Gordon.  

Today only Florence Nightingale will be familiar to many people, but back at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries the other three were up there on that pedestal of the good and the inspirational.  

And only Florence Nightingale survived Mr. Strachey’s forensic reexamination of their careers, in what at times is a savage, witty and cynical account.  

Just how savage, witty and cynical he could be I leave you to judge, from the end of his chapter on General Gordon, which having surveyed Gordan’s life and the campaign to avenge his death concludes that “General Gordan had always been a contradictious person – even a little off his head, perhaps, though a hero; and besides he was no longer there to contradict .... At any rate it all ended very happily – in a slaughter of twenty thousand Arabs, a vast addition to the British Empire, and a step in the Peerage for Sir Evelyn Baring”.**

There will be those who will turn their gaze on those public statues here in Manchester, and in the fall out from the Colston case Manchester City Council began weighing up the continued justification for  the presence of some of those “worthies” on our streets and square.*

Sir Robert Peel, 2019

And so drawn purely at random from some of the collection I have taken over the years here are three.

I make no judgements and leave it to others to add sound historical comments and only reflect that these long gone worthies are ingored by most, are the subject to occasional paint vandalism and at certain times of the year look down on the Christmas markets.

Pictures; Prince Albert, James Fraser, Bishop of Manchester, and Sir Robert Peel, Manchester, 2019-20, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

*On that statue of Mr. Colston …..…and thoughts on Annie Kenney, the Sheffield Women of Steel and Totò, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/2020/06/on-that-statue-of-mr-colston-and.html

**D Day ...... AD 43 .......Portrait Of An Age ..... and the death of General Gordan, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/2020/05/d-day-ad-43-portrait-of-age-and-death.html

*** Eminent Victorians, Lytton Strachey, 1918