Returning again to Lytton Strachey

"He never married," David Cecil wrote of Lytton Strachey in his entry for the Dictionary of National Biography supplement for 1931-1940, published in 1949. Colin Matthew used Cecil's statement to illustrate his point that "necessary reticence on the recently dead becomes as time passes not merely misleading but hilarious." Elizabeth and Essex, as malaheed commented on my last post, can be read as saying more about Strachey than his supposed subjects. Strachey moved in intellectual circles where homosexuality was tolerated and accepted - he's been described as turning the Cambridge undergraduate society the Apostles into "more of a homosexual brotherhood than it had been" (S.B. Rosenbaum, 'Strachey, (Giles) Lytton', Oxford DNB) and the narrative of Elizabeth and Essex presupposes same sex attraction throughout.

How far this was an issue with me when I was twelve and first attempted to read the book, I can't remember. I know that I was more interested in the sourcebook of extracts from primary sources which I bought at the same time, Arthur, King of Britain, edited by Richard L. Brengle, and when Strachey baffled and bored, I fell to reading translations of 'Culhwch and Olwen' and Layamon, even though the prose sparkles less. I was certainly annoyed by Strachey's reluctance to give more than a minimum of dates; I'd now add that he isn't greatly attached to the distinction between places beyond the most general, and he's more interested in suggesting unity of place. Elizabeth's England is, for him, 'baroque'; the same is true, really, of Philip's Spain; and Ireland is both a land of savagery and of sylvan pastoral. Not that Strachey is under illusions about the capacity of his Elizabethans to commit atrocities. Essex butchers his way ineptly across Ireland; and Philip II, dying in an aura of holiness if not sanctity, fears that his kingdom suffers because God is angry with him for not burning more heretics. Strachey's writing is poised between historical novel and documentary-sourced history (there are long passages of direct quotation from his subjects' correspondence) and while he expects his reader to recognise this, it's not something I'm that easy with now, and far less so in 1983.

The edition itself is the fourth printing, February 1940, of the Pocket Books edition first published in November 1939. I've scanned the cover as a window into American paperback publishing sixty-six years ago.

This was the twenty-sixth Pocket book, and another couple of pages show where the list stood by February 1940, and the deal Pocket must have cut with the hardback publishers.

I'll stop now before I'm accused (as I frequently was by a friend at school) of being more interested in a book's publication date than in the text itself.

EDIT: Looks as though reading the text on some of the images may cause irreversible eye damage! I'll try again when I'm more awake.