by Doug Munro
Independent Review ( IR), 5 (1905), 231–40; Trevelyan, Clio, a Muse, and Other Essays Literary and Pedestrian (London: Longmans, Green, 1913), 56–81.
10 Barbara Caine, Bombay to Bloomsbury: A Biography of the Strachey Family (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 3; Leonard Woolf, Sowing: An Autobiography of the Years 1880–1904
(London: Hogarth Press, 1960), 190.
11 John St Loe Strachey, The Adventure of Living: A Subjective Autobiography (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1922), ch. 3; ‘Sutton Court’, Country Life, 45 (1910), 22 January 1910; Sir Edward Strachey, Materials to Serve for a History of the Strachey Family, ed. John St Loe Strachey (London: Office of The Spectator, 1899); Charles Richard Sanders, The Strachey Family, 1588–1932: Their Writings and Literary Associations (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1953), 28–40; W.C.
Lubenow, ‘Authority, Honour and the Strachey Family’, Historical Research, 76:194 (2003), 511–34.
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of Rothiemurchus. Here, too, there was the whiff of vanished ancestral
real estate, and Jane Grant’s debt-encumbered forebears had to seek fame
and fortune in the Empire, above all, in India. The Stracheys, too, had
become primarily an Anglo-Indian family: servants of the East India
Company and the Raj, ‘continuously from the days of Clive and Hastings’
– its colonial officials, army officers, engineers, railway builders, explorers,
cartographers, meteorologists, historians and scientific collectors. Among
them were Lytton’s uncle, Sir John, acting Viceroy and finance minister
during the 1870s, and Lieutenant General Sir Richard Strachey, Lytton’s
father, who, ‘in length of service and variety of his claims to distinction’,
was described as ‘the most remarkable of the Stracheys who for four
generations … ha[d] given to India the best portion of their lives’.
In 1872, shortly after what he intended as a final return from India, the
family acquired its first permanent home, Stowey House, a Georgian
mansion, on Clapham Common, once the home of James Stephen,
a leading member of the sect. Here, in 1880, Lytton was born. His
birthplace, though clearly not of his choosing, was ironically emblematic
– enough to prompt an absurdly tendentious essay on the decline
of Victorian values by Gertrude Himmelfarb: ‘From Clapham to
Bloomsbury: A genealogy of Morals’.12 But, in 1884, the family moved
to Lancaster Gate – in Bayswater, known for its colonial connections as
‘Little India’. And Sir Richard, though greatly admired by Lytton, by now
67, was cut off from his younger children by age, deafness and outside
interests: a kindly but remote, olympian figure.13
Thus, the household Lytton inhabited for quarter of a century was
dominated by his mother, Jane, and his unwed sisters, Dorothy, Pippa,
Pernel and Marjorie. Intelligent, cultured, independent women, they
did much to nurture Lytton’s knowledge and love of literature. But they
overindulged the sickly lad. Perhaps that was the trouble: to Lytton, the
female, nursing-home atmosphere of Bemax and Dr Gregory’s Rhubarb
Oil was claustrophobic and inhibiting. But it was also wonderfully
stimulating and reassuring. There were many Victorian worlds. And
alongside his father’s world of technological, scientific and scholarly
advancement was the mince, quince and runcible spoon world of Edward
Lear: what Leon Edel, in a deft evocation of Lytton’s childhood, describes
12 Gertrude Himmelfarb, Marriage and Morals among the Victorians (New York: Knopf, 1986), 23–49.
13 Caine, Bombay to Bloomsbury, 68–9; Holroyd, LSNB, 5–6.
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CLIo'S LIvES
as ‘a verbal world, an eternal nursery’ where he danced, dressed up,
wrote and acted plays with his sisters, or played ‘Blue Fly’ to his mother’s
‘Bumble Bee’.14
The Trevelyans too were, by origin, an ancient West Country gentry
family. For centuries they had lived at Nettlecombe Court, a honeystoned
Elizabethan country house with an estate of 20,000 acres in South
Somerset. Here, they perennially served as knights of the Shire – Country
Tories, obscure, independent, invariably out of office. Then a series of
fortuitous marriages, inheritances that included Wallington and three
generations of administrative, political and cultural distinction raised
them above the common run of squires. Trevelyan’s grandfather, Charles
Edward, who inherited Wallington from a cousin, was an energetic, self-
made civil service mandarin, so unbending as to be pilloried by Anthony
Trollope in the character of ‘Sir Gregory Hardlines’.15 An ardent liberal
reformer, he helped transform India’s trade and education, presided over
Irish Famine relief, initiated the rebuilding of Whitehall and authored the
famous Northcote–Trevelyan report, British public administration’s ‘Bill
of Rights’.16 Life for him was a battlefield, where the forces of altruistic
moral progress constantly had to be mobilised against tradition and vested
interest. Even more important than his embattled reformist imprint was
his marriage to Hannah, beloved sister to Thomas Macaulay, the essayist
and historian. Over the years, Macaulay became virtually a member of the
family, sharing their house in Calcutta and at Western Lodge on Clapham
Common. Living next door to the hallowed ‘Battersea Rise’ – into the
1850s the shrine of progressive Evangelicalism – the Trevelyan household
was closer in spirit to the original ‘Saints’ than were the later inhabitants
of Stowey House.17
14 Holroyd, LSNB, 18ff; Leon Edel, Bloomsbury: A House of Lions (London: Hogarth Press, 1979), 35; Lytton Strachey, correspondence with Jane Strachey 1885–1897, with frequent insect greetings, HRHC, Strachey Mss, Box 3, folders 7–8; Box 4, folder 1; Box 5, folders 3–5.
15 G.M. Trevelyan, An Autobiography and Other Essays, 1–5; Laura Trevelyan, A Very British Family: The Trevelyans and their World (London: I.B. Taurus, 2006), 8, 12–15, 24–25; Anthony Trollope, The Three Clerks: A Novel (London: Richard Bentley, 1858).
16 The Northcote–Trevelyan Report of 1854 established the DNA of the modern civil service:
recruitment by competitive examination, a graded hierarchy and promotion on merit.
17 John Clive, Macaulay: The Shaping of the Historian (New York: Knopf, 1973), 316–18, 344, 351–3; Humphrey Trevelyan, Public and Private (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1980); Christopher Tolley, Domestic Biography: The Legacy of Evangelicalism in Four Nineteenth-Century Families (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 196–219, doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198206514.001.0001;
L. Trevelyan, A Very British Family, 32–7.
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7 . INTERSECTING AND CoNTRASTING LIvES
Yet Charles’s son, George Otto, proved an oblique specimen of evangelical
descent: ‘a hearty Protestant’, he inherited his father’s reforming zeal and his
uncle’s bookishness. But he ‘did not understand Christianity’. Described
as ‘a busy pushing man … for ever writing, speaking, questioning …
ready with remedies for all things’, George Otto was a leading Liberal
who enjoyed high office in all four Gladstone governments. Yet he never
quite decided whether to be a ‘stormy’ reformer after the manner of his
father, or an orthodox Whig like Uncle To
m. He loved the House of
Commons, but shied away from the drudgery of political office. Life was
too easy; he loved Wallington; he was wealthy and he spread himself thin.
A gifted polymath, part politician, part historian, part biographer, a clever
versifier, accomplished essayist and classicist, he had, he said, ‘a craving
for literature, like … some people for drink’. He had inherited his uncle’s
narrative skill, to which he added a classical refinement and aristocratic
sensibility: qualities evident in all he wrote, from The Competition Wallah,
his critical sociology of Anglo-Indian manners after the Mutiny, and
Cawnpore, his horror narrative of 1857, to his fond recreation of the
world of eighteenth-century Whig politics in The Early History of Charles
James Fox, and his multi-volumed The American Revolution. Best of all was his 900-page Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay, perhaps the finest
Victorian biography.18
As the setting of George Otto’s first writings indicated, in the nineteenth
century the Trevelyans also had become an Anglo-Indian family. In three
tours of duty spanning the period from 1826 to 1865, Charles Edward
served as First Assistant to the Resident in Delhi, private secretary to the
Governor-General in Calcutta, Governor of Madras and eventually Finance
Minister for the whole Raj. During his last years on the subcontinent
from 1862 to 1865, he and Hannah lived next door to Colonel Richard
Strachey, then Secretary for Public Works. Charles thought him ‘sanguine,
ambitious and strongly disposed to partisanship’.19 Their politics were
very different. As political advisor to the evangelistic Governor-General,
Lord William Bentinck, in the 1830s, Trevelyan became a crusader for
the replacement of traditional Hindu and Muslim beliefs by Christianity,
18 G.M. Trevelyan, George Otto Trevelyan: A Memoir (London: Longmans, Green, 1932), 20–2; G.O. Trevelyan, The Competition Wallah (London: Macmillan, 1864); G.O. Trevelyan, Cawnpore (London: Macmillan, 1865); G.O. Trevelyan, The Early History of Charles James Fox (London: Longmans, Green, 1881); G.O. Trevelyan, The American Revolution (London: Longmans, Green, 1899); G.O. Trevelyan, Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay (London: Longmans, Green, 1876).
19 Raleigh Trevelyan, The Golden Oriole: A 200-Year History of an English Family in India (London: Secker & Warburg, 1987), 411–12, 436.
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of indigenous learning by western scholarship and of native vernaculars
by English. Cured of superstition and error, ‘trained by us to happiness
and independence, and endowed with our learning and institutions’,
Indians, he believed, would learn to govern themselves, and ‘we shall
exchange profitable subjects for still more profitable allies’.20
Richard Strachey, by contrast, was typical of the new breed of technocrats
who dominated the Raj after the Mutiny. If institutional and educational
reform had been the galvanising principle of British rule in the 1830s,
modernisation and territorial consolidation were those of the following
decades. The system after 1857 was stiffer, more remote: its watchwords
control, efficiency, hierarchy and difference rather than reform, progress
and assimilation. The downward filtration expectations of the Bentinck era
were now seen as a delusion. Far more useful to the imperial project than
evangelical teachers, seeking to inculcate ‘the diffusive benevolence’ of
British education, were the builders and modernisers of India’s economic
infrastructure that would underpin its prosperity under the rule of Viceroys
such as the Tory Lord Lytton, after whom Lytton Strachey was named.21
So, in the 1870s, as the Trevelyans reaffirmed the Whig vision of Indian
self-development and self-government, the Stracheys and their friends
restated their belief in enlightened colonial despotism. ‘The only hope
for India’, Sir John Strachey wrote in 1903, was ‘the long continuance
of the benevolent but strong government of Englishmen’: an ‘illusion
of permanence’ accepted by the family till 1914.22
20 R. Trevelyan, The Golden Oriole, 139–58, 214–15, 285–7, 326; Charles E. Trevelyan, On the Education of the People of India (London: Longman, 1838); Eric Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959).
21 Thomas R. Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj: The New Cambridge History of India, Vol. 3, Part 4
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 66–159.
22 C. Trevelyan, House of Commons, Select Committee on East Indian Finances, The Times,
31 July 1873; Letters on The Famine in Bengal, The Times, 27 November 1873; G.O. Trevelyan, The Competition Wallah; James Fitzjames Stephen, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity (dedicated to Sir John Strachey; London: Smith Elder, 1873), xix–xx; Sir John Strachey, India: Its Administration and Progress (3rd ed., with new preface; London: Macmillan, 1903) x–xi; Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj, 206–11; Ranbir Vohra, The Making of India: A Political History (New York: Armonk, 2014), 87; Francis G.
Hutchins, The Illusion of Permanence: The British in India (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1967), doi.org/10.1515/9781400879649. The family repeatedly stated this belief up to 1914: Lytton Strachey, ‘The First Earl of Lytton’, IR, 12 (March 1907), 332–8; Strachey, ‘The Guides’, Spectator, 15 August 1908; Lady Jane Strachey, ‘That India Should Not Be Allowed Self-Government’, Speech to Lyceum Club, 15 March 1910, quoted in Caine, Bombay to Bloomsbury, 49–50; Joan Pernel to S, 1 March 1914, BL, Add.Ms., 60,726, f. 4.
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The Trevelyan household, like the Stracheys’, was a happy one. But it was
also masculine and highly politicised. If Lytton was, to some degree, ‘made
feminine by the femininity of his environment’, Trevelyan was made ‘manly’
by his. Instead of sisters, he had brothers; instead of amateur theatricals,
they played Napoleonic war games; they spent hours of outdoor activities
on the estate and they walked on a heroic scale. For George especially,
mountain walking was a regular tonic and a spiritual experience: ‘the best
means whereby a man might regain possession of his own soul, by rejoining
him in sacred union with nature’. Every Easter from 1899, the ‘Trevies’ and
their friends went on ‘The Man Hunt’, a five-day game of fellside running,
scrambling and sleeping rough in the Lake District, devised by George in
an attempt to recreate the excitements of the great chase in Robert Louis
Stevenson’s Kidnapped.23 Yet the brothers – Charles the radical politician,
Robert the classicist, and George the historian – were no philistines.
Admittedly, they had no small talk. They lectured one another; they were
abrupt, plain-speaking, often rude. But they also recited and wrote poetry.
George started serious writing at eight with a biographical collage of British
leaders in the Napoleonic wars, and at school he composed enormous
sub-Tennysonian verse epics on ‘Columbus’, ‘Sir John Franklin’, and
‘The Prophet’ or ‘A Song of the People’.24
By upbringing and education, as well as lineage, George Trevelyan belonged
far more decisively than Lytton Strachey to the political elite. Fol owing his
brothers, he was sent to Wixenford, an exclusive preparatory school where
the headmaster was a distant
cousin of the great Dr Arnold. He went then
to Harrow, where his history teacher and housemaster Edward Bowen –
author of Harrow’s school songs – was a close family friend. The school,
remodelled after the pattern of Arnold’s Rugby, was at the peak of its
prestige, having already produced five nineteenth-century prime ministers.
But, by the 1880s, Harrow had also become a High Tory preserve, and
Trevelyan’s politics were radical Liberal. When he was not in the library
immersed in Ruskin, Shelley and Tennyson, or in his study, ‘keeping the
23 Cannadine, Trevelyan, 144, 146; Mary Moorman, George Macaulay Trevelyan: A Memoir by his Daughter (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1980), 68–70; G.M. Trevelyan, ‘Walking’, in Clio, A Muse and Other Essays, 1–19, esp. 3–4; R.C. Trevelyan, Windfalls: Notes and Essays (London: Allen
& Unwin, 1944); Alan Hankinson, Geoffrey Winthrop Young: Poet, Mountaineer, Educator (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1995), 45–6.
24 Trevelyan’s school poetry can be found in Prolusiones … Scholae Harroviensis (Harrow: Privately Printed, 1892), 51–5; ibid. (1893), 31–44, 54–59; precis of poems in The Harrovian, 18 February, 5 July 1893; Christopher Tyerman, A History of Harrow School, 1324–1991 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 355–70, doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198227960.001.0001.
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flame of [his] liberalism bright in this dark corner’, he was firing off daily
screeds to brother Charles, about ‘true democracy’, ‘the gospel of the poor’,
and ‘the progress of the human race’, signing his letters ‘God Save Ireland’,
‘God Save the People’, or GSI and GSP, for short. But saving Ireland or the
People was not Harrow’s line, and Trevelyan found himself ‘the democratic
exception in this high-class establishment’. As a militant agnostic he also
refused to take Confirmation – a refusal the headmaster responded to,
he said, ‘with a religious bigotry worthy of Ignatius Loyola’.25
Lytton’s schooling, apart from a brief stint at Marie Souvestre’s academy,
where his French and English literary skills were nurtured, was less select
and fortunate. There was Abbotsholme, a spartan, religiose establishment,