Strachey developed the idea for Eminent Victorians in 1912, when he was living on occasional journalism and writing dilettante plays and verse for his Bloomsbury friends. He went to live in the country at East Ilsley and started work on a book then called Victorian Silhouettes, containing miniature biographies of a dozen notable Victorian personalities. In November 1912, he wrote to Virginia Woolf that their Victorian predecessors "seem to me a set of mouth bungled hypocrites". After his research into the life of Cardinal Manning, he realised he would have difficulty managing twelve lives. In the following year he moved to Wiltshire, where he stayed until 1915, by which time he had completed half the book.[1] One of the subjects he considered but rejected was Isabella Beeton. He chose not to write about her because he could not find sufficient relevant material.[2]
By then it was wartime, and Strachey's anti-war and anti-conscription activities were taking up his time. He hardened his views and concluded that the Victorian worthies had not just been hypocrites, but that they had bequeathed to his generation the "profoundly evil" system, "by which it is sought to settle international disputes by force".[1]
By 1917, the work was ready for publication and Strachey was put in touch with Geoffrey Whitworth at Chatto & Windus. The critic Frank Arthur Swinnerton was taken with the work and it was published on 9 May 1918, with almost uniformly enthusiastic reviews.[1]
