End of General Gordon (By Lytton Strachey) Critical Analysis General Gordon

End Of Gordon :
Frederick William Pomeroy's "General Gordon's Tomb at St. Paul's Cathedral, London." Frederick William Pomeroy's General Gordon Tomb (1857-1924). Rudolph von Slatin, one of the Mahdi's prisoners, was shown Gordon's head when it was brought to Omdurman. The head was presented to Slatin before being given to the Mahdi. Some stories claim that Gordon's body was thrown into the Nile. Numerous initiatives were made to find Gordon's remains after the reconquest.
The End of General Gordon,” the last of Lytton Strachey’s portraits in Eminent Victorians, is a story governed, at its end, by the telegraph. In a mere eighty pages, the words “telegram” and “telegraph” in their various forms appear thirty-three times, dominating the action as the story—and General Gordon’s life—hurtle to a close. Every turn or advancement of the “plot” is marked by either the presence or absence of a telegram as the situation in the Sudan comes to a head. Gordon sends Lord Baring “a whole flock of telegrams” and “a great pile of telegrams”, “pour [in]” his thoughts into them until it became “clear that the wire between Khartoum and Cairo had been severed”. Even once that line is severed, Gordon “fill[s] the empty telegraph forms with the agitations of his spirit, overflowing ever more hurriedly, more furiously”. And then, of course, there are the telegrams unread, the telegrams unsent and unwritten, the telegrams that are published in the papers to be read by the public and—only belatedly—by Mr. Gladstone. It is through the device of the telegraph—and the approach of modernization it hails—that Strachey thematizes the issue of speed which becomes not only central to the dénouement of the portrait, but to Strachey’s criticism of the Victorians.
Perhaps the most memorable character in Strachey’s portrait—after Gordon himself—is Lord Hartington, whose late sketch in the story serves to draw into focus the issues which Strachey has been developing throughout. “Lord Hartington was slow,” Strachey informs the reader, designating this the characteristic that is “the essential expression” of “all the rest”. “He was slow in movement, slow in apprehension, slow in thought and the communication of thought, slow to decide, and slow to act” and it is this slowness which Strachey figures as the ultimate reason for the debacle that was Gordon’s defeat and death in the Sudan. “The fate of General Gordon, so intricately interwoven with such a mass of complicated circumstances was finally determined by the fact that Lord Hartington was slow” , Strachey writes. But not only was Lord Hartington slow, he was slow “in the best English manner” and thus “too late”. One might as well substitute “Victorian” for English here. Lord Hartington becomes the episode’s consummate Victorian as Strachey proceeds, having eviscerated his character, to detail the “seven stages” of Hartington’s slowness: a description which reads as a condemnation of both bureaucracy (“the ponderous machinery” of the British government, of the cabinet) and of the slowly plodding progress of the Victorian mind as it becomes slowly aware of its own convictions and conscience.

• Conclusion :

Strachey's views on General Gordon are convincing and strategically presented. There is no doubt that he was a man of knighthood (principled and intelligent) but he was a man, a man of egoistic errors. The arguments put forth by Strachey on General Gordon are solid and well-timed. He was without a doubt a gentleman principled and educated), but he was still a man, a man with egoistic flaws.