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San Marino, CA 91108
Rare Books
General Gordon
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- Description
- "The death of Charles George Gordon at Khartoum in 1885 was the signal for a spate of biographies, essays, monographs, and sermons, varying considerably in accuracy and bulk, but all composed in a mood of solemn or ecstatic reverence. Twenty years later the flood of public eulogy had shrunk to a trickle, for the twentieth century was not greatly interested in soldier-saints or Christian warriors. Even the iconoclasts of the 1920's left him severely alone, though their prototype, Lytton Strachey, included him among the Eminent Victorians and contrived in what Lord Elton describes as 'a characteristically feline and unfounded innuendo' to convey the suggestion that Gordon was a drunkard. But Strachey's caricature leaves out just as much as did the cruder full length sketches of the nineteenth century. If Gordon was something a great deal more self-contradictory than the orthodox Christian warrior of the original hagiographers, he was also something much more formidable and much more mysterious than Strachey's pious, tripping Eminent Victorian. His courage was uncanny, his energy boundless; as a ruler of primitive peoples and as a commander of primitive troops, he has few equals in history. His religious unorthodoxies were manifold and strange, yet few have displayed a simpler or a surer faith. Yet with all the qualities, all the defects, and all the achievements--whether of soldier or saint--have been reckoned up, the sum total cannot be said to be, quite simply, soldier-saint. The truth is that there was a further, less easily definable, quality by which every other aspect of Gordon was transfused and on occasion, distorted. He was one of the greatest and one of the strangest in the long line of British eccentrics. Neither the original hagiographers nor the more recent debunkers discovered the real Gordon. Lord Elton's biography, based on the examination of many of hundreds of Gordon's unpublished letters, presents his extraordinary personality, with all its fascinating contradictions, for the first time in the round. It throws new light upon many episodes in his career and contains an enthralling account of the last terrible days of Khartoum and of the hesitations and tergiversations by which Mr. Gladstone's government ensured its fall"--dust jacket.
![[Elizabeth Gordon and Parker family at Gordon residence]](/_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Frail.huntington.org%2FIIIF3%2FImage%2F22APN451P0L9%2Ffull%2F%5E360%2C%2F0%2Fdefault.jpg&w=750&q=75)