The Title
The deep and broad use of irony throughout the book begins with the cover. The title itself is intended as an ironic statement regarding the contents. Although Florence Nightingale comes off much better than the others, even her motivations are presented as a full portrait that include negative as well as positive characteristics. The other three main figures, however, unquestionably suffer from a diminishment of their previous eminence.
General Charles George Gordon
The biography of General Gordon moves relentlessly toward the explosion of irony which brings it to an end. It is somewhat fitting this line draws things to a close as it sums up the ironic tapestry of the Victorian Age in which the main figure here—Gordon—dies in the end:
“At any rate, it had all ended very happily–in a glorious slaughter of 20,000 Arabs, a vast addition to the British Empire, and a step in the Peerage for Sir Evelyn Baring.”
Ironic Humor (Rough Version)
Ironic humor can range across a wide variety of tones. An example of the roughest sort arrives with the assertion of opinion toward Thomas Cranmer held by Oxford Movement leader Hurrell Froude. Thomas Cranmer—not to be confused with Thomas Cromwell, made famous again courtesy of the book and miniseries Wolf Hall—the Archbishop of Canterbury who laid the foundation for Henry VIII to secure an annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon. He was subsequent executed by fire. Noted Froude:
“The only good I know of Cranmer was that he burned well.”
Dr. Arnold
The chapter devoted to alleged education reformer, Thomas Arnold, ends with an ironic bang to his expected legacy. As headmaster of Rugby School, Arnold instituted reforms that focused less on intellectual pursuits than on instill moral discipline and respect for authority. Strachey points out ironic chasm between Arnold’s intent to transform British education into one founded on Old Testament moality and the reality of being the founder of the worship of athletics and good form:
“Upon those two poles our public schools have turned for so long that we have almost come to believe that such is their essential nature, and that an English public schoolboy who wears the wrong clothes and takes no interest in football, is a contradiction in terms.”
The Bison vs. the Lady
The Bison was Lord Panmure was the British Secretary of State who earned his nickname because of a reputation of being a stout, sturdy and utterly unmovable stubborn object when he wanted his way. The Lady is Florence Nightingale, a thirty-something woman in the lowly position of nurse. The Crimean War brought them together and placed them into direct opposition with each other over various issues. The irony is not only that the Lady got her way, but that she found a way to continually do so because the Bison’s reputation disguised the profoundly ironic truth of that it had:
“the hide of a Mexican buffalo, but the spirit...of an Alderney calf.”
