"The Historian of the Future": Lytton Strachey and Modernist Historiography between the Two Cultures

This essay explores Lytton Strachey's participation in a central debate in early twentieth-century British historiography, which centered on the question, Is History an art, or a science? As a history student at Cambridge University at the turn of the century, Strachey was keenly attuned to this debate. His participation in it, particularly in a still-unpublished essay, "The Historian of the Future" (1903), helps to illuminate the ethical and aesthetic complexity both of his attitude toward science and of the early development of his innovative approach to biography at a time that saw a widening gap between "scientific" and "artistic" historiography.