In Cardinal Manning's story, the background is the creation of the Oxford Movement and the defection of an influential group of Church of England clergy to the Catholic Church.
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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.
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Each of the lives is very different from the others, although there are common threads - for example the recurrent appearance of William Ewart Gladstone and Arthur Hugh Clough.
However, his reputation suffered as one of the Eminent Victorians in Lytton Strachey's book of that name published in 1918.
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Then in 1918 Lytton Strachey published his critique of Victorianism in the shape of four ironic biographies in Eminent Victorians, which added to the arguments around Bloomsbury that continue to this day, and "brought him the triumph he had always longed for ... The book was a sensation".