CLIO REDISCOVERED: Trevelyan

Abstract

[George Macaulay Trevelyan (b. 1876), the grand-nephew of Macaulay, has done more than any other living English writer to restore history to its earlier station as a literary art which instructs and entertains the general public and professionals alike. As a student at Trinity College in Cambridge, Trevelyan was told by the then Regius Professor of Modern History, Sir John Seeley, that Macaulay and Carlyle were charlatans, and this awakened in him an abiding suspicion of “scientific” historians. A prolific writer, his works—from his dissertation on England in the Age of Wycliffe (1899) to his History of England (1926) and his several works on Garibaldi—are mostly literary, narrative histories with a marked bent for social history. He supplemented his research by direct observation, traversing on foot a good part of England and Italy, and retracing in this way Garibaldi’s campaign of 1860. The following essay was originally written as a polemical answer to J. B. Bury’s The Science of History (see preceding selection) and published in December, 1903, in the Independent Review. After Bury’s death, Trevelyan reprinted it, omitting all mention of Bury, as the leading essay in the volume Clio, A Muse (1913), from which the following, somewhat shortened, selection has been taken.]