Historical Style and the Man of Letters: Macaulay and Carlyle

Abstract

Focusing on the reception history of Thomas Babington Macaulay’s History of England and Thomas Carlyle’s French Revolution, this chapter rehabilitates prose style as part of a technical discourse that reflects and mediates the domain of historical knowledge production. More specifically, it argues that the stylistic innovations associated with review essays opened official history up to ‘the more visceral language of journalism’, as well as to more idiomatic and anecdotal styles than those sanctioned by the decorous prose of neoclassical history. At the same time, Macaulay and Carlyle’s status as ‘amateur’ reviewers and essayists determined their exclusion from the emerging specialist field of academic history. The chapter concludes, first, that stylistic virtuosity did not negate the gradual and ongoing process of historical specialisation in the period; and second, that we require a looser definition of the ‘professional’ historian in the nineteenth century, one that is detached from the attainment of academic or institutional positions, and which is able to accommodate various historical styles, from the neoclassical and Anglo-British style to Carlyle’s ‘Gothic and Gaelic confection’.