The Correspondence of Catharine Macaulay

Abstract

Abstract This edition of all of Catharine Macaulay’s known correspondence includes an introduction to the life, works, and influence of this celebrated, eighteenth-century, republican historian. Through her letters and those of her correspondents it offers a unique glimpse of the connections between radical republicanism and dissent in London, and throws light on the origins of parliamentary reform in Great Britain. Macaulay’s correspondents include many individuals who were active in the lead-up to the American and French Revolutions, others who became involved in the antislavery movement, and yet others who were central to the development of feminism. These letters demonstrate how Macaulay’s history of the seventeenth-century republican period in Great Britain, which she published between 1763 and 1783, encouraged her readers to represent themselves as the heirs of those earlier struggles and to lavish praise on the author as an important defender of their liberties and of the universal rights of mankind. It shows Macaulay and her friends to have been inspired by positive notions of liberty and by ideals of democratic republicanism, thought of as systems of equal government committed to universal benevolence, in which the common good would become the common care.