Thomas Babington Macaulay

Abstract

Thomas Babington Macaulay (b. 1800–d. 1859) accumulated an unprecedented series of successes—both in sales and critical acclaim—as an English poet, essayist, orator, and, most triumphantly, historian. In addition, he presided over important though controversial reforms in education and law in India and served as a leading politician at home in Parliament and an influential figure abroad for the British East India Company. Like his contemporary and antithesis Thomas Carlyle, to whom he is often contrasted, Macaulay has suffered an equally remarkable descent. In the twenty-first century, much of the shrinking scholarly attention has turned frankly judgmental, especially regarding his role in first helping build and then loudly celebrating a liberal capitalist Britain and British Empire as the then acme (in his eyes) of Western progressive civilization. The question of the reasons for Macaulay’s lifetime successes and posthumous reversals runs through much Macaulay scholarship. The 20th-century turn against grand or totalizing historical narratives, particularly of progress, has produced a context in which Macaulay’s championing of this narrative, indeed his nationalist embodiment of it, has steadily worked against not for him. Considerable scholarly work, moreover, has explored his famously clear, highly rhetorical, and smoothly narrative style—popularizing qualities that originally elevated his fame but soon helped consign him to a sub-canonical status. As his career developed from his essays (mostly novella-length biographies of English literary and political figures), his influential speeches (above all, in support of the First Reform Bill), and his popular historical ballads and thence toward his systematic planning for a long epic history, Macaulay’s aspiration was to join the select club of great narrative historians. The ancient Greek Thucydides emerged as his favorite, and Macaulay seemed poised to become the English Thucydides of the Napoleonic Wars abroad and political reform at home—for both of which he had been an observer and participant. Instead, he designed a far more ambitious project. His History of England, whose sales broke records in England and then America, would sweep from the 17th-century Glorious Revolution to the 19th-century Reform Bill. Such Humean or Gibbonian grandeur combined with cutting-edge novelistic detailing enabled by his archival work proved impossibly ambitious. But here, too, his history’s unfinished state and the story of its evolution have become subjects of fascinating inquiry into Macaulay’s central lifework.