Macaulay, Thomas Babington

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MACAULAY, THOMAS BABINGTON

MACAULAY, THOMAS BABINGTON (1800–1859), British politician and historian.

Thomas Babington Macaulay was the precocious eldest son of a Quaker, Selina Mills Macaulay, and the notable Evangelical reformer Zachary Macaulay. A playful, affectionate, humorous man, Macaulay the public figure was combative, cocksure, and fond of exaggeration.

He is best known for his History of England from the Accession of James II. Volumes one and two were published in 1848, three and four in 1855, and the last volume posthumously in 1861. Macaulay thought history should be as interesting as fiction, and his History became nearly as popular as Dickens's novels. It was widely read in the United States and on the Continent. Believing that the lives of ordinary people were as relevant to historical writing as battles, treaties, and great deeds, Macaulay brought to life dramatic, picturesque scenes of the past. As a social historian, he used a range of material besides archival sources, including ballads, pamphlets, and diaries.

The story of seventeenth-century England exemplified for him the gradual progressive movement of history, not only in material improvement but also in extensions of liberty. The timely arrival of William III (r. 1689–1702) represented a "preserving revolution," whereby William became the instrument for restoring both English liberty and English Protestantism. This inherently dramatic story involving the downfall of King James II (r. 1685–1701) lacks the analytic power, however, that the critic Macaulay had recommended in his 1828 Edinburgh Review essay "History."

Macaulay was elected to Parliament in 1830 as a Whig. The party that abolished the slave trade occupied a middle ground between Tories and Radicals that suited him. In eloquent speeches in the House of Commons, Macaulay defended the Reform Bill (that extended political power to the middle class) and advocated grants to a Catholic institution in Ireland, factory legislation, and equal rights for Unitarians and Jews. He also opposed universal suffrage and supported capital punishment.

As a legal member of the Supreme Council of India from 1834 to 1837, Macaulay expressed a comparable range of opinion, disparaging Indian culture, for example, but also supporting a uniform justice system that treated rulers and the ruled alike, and advocating an end to press censorship. He believed India would eventually be free of British rule and acknowledged that coercion was needed to maintain it.

Macaulay's Minute on Indian Education (1835) argued that English should be the language of instruction in India, against Orientalists, who favored Arabic and Sanskrit rather than vernacular languages. Late-twentieth-century postcolonial studies have revived interest in Macaulay's role in this debate. The best account of Macaulay is given by John Clive in the last four chapters of Macaulay: The Shaping of the Historian.

Macaulay's essays fall into two groups: arguments and narratives. His 1825 Edinburgh Review essay on John Milton made him famous. Other polemical essays demonstrate more skill in treating concrete, practical subjects than at analyzing abstract subjects such as political economy. Macaulay used contrasts, allusions, historical analogies, hypothetical cases, and metaphor to make his points. His language was vivid and forceful. "Gladstone on Church and State" (1839), one of his best argumentative essays, cautions against too close a link between the two institutions.

Three notable, long narrative essays are "Lord Clive" (1840), "Warren Hastings" (1841), and "Frederic the Great" (1842). Of the five essays Macaulay contributed to the Encyclopaedia Britannica in the 1850s, "Samuel Johnson" best illustrates his mature style, marked by careful judgments and the ability to sustain a complex narrative.

The antithetical style of Macaulay signals more than word arrangement: it was a way of perceiving, one that showed a strong affinity for order and balance, and an eighteenth-century sensibility. He was also influenced by the Romantic movement. Though sometimes rigid and oversimplifying, his antithetical style imparted special force to aphorisms: for example, "An acre in Middlesex is better than a principality in Utopia."

Macaulay's impressive accomplishments in several fields, including colonial administration, are remarkable. In his own day the preeminent Victorian, Macaulay today is less read than other great nineteenth-century English writers—George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans; 1819–1880), Matthew Arnold (1822–1888), John Ruskin (1819–1900), and John Stuart Mill (1806–1873). One reason is that he often has been represented in texts and anthologies by his poorest work, and by excerpts, rather than whole essays, that obscure his humanism. In addition, modern specialization has made his concept of history as a branch of literature seem obsolete. Nonetheless, some of his opinions, such as his support of women's education, bring him closer to the present. What Macaulay did best, historical narration, he did incomparably well.

See alsoHistory; Liberalism; Whigs.