Thomas Babington Macaulay

Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay of Rothley, (1800-1859) was a leading British essayist, historian, and statesman, best known for his vivid style and brilliant Whiggish interpretation of the English Civil War of the 17th century, and for his successful work to modernize education and society in India through the English language.

Career

His father, businessman Zachary Macaulay, was active in the Clapham Sect of the Church of England, a noted enemy of slavery, and editor of the "Christian Observer". The precocious boy with a powerful memory was educated at two small private schools. Avidly devoted to literature, he nevertheless did not win honors at Trinity College, Cambridge University, because of his weakness at mathematics. He won two college poetry prizes and in 1824 he was awarded a Trinity Fellowship at the very handsome rate of £300 a year. He needed the money for his father's business had failed and he was the breadwinner for the family. He took law courses but never practiced.

Writer

Macaulay began his writing career with essays in Britain's literary reviews and antislavery magazines. In 1825 his essay on Milton in the prestigious Edinburgh Review won overnight recognition. Readers thrilled at his original style--exciting, vigorous, and trenchant-- which he was later perfected and which has made a permanent impact on English and American prose.

Politics

After serving as a commissioner in bankruptcy from 1828 to 1830, Macaulay became a Member of Parliament for the "pocket borough" of Calne in the latter year, and was a vigorous supporter of parliamentary reform. The power and eloquence of his oratory won widespread admiration, helped the passage of the Reform Bill of 1832, and--combined with his conversational brilliance --made him a center of Whig political and social life in fashionable London circles.

Macaulay was an all-purpose reformer with his hand in many causes. For example on 5 April 1830, he delivered a powerful maiden speech in Parliament favoring a bill to extend full civil rights to British Jews. His January 1831 article in the Whig Edinburgh Review drew attention for its strength and clarity on the issue, as did a speech in Commons in 1833, supporting a second attempt to pass the bill. Macaulay favored granting Jews the same status as Protestant Dissenters and, more recently, Roman Catholics. He opposed all theological or religious tests for citizenship or the holding of public office.

India

Appointed first a member and then secretary of the board of control of Indian affairs, in 1832 he was elected to Parliament as Whig member for Leeds. His Cambridge University fellowship had come to an end in 1831, and he now depended upon this official income to support the family and pay off his father's debts. Yet, at a time when he had been forced to sell his Cambridge prize medals, he offered to resign in opposition to an inadequate government plan to liberate slaves in the West Indies; the plan was changed, however, and his resignation was not accepted. In December 1833 he accepted appointment to the Supreme Council of India at a salary of £10,000 a year for five years. He moved to India. He is given credit for the official introduction of English education in India, especially though his famous minute of February 1835. It replaced Persian by English as the official legan and political language, and required the use of English as the medium of instruction in all institutions of learning, and the training of English-speaking Indians as teachers. Macaulay's role was controversial for at the time there were two competing positions. The Indian gentry, as well as the strivers seeking upward mobility into the middle class demanded English language education. The ywere opposed by a reactionary Indian faction that wanted schools to teach using the vernacular (native) languages, who joined with British Orientalists who rejected the need for English education. Macaulay thus won the day for one element of Indian society. To this day Indian elites know English, although it was never widespread among the Indian people.

Essentially a Londoner, he felt keenly the pangs of exile, despite the comfort of his sister Hannah's presence and the knowledge that he was saving his family from want. A £10,000 legacy from an uncle enabled him to leave India after three and one-half years, during which time he had taken a leading part in putting the English language foremost in Indian education and, almost single-handed, had drafted the Indian Penal Code which became law in 1860.

Politics

Back in London in 1838, he was elected to Parliament for Edinburgh in 1839, serving in Melbourne's cabinet as secretary of state for war until 1841, when the government was defeated. When the Whigs were returned to power in 1846 he became paymaster general, a less onerous post. Defeated for reelection in 1847, he was spontaneously chosen by Edinburgh in July 1852, although he was not a candidate. At this time he was stricken by a heart illness from which he never fully recovered. He resigned his seat in 1856 and in the following year was made Baron Macaulay of Rothley.

History

During these years he turned increasingly to writing. In 1838 he began his monumental History of England from the Revolution of 1688. He also wrote twenty-seven essays between 1825 and 1844 for the Edinburgh Review. His Lays of Ancient Rome (1842) and the republication of his Edinburgh Critical and Historical Essays (1843) enhanced his renown. The first two volumes of the History of England, published in 1848, were an immediate success. In 1849 he was elected lord rector of Glasgow University, an honorary post. He published his collected Speeches in 1854, and the third and fourth volumes of the History in 1855. The fifth volume, left unfinished, was published posthumously in 1861.

His in-depth coverage of a critical 17 years from 1685 to 1702 contributed to a definition of the English nation with a special mission of civilization.

Macaulay sought to emulate and expand upon Sir Walter Scott's method of historical presentation as seen in the immensely popular novel, Waverley. In his ambitious History of England Macaulay sought to use Scott's approach to enliven and attract a large readership to his historical text, which did achieve great popularity for several decades following its publication. A comparison of the depiction of Scottish Highlanders in Scott and Macaulay reveals much about their origins and political bias. While Waverley remains readable today, interest in Macaulay's History has faded due to its overwhelming Whig bias and the preference for dispassionate analysis.

One weakness was a failure to appreciate the the Enlightenment as a major philosophical movement. He did not grasp its essentially cosmopolitan spirit, the mutual fecundation of ideas coming from various parts of the world, and the important role played by the Orient in the evolution of ideas. Nor did he recognize the struggle between the writers and the political regimes under which they lived.

Evaluation

Macaulay died in London on Dec. 28, 1859, and was buried in Westminster Abbey.

More than anyone else, the true Whig party principles were expressed by Francis Jeffrey, the editor of the Edinburgh Review, and that magazine's most notable contributor, Macaulay. Surprisingly, Macaulay rejected moral conscience in political decisionmaking, best shown in his ridicule of the Nonconformists and of assertive Catholicism. He also criticized secular factions who introduced morality into politics. Politics meant protecting the center from the extremes, as illustrated by the Reform Bill. Macaulay's Machiavellianism had a long-range ill effect on the Whigs as a party by leaving no room for morality.

Edward Gibbon (1737-94) and Macaulay were the two most famous English historians before 1850. A number of superficial similarities and differences are apparent. For example, Macaulay frowned upon indecency, while Gibbon relished in bawdy scenes. Both men were fat, considered ugly, and unmarried. Neither could get along with his father. But in a deeper analysis, other parallels and divergences can be discerned. Gibbon asked for a respect for scholarship and attempted to use history as a science of human nature, while Macaulay stressed narrative art and a new kind of social history. Both historians were popular, and they both sought to amuse and to teach. Macaulay in particular felt that the lessons of the past could instruct the future. They had different prose styles; Macaulay was straightforward, while Gibbon was ironic and elliptical. Gibbon wrote for upper middle class circles, Macaulay for a more popular audience.

Neither deeply philosophical nor religious, but gifted with immense learning and robust common sense, generous, staunchly liberal, emotionally affectionate in his family circle, Macaulay was an example to his age. Few writers have had greater power than he to stimulate literary interests.

Further reading

• Clive, John. Macaulay: The Shaping of the Historian (1974), ends in 1839
• Edwards, Owen Dudley. Macaulay (1989). 182 pp.
• Hamburger, Joseph. Macaulay and the Whig Tradition (1976)

Works

• Macaulay, Thomas Babington. The Letters of Thomas Babington Macaulay, edited by Thomas Pinney, (6 vol 1981) primary sources
  • Lays of Ancient Rome
  • The History of England from the Accession of James II, 5 vols. (1848) [1], [2], [3], [4], [5]
  • Critical and Historical Essays, 2 vols., edited by Alexander James Grieve. vol 1,vol 2
  • The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, 4 vols. vol 1, vol 2, vol 3, vol 4