Macaulay: The Tragedy of Power (review)

A few years after his death in 1859, Thomas Babington Macaulay, the best-known historian of his era and the first ever to be honored with a peerage, was commemorated with a two-volume life and letters biography penned by his nephew George Otto Trevelyan. There were to be briefer pen-portraits in the twentieth century by Arthur Bryant, Joseph Hamburger, Margaret Cruikshank, and Owen Dudley Edwards, but not until John Clive's Macaulay: The Shaping of the Historian (1973) did the once-celebrated parliamentarian, essayist, and poet—as well as the author of The History of England (1848-61)—receive a fully documented modern biography. Yet Clive's book concluded with the year 1837. Then came the six-volume edition of The Letters of Thomas Babington Macaulay (1974-81), edited by Thomas Pinney, and even more recently, the five-volume edition of The Journals of Thomas Babington Macaulay (2008), edited by William Thomas. The journals were made available to scholars only after the 1962 death of the eminent historian George Macaulay Trevelyan, Macaulay's great-nephew.

Robert E. Sullivan's new book is truly the first full and fully documented biography of Macaulay, and no aspect of his meteoric career is left out: the evangelical Clapham Sect family into which he was born; his speeches in favor of the 1832 Great Reform Bill; Ireland; the India that he helped govern; his (largely historical) essays for the Edinburgh Review; his Lays of Ancient Rome (1842) and other poems; the History of England that turned out to be a massive five-volume fragment that, after a long introduction, focused on the reigns of James II and William III . Although Sullivan's book lacks an independent bibliography, he provides eighty-eight pages of endnotes that touch not only on Macaulay's public and private writings but also on just about every book and article with a direct or peripheral connection to his subject. He also amply illustrates the theme that first drew him to Macaulay, a case study on how the latter's profound knowledge of the Greek and Roman classics molded his life and his mental world.

What the author unfortunately does not possess is the ability to distill the vast store of relevant learning that he has accumulated in a manner that readily enables him to place Macaulay in his several contexts. Only a reader already familiar with parliamentary history, the economic and religious assumptions of Macaulay's era, and three centuries of Irish and Indian history can fully appreciate Sullivan's often allusive judgments and apercus; his book is stronger on commentary than on text. Many endnotes, for example, incorporate as many as twenty separate references, making it often extremely difficult to locate the origin of a given statement. Although the story is told in a roughly chronological manner, it often skips back and forth. As the author readily concedes, Macaulay was a master of a form of historical narrative that celebrated England's technological, social, and moral improvement between 1685 and the early Victorian era. Sullivan disdains a narrative approach in his own book, however, as he surveys Macaulay's life. What Sullivan also disdains is Macaulay's self-absorbed personality, his oratory, and his very approach to writing history, as well as Macaulay's attitudes toward religion, political democracy, Ireland, English nationalism, and imperialism.

Thus Sullivan condemns Macaulay for publicly avowing his Christianity, when his "Ciceronian Anglicanism—nonbelieving, nominal but always insisted upon and increasingly visible—guaranteed him respectability," noting that "nationalism became nineteenth-century England's civil religion and Macaulay one of its high priests" (46). Indeed "the religion he wanted for England was Protestantism minus Christianity" (166). The author seems to forget how readily Macaulay fit into the mid-Victorian Broad Church Anglican world. Sullivan also insists that Macaulay has been "widely misunderstood on two continents as an embryonic political liberal" (315). Yet the MP for Leeds and later for Edinburgh favored broadening the franchise...