Top Boy

Thomas Babington Macaulay, the great historian of England, loved words and loved to write. Most of his writing was carefully crafted, his essays, his Lays of Ancient Rome, and the History of England revised and rewritten for maximum effect. The speeches, that he rewrote for publication, sparkle with their rhetoric. His letters, magnificently edited over years by Thomas Pinney, demonstrate a range of styles and emotions, from the piteous epistles of the homesick child, to the confident statements of the successful public man, the evocations of a colonial encounter in India and the tormented cries of the brother who feels himself abandoned by his beloved sisters. The publication of his journals is to be greatly welcomed, for it gives us access to Macaulay's most spontaneous writing. Even these, however, are self-censored, with Greek used, for example, for material he considered indelicate. He clearly had other readers in mind and it was no secret to his sister Hannah and her family that the journals existed. They have been carefully preserved in the library of Trinity College Cambridge, along with many other Macaulay manuscripts. Trinity was his college. His nephew, George Otto Trevelyan, laudatory composer of his Life and Letters (1876) which drew extensively on the journals, followed him there. His great-nephew, George Macaulay Trevelyan, the third in the line of renowned historians, became the Master of the college. For a long period access to the journals was very restricted, G. M. Trevelyan taking the view that private life was private and that he was not going to have his admired great-uncle exposed to unfriendly gaze, particularly that of Bloomsbury. Now they have been carefully edited and published with extensive notes, a labour of scholarly love by William Thomas, building on the work of Robert Robson. The five volumes make available, as Thomas puts it, the 'private history and … personal qualities of the man: aggressive, bullying and passionate underneath the prim manner, deeply self-centred and self-pitying; but also marvellously articulate, learned, widely read and wise, truly an extraordinary man' (p. xxviii). A leading intellectual historian of the early nineteenth century, Thomas has been a Macaulay scholar for many years, his The Quarrel of Macaulay and Croker (2000) a major fruit of that work. Now there is this edition of the journals, truly a gift to anyone interested in this spectacularly successful historian.

Macaulay kept the journals on and off between October 1838, when he had just returned from his sojourn in India aged thirty-eight, and his death in December 1859. There are no entries between June 1840 and the end of 1848, a time when he was twice in the Whig cabinet, and writing the first volumes of the History. There are long periods after that when he wrote little, either because he was preoccupied with his public life, or because his writerly imagination was totally absorbed in his history. In his earlier years letters to his favourite sisters, Hannah and Margaret, were his most intimate expressions of feeling. In the later years, long after the death of Margaret and when he was, for much of the time, in almost daily contact with Hannah, the journals provide the best insights we have into his states of mind. Macaulay loved to re-read his old journals himself, 'No kind of reading is so delightful, so fascinating', he wrote, 'as this minute history of a man's self' (7 Jan. 1856, IV, p. 233).

Perhaps, for readers of History Workshop Journal, one of the most interesting aspects of these journals is the reflections on the practice of the historian. Tom Macaulay was a very brilliant child and expected from his earliest years to do great things. His father, the leading abolitionist Zachary Macaulay, 'felt if he could only add his own morale, his unwearied industry, his...