Thomas Babington Macaulay

Thomas Babington Macaulay - J. H. Plumb On the day in November 1848 when the first volume of Macaulay's History of Eng/and appeared, Ludgate Hill was jammed with carriages struggling to get to Messrs. Longman in Paternoster Row. Three thousand copies were sold in ten days and the pace began to increase rather than slacken. The time came when Robert Longman pressed a cheque for £.20,000 on Macaulay on the grounds that he had too much money in his own account. At a guinea a volume this was a prodigious achievement for Victorian times. Although Macaulay naturally thought well of his work, its public reception astonished even him. The reviews were almost uniformly as eulogistic as they were lengthy, but the book was far more than a success of metropolitan literary society. "At Duckinfield, near Manchester, a gentleman who thought that there would be a certain selfishness in keeping so great a pleasure to himself, invited his poorer neighbours to attend every evening after their work was finished, and read the History aloud to them from beginning to end. At the close of the last meeting, one of the audience rose, and moved, in north country fashion, a vote of thanks to Mr. Macaulay 'for having written a history which working men can understand.'''1 His success at Windsor was as great as at Manchester. The Prince Consort was so deeply impressed by his book that he immediately offered Macaulay the vacant chair of Modem History at Cambridge, which Macaulay immediately declined on the grounds that if he were to lecture well he would be forced to give up his History. And if he were to write the History, his lectures would be bad. Some years later, Queen Victoria recognized Macaulay's unique position in English life and letters by making him a peer-the first writer to achieve such a distinction. It is obvious from the great financial rewards and public honours which Macaulay's literary works brought him that he wrote very much what his time and generation wished to read. Certainly his own sympathy with his age was greater than that commonly found amongst the 17 18 J. H. PLUMB great historians. Gibbon who, alone of English historians, can be compared with Macaulay to the latter'S disadvantage, offended a considerable section of his reading public by his ironic treatment of the mysteries of the Christian religion. Although perfectly in harmony with the philosophic attitude of the Enlightenment, Gibbon displayed a complete detachment from the aspirations and ideals of the active part of the nation to which he belonged. Macaulay, however, was totally involved in his age--in it he found an echoing response to his own boundless energy and eupeptic confidence. Indeed, it is remarkable how closely Macaulay's character mirrors the strength and weakness of the early Victorian period. And his success must partly lie in the fact that the men and women who read him so eagerly, felt as he felt and believed as he believed: his truth was their truth. That this was so is also borne out by the fact that Macaulay now seems not only far below Gibbon in quality and achievement, but also below Michelet, below Burkhardt, even below Ranke. He lacked the range of Gibbon, the imagination of Michelet, the penetration of Burkhardt, and the wisdom of Ranke. Nor has his scholarship worn so well as theirs.' Even so, his qualities still claim for him a place amongst the great historians of the nineteenth century. It is likely that he will always maintain that place, and always be quite widely read. For this reason: in temperament he was very close to a fairly common variety of human personality. To make this clear, Macaulay and his time need to be described in a little more detail. n He was born October 25, 1800, the son of Zachary Macaulay who had recently returned from West Africa where he had been in charge of the settlement of freed slaves at Freetown. Zachary was an evangelical, a member of the Clapham Sect, one of the Saints, a man of formidable and relentless piety. Equally formidable and equally relentless was his industry...