Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay
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Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay, PC (25 October 1800 – 28 December 1859) was a British poet, historian and Whig politician and one of the two Members of Parliament for Edinburgh. He wrote extensively as an essayist and reviewer, and on British history.
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[edit] Life
The son and eldest child of Zachary Macaulay, a Scottish Highlander who became a colonial governor and abolitionist, Thomas Macaulay was born in Leicestershire. He was noted as a child prodigy. As a toddler, gazing out the window from his cot at the chimneys of a local factory, he is reputed to have put the question to his mother: "Does the smoke from those chimneys come from the fires of hell?" He was educated at a private school in Hertfordshire and at Trinity College, Cambridge.[1] Whilst at Cambridge he wrote much poetry and won several prizes, including the Chancellor's Gold Medal in June 1821.[2] In 1825 he published a prominent essay on Milton in the Edinburgh Review. In 1826 he was called to the bar but showed more interest in a political than a legal career. It was once rumoured[3] that Macaulay had fallen for Maria Kinnaird, the wealthy ward of "Conversation" Sharp, but in fact he never married and had no children.
[edit] Macaulay as a politician
In 1830 he became a Member of Parliament for the pocket borough of Calne. He made his name with a series of speeches in favour of parliamentary reform, attacking such inequalities as the exclusion of Jews.[2] After the Great Reform Act was passed, he became MP for Leeds.[2]
[edit] India
Macaulay was Secretary to the Board of Control from 1832 until 1833. After the passing of the Government of India Act 1833, he was appointed as the first Law Member of the Governor-General's Council. He went to India in 1834. Serving on the Supreme Council of India between 1834 and 1838 he was instrumental in creating the foundations of bilingual colonial India, by convincing the Governor-General to adopt English as the medium of instruction in higher education, from the sixth year of schooling onwards, rather than Sanskrit or Arabic then used in the institutions supported by the East India Company. His final years in India were devoted to the creation of a Penal Code, as the leading member of the Law Commission.
In the aftermath of the Indian Rebellion of 1857, Macaulay's criminal law proposal was enacted. The Indian Penal Code (1860) was followed by the Criminal Procedure Code, 1872 and the Civil Procedure Code, 1909. The Indian Penal Code was later reproduced in most other British colonies – and to date many of these laws are still in effect in places as far apart as Singapore, Sri Lanka, Nigeria and Zimbabwe.
The term Macaulay's Children is used to refer to people born of Indian ancestry who adopt Western culture as a lifestyle, or display attitudes influenced by colonisers[4]. It is used as a pejorative term, and the connotation is one of disloyalty to one's country and one's heritage. This frame of mind or attitude is also referred to as Macaulayism
The passage to which the term refers is from his Minute on Indian Education, delivered in 1835. It reads,
| “ | It is impossible for us, with our limited means, to attempt to educate the body of the people. We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect. To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the Western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population.[5] | ” |
[edit] Later career
Returning to Britain in 1838, he became MP for Edinburgh. He was made Secretary at War in 1839. After the fall of Lord Melbourne's government Macaulay devoted more time to literary work, but returned to office as Paymaster General in Lord John Russell's administration.
In 1841 Macaulay addressed the issue of copyright law. Macaulay's position, slightly modified, became the basis of copyright law in the English-speaking world for many decades. Macaulay argued that copyright is a monopoly and as such has generally negative effects on society.[6]
In the election of 1847 he lost his seat in Edinburgh. He attributed the loss to the anger of religious zealots over his speech in favour of expanding the annual grant to Maynooth College in Ireland, which trained young men for the Catholic priesthood; some observers also attributed his loss to his neglect of local issues. In 1849 he was elected Rector of the University of Glasgow, a position with no administrative duties, often awarded by the students to men of political or literary fame; he also received the freedom of the city. In 1852, the voters of Edinburgh offered to re-elect him to Parliament. He accepted on the express condition that he need not campaign and would not pledge himself to a position on any political issue. Remarkably, he was elected on those terms. However, he seldom attended the House, due to ill health; indeed his weakness after suffering a heart attack caused him to postpone for several months making his speech of thanks to the Edinburgh voters. He resigned his seat in January, 1856.
Macaulay sat on the committee to decide on subjects from British history to be painted in the new Palace of Westminster. The need to collect reliable portraits of noted figures in British history for this project led to the foundation of the National Portrait Gallery, which was formally established on 2 December 1856. Macaulay was amongst its founder trustees and is honoured as one of only three busts above the main entrance.
He was raised to the Peerage in 1857 as Baron Macaulay, of Rothley in the County of Leicester but seldom attended the House of Lords. His health made work increasingly difficult for him. He died in 1859, leaving his major work, The History of England from the Accession of James the Second incomplete. He was buried in Westminster Abbey.
Macaulay's political writings are famous for their brilliant ringing prose and for its confident, sometimes dogmatic, emphasis on a progressive model of British history, according to which the country threw off superstition, autocracy and confusion to create a balanced constitution and a forward-looking culture combined with freedom of belief and expression. This model of human progress has been called the Whig interpretation of history. This philosophy appears most clearly in the essays Macaulay wrote for the Edinburgh Review. But it is also reflected in the History; the most stirring passages in the work are those that describe the "Glorious Revolution" of 1688. Macaulay's approach has been criticised by later historians for its one-sidedness and its complacency. Karl Marx referred to him as a 'systematic falsifier of history'.[7] His tendency to see history as a drama led him to treat figures whose views he opposed as if they were villains, while characters he approved of were presented as heroes. Macaulay goes to considerable length, for example, to absolve his main hero William III of any responsibility for the Glencoe massacre. On the other hand, this outlook, together with his obvious love of his subject matter and of English civilization, helps to place the reader within the age being described in a personal way that no cold neutrality could, and Macaulay's History is generally recognized as one of the masterpieces of historical writing and a magisterial literary triumph only comparable as such to Gibbon and Michelet.
Macaulay's nephew, Sir George Otto Trevelyan, wrote a best-selling "Life and Letters" of his famous uncle, which is still the best complete life of Macaulay. His great-nephew was the Cambridge historian G. M. Trevelyan.
[edit] Literary works
During his first period out of office he composed Lays of Ancient Rome, a series of very popular ballads about heroic episodes in Roman history. The most famous of them, Horatius, concerns the heroism of Horatius Cocles. It contains the oft-quoted lines:
Then out spake brave Horatius,
The Captain of the Gate:
"To every man upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late.
And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers,
And the temples of his Gods?"
During the 1840s he began work on his most famous work, "The History of England from the Accession of James the Second", publishing the first two volumes in 1848. At first, he had planned to bring his history down to the reign of George III. After publication of his first two volumes, his hope was to complete his work with the death of Queen Anne in 1714. The third and fourth volumes, bringing the history to the Peace of Ryswick, were published in 1855. However, at his death in 1859, he was working on the fifth volume. This, bringing the History down to the death of William III, was prepared for publication by his sister, Lady Trevelyan, after his death.[8]
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[edit] See also
- Whig history Further explains the Whig interpretation of history that Macaulay espoused.
[edit] Notes
- ^ Macaulay, Thomas Babington in Venn, J. & J. A., Alumni Cantabrigienses, Cambridge University Press, 10 vols, 1922–1958.
- ^ a b c William Thomas, ‘Macaulay, Thomas Babington, Baron Macaulay (1800–1859)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, Sept 2004; online edn, Jan 2008 accessed 25 Jan 2008
- ^ Macaulay, Margaret: Recollections (see entry for 22nd November, 1831)
- ^ Think it Over: Macaulay and India's rootless generations
- ^ Macaulay's "minute on education" arguing for the use of English in India
- ^ Macaulay's speeches on copyright law
- ^ Karl Marx, Das Kapital, ch. 27, p.877: "I quote Macaulay, because as a systematic falsifier of history he minimizes facts of this kind as much as possible"
- ^ Macaulay, Thomas Babington, History of England. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1878. Vol. V, title page and prefatory "Memoir of Lord Macaulay".
- ^ a b c d Burke, Bernard (1864). The General Armory of England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. London: Harrison & sons. p. 635.
[edit] Works
- Works by Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay at Project Gutenberg
- 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. [6],[7]
- The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, 4 vols. [8], [9], [10], [11]
- Machiavelli
- The Letters of Thomas Babington Macaulay, 6 vols., edited by Thomas Pinney.
- Macaulay index entry at Poets' Corner
- Lays of Ancient Rome (Complete) at Poets' Corner with an introduction by Bob Blair
[edit] External links
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Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay |
- Thomas Macaulay, "Lord Clive," Edinburgh Review, January 1840.
- Thomas Macaulay, "Warren Hastings." Edinburgh Review, October, 1841.
- Macaulay on Copyright
- Lord Macaulay's Habit of Exaggeration
- Macaulay on copyright law
- Macaulay's Minute revisited: An article in The Hindu, an Indian newspaper
- Thomas Babington Macaulay at Find a Grave
- Thomas Babington Macaulay at Find a Grave (memorial statue, antechapel, Trinity College, Cambridge, UK)
