Macaulay and America

The phenomenon of the precipitate decline in popular and critical favour of writers immensely successful in their own day is a familiar one. In due course, however, it often happens that decline is halted, and replaced by some degree of renewed interest. Nowhere has this pattern been more clearly revealed than in the case of the eminent Victorians: and Macaulay is an obvious example. In the present flourishing state of Victorian studies it is hardly surprising that the great liberal historian should be once again receiving at least some fraction of the attention he was accorded in his nineteenth-century heyday. Two book-length studies have recently appeared: Jane Millgate's Macaulay (1973), in the Routledge Author Guides series, mainly concerned with Macaulay's status as a literary artist, and John Clive's highly praised biographical study, Thomas Babington Macaulay: the Shaping of the Historian (1973). Somewhat earlier, George Levine's The Boundaries of Fiction (1968) had included extended treatment of Macaulay along with Carlyle and Newman, and the early volumes of Thomas Pinney's collected edition of Macaulay's letters were published in 1974. It is perhaps surprising that more attention has not been paid to the evidence for Macaulay's widely-acknowledged, extraordinary American vogue and to the reasons for it.