G. M. Trevelyan: A Life in History - Softcover

Cannadine, David

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140264825 ISBN 13: 9780140264821

Publisher: Penguin Books, 1998

Synopsis

George Macaulay Trevelyan (18761962) is a name scarcely familiar in most twentieth-century households. Yet during the first half of this century he was the most famous, honored, influential, and widely read historian of his generation. In this compelling volume David Cannadine preserves the memory of this powerful figure in a thoroughly researched biography that draws from a wealth of Trevelyan's own writings and the recollections of those who knew him.

About this title

About the Author

David Cannadine is Moore Collegiate Professor of History at Columbia University.

From Kirkus Reviews

A well-written if not wholly successful effort to revive the reputation of G.M. Trevelyan as a historian. There have been few more born to the craft of history than Trevelyan (1876-1962). A descendant of the English historian Lord Macaulay and the son of historian George Otto Trevelyan, he dedicated himself at an early age to the family tradition. ``The past,'' writes Cannadine (History/Columbia; The Pleasures of the Past, 1989), ``was his inheritance, his passion, his calling, his duty, his art.'' Trevelyan threw himself into it with all the Victorian virtues of his ancestors--stamina, self-discipline, and the appreciation, more common then than now, that history and literature are inseparable. His three-volume life of Garibaldi, his three-volume history of England in the Age of Queen Anne, and his English Social History enjoyed immense sales. In the latter book, he almost pioneered social history or, as he described it, ``the history of the people with the politics left out.'' Cannadine notes that Trevelyan's reputation has been in eclipse for some time: He reflected an earlier era in his belief that the function of history is to illuminate the present in the light of the past, and in his conviction that ``all novelists since Conrad are cads.'' But these ideas, Cannadine notes, arose from ``a mind of remarkable range, power, erudition and creativity,'' and were accompanied by a determination to get inside the minds of his subjects and to see their problems as they saw them. Cannadine doesn't persuade, though, in his attempt to show that Trevelyan's internationalism, constitutionalism, and feeling for the countryside were so emblematic of his era that ``the time in which he lived cannot be properly understood without reference to [his] life and work.'' Cannadine tries hard, but he fails to disprove Trevelyan's own dictum that ``historians, scholars and literary men who have led uneventful and happy lives, seldom afford great subjects for biographies.'' -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0140264825
• ISBN 13: 9780140264821
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 304