Macaulay (Author Guides)

As essayist, critic, poet and historian Lord Macaulay is prominent in the literary history of early Victorian England. But he also played an extremely important part, as politician, statesman and imperial administrator, in the political history of the period. He enjoyed an extraordinary success in many different fields of activity, and touched the life and literature of his time at more points than perhaps any other figure.
The present study explores important aspects of the interrelationship between Macaulay's literary and political careers, sets his achievements as an author within the context of his achievements as a public man, and examines some of the sources of his popularity and success. In doing so, it draws extensively on Macaulay's journals and other papers at Trinity College, Cambridge, and elsewhere. The emphases of the book are critical not biographical, its essential aims the exploration of the range and quality of Macaulay's writing and the demonstration of the validity of continuing to approach him -- above all in the mature essays and the History of England -- as a major narrative artist.
The author, Jane Millgate, was born in Yorkshire and educated at the Universities of Leeds and Kent. Since 1964 she has taught English at Victoria College, University of Toronto. Dr. Millgate is the author of articles on Macaulay and on a number of other nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers, including Thackeray and Charlotte Bronte.