Macaulay: The Shaping of the Historian
by John Clive
Summary
Thomas Babington Macaulay wrote the most read work of history in the English nineteenth century, and John Clive's biography asks the question a conventional life would skip: what made the historian? The book deliberately covers only the shaping years, from Macaulay's birth in 1800 to his return from India in 1838, before a line of the famous History of England had been written. Clive gives us the prodigy son of a stern evangelical abolitionist, reading endlessly and talking better than anyone in England; the Cambridge debater; the young reviewer whose Edinburgh Review essays made him famous at 25; the member of Parliament whose speeches for the Reform Bill of 1832 made the case for widening British democracy; and the administrator in India, drafting a penal code and the notorious minute on education that ordered English over Sanskrit and Arabic, a document whose consequences the subcontinent still argues about. Clive reads the inner life as carefully as the public one, above all Macaulay's intense attachment to his sisters Hannah and Margaret, whose marriages devastated him, and finds in the private losses part of the engine that drove the History. The method asks patience, since the celebrated masterpiece stays offstage, but the reward is a genuine answer to how a mind gets made. The book won the 1974 National Book Award in Biography, and Clive, a Berlin born refugee from Nazism who became a Harvard professor of history and literature, wrote it with a stylist's ear worthy of his subject. It stands with the best studies ever written of a historian by a historian.
Historical Context & Significance
Clive fled Berlin as a boy named Hans Leo Kleyff, reached America by way of England, and spent his career at Harvard thinking about how history gets written, a preoccupation his essay collection Not by Fact Alone carried on to a National Book Critics Circle award after his death. The Macaulay appeared in 1973, as empire and its records came under new scrutiny, and Clive's unsparing account of the India years gave later postcolonial critics their starting point while keeping the man whole. The 1974 National Book Award recognized a biography that treated the making of a writer as seriously as any battle, and historians still assign it as a model of the form, the rare book about historiography that reads like a life.