Double vision | 30 January 2010

Thomas Babington Macaulay’s early essays in the Edinburgh Review were an immediate success, and soon made him a respected figure in Whig society.

Thomas Babington Macaulay’s early essays in the Edinburgh Review were an immediate success, and soon made him a respected figure in Whig society. In 1830 Lord Lansdowne offered him a seat in parliament for the rotten borough of Calne. In 1848 he published the first volume of his History of England from the Accession of James II. It was an instant bestseller. He gave his readers a flattering image of themselves. The Whig Revolution of 1688 had made the English ‘the greatest and most highly civilised people that ever the world saw’. By 1857, when he was raised to the peerage, he had become a National Treasure.

Robert Sullivan, in his long and superbly researched book, chips away at this benign image. Macaulay’s letters to his sisters read like love letters, but to regard them as incestuous is absurd. He remained a bachelor not because he mourned the death of Margaret, or pined for Hannah — whom he hoped to keep as his housekeeper in India — but because he was a self-centred man. To his friends he was ‘Cocksure Tom’, an intellectual bully who delighted in defeating all opponents in debate. According to his critic, Carlyle, he was ‘short and rather pot-bellied’. He certainly was incapable of the small talk needed to seduce a woman.

For Sullivan, Macaulay’s relationship with his father was as convoluted as that with his sister, Hannah. Zachary, a leading and pious figure in the Clapham sect of evangelicals, was a heavy-handed father to the infant prodigy who could read at three and was writing poetry and history by the age of five.