Volume 40, Number 13 · July 15, 1993
Lyrical Historian
By Blair Worden
G.M. Trevelyan: A Life in History
by David Cannadine
Norton, 288 pp., $32.95
Return to Essentials: Some Reflections of the Present State of Historical Study
by G.R. Elton
Cambridge University Press, 128 pp., $32.95
Rarely does a historian's reputation rise as high and then fall as fast as that of George Macaulay Trevelyan. He was, thought his fellow-scholar V.H. Galbraith, 'probably the most widely read historian in the world: perhaps in the history of the world.' His first best seller, England Under the Stuarts, published in 1904 when he was in his late twenties, would still be the standard textbook nearly sixty years later. Then came the work on which his reputation was built, the trilogy on Garibaldi and the Italian Risorgimento that appeared between 1907 and 1911. His British History in the Nineteenth Century (1922), his brief History of England (1926), and his three-volume England under Queen Anne (1930–1934) confirmed his eminence and made him the nation's unofficial Historian Laureate. The most successful of his major books was the last. English Social History appeared in 1944, and sold more than half a million copies within seven years.
Review, 4344 words
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