Volume 22, Number 16 · October 16, 1975
The Real Macaulay
By Hugh Trevor-Roper
The Letters of Macaulay Volumes I and II
edited by Thomas Pinney
Cambridge University Press, Vol. II, 383 pp., $31.50 each volume
All the great Victorians are now emerging from their shrouds: from those heavy integuments, those discreet, laudatory, two-volume biographies, in which they were still piously wrapped when they were discovered and insulted by the nimble buzz-flies of Bloomsbury. Macaulay was sealed up for almost a century in the family vault of the Trevelyans in Northumberland, just as Gibbon had been sealed up, body as well as works, in the family vault of the earls of Sheffield in Sussex; and the profane world was allowed to see only so much of them as was thought good by three generations of these hereditary custodians. What was thought good, in the case of Macaulay, was contained in The Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay, published in 1876 by his nephew, Sir George Otto Trevelyan.
Review, 3494 words
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