Macaulay, Thomas Babington ___ 1800-1859 ___ British ___ historian

BIOGRAPHICAL SUMMARY
Macaulay was born in Leicestershire, and studied at Trinity College, Cambridge where he fell in with Lord Grey and Charles Austin, and became interested in utilitarianism. Significantly, his father, Zachary Macaulay, had been a colonial governor and was an active anti-slavery campaigner. After university, Thomas Macaulay began contributing to the 'Edinburgh Review', was called to the bar, and, in 1830, was elected to Parliament (for a pocket borough thanks to Lord Lansdowne), where he distinguished himself as a orator. In the mid-1830s, he went to India to serve on the Supreme Council, apparently because it was a lucrative job and his father was in debt. Partly because of his role in reforming the education system in India and developing the use of English language, people born of Indian ancestry who adopted a Western lifestyle came to be known - disrespectfully - as 'Macaulay's Children'. On his return to Britain, he was elected to Parliament again, this time for Edinburgh, and was appointed Secretary of War in 1839 by Lord Melbourne, a post he held till the fall of Melbourne's government. Thereafter, Macaulay focused on writing a history of England, volumes of which were published to great acclaim between 1848 and 1855. In 1857, Palmerston made him a lord.
A biography link
Wikipedia bio

DIARY DATES, CONTENT DESCRIPTORS
1838-1859 ___ literary political travel Italy

WEB TEXT LINKS
etext
etext
about

ORIGINAL MANUSCRIPT LINKS
Trinity College Library

SOME PUBLISHED TITLES
Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay
The Journals of Thomas Babington Macaulay
 

May 2005, July 2008
Please email if you have any corrections, additions or comments, or if you've found the site useful. Thank you.

IMPORTANT NOTES AND CAUTIONS: 1) The first line of basic information may be incomplete in several ways: some historical figures have different names (titles, pen-names); their birth and death dates may be unknown or uncertain (g - guess, c - circa); similarly, their occupations may be unknown, or they may have had other jobs; and, for early diarists, I've used 'British' a bit too freely. 2) The biographical summary may not be accurate. It was compiled quickly from various sources, mostly on the internet, and the facts were not checked anywhere near as rigorously as they would have been if they'd been intended for publication in a printed form. 3) The journal dates and descriptors (which are in no particular order) must be treated with caution: since I have not examined the diaries myself, the descriptors are only guesses based on bibliographies, anthologies and internet biographies. 4) For the biography and etext links, I have ignored any sites with charges, and I have avoided, wherever possible, those with pop-ups or too much advertising. I have limited myself to providing three etext links where there is some variety between them. 5) For the original manuscript links, I have limited myself to providing a maximum of two (although, for a few diarists, their original diaries are held in more than two places). 6) I have provided the titles - chosen randomly - for up to three printed editions of the diaries.