Lord macaulay education policy 1835

WORKS BY MACAULAY

WORKS ABOUT MACAULAY

Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–1859), English historian, essayist, and politician, was born at Rothley Temple, Leicestershire. His father, Zachary, one of the leading members of the “Clapham sect,” was a stern evangelical who fought unremittingly for the abolition first of the slave trade and then of slavery itself. Macaulay's mother was the daughter of a Quaker bookseller and herself a devout evangelical. Thus, the young Macaulay, an astonishingly precocious boy, grew up in an atmosphere of piety, introspection, and humanitarian endeavor. He absorbed and retained the moral and ethical imperatives inculcated upon him; but much to the chagrin of his father, he never underwent a conversion experience and always remained wary of the emotional excesses, cant, and hypocrisy to which an experiential religion so easily lends itself.

At Trinity College, Cambridge, he distinguished himself as a classicist and a poet. He became a fellow of the college in 1824. While at the university, he triumphed as an orator in the Union Debating Society and began his brilliant career as an essayist. In the latter role, he first made his mark with his essay “Milton,” which appeared in the Edinburgh Review of October 1825 ([1825–1844] 1963, vol. 1, pp. 150-194). It was indeed appropriate that in that essay, which made him famous overnight, he should have taken his place on the libertarian side of seventeenth-century English politics. Although Macaulay had been a mild Tory when he entered the university, he was a staunch Whig when he left, and in many ways his political stance was derived from his study of the constitutional conflicts of the seventeenth century.

In “Milton” and subsequent writings he transferred the theme of those conflicts to the decade of struggle between Whig and Tory before the passage of the Reform Act of 1832.

His early essays in the Edinburgh Review are richly caparisoned with wit, paradox, and antithesis, but as Bagehot justly remarked, “Macaulay is anything but a mere rhetorical writer, there is a very hard kernel of business in him.” What gave his writings this “kernel of business” was his sturdy common sense, his fondness for Baconian induction, his suspicion of system making and idees revues, and his ability to get to the root of the matter. These characteristics led him on occasion to anticipate some of the insights of twentieth-century social science; the results are still well worth sampling in some of his articles: “Thoughts on the Advancement of Academic Education in England” (1826), in which he presented a well-argued case against the collegiate system of Oxford and Cambridge and for a nonresidential university in an urban setting; “Social and Industrial Capacities of Negroes”; (1827), in which Macaulay saw the roots of the Negro problem as fundamentally social and economic rather than in any sense innately “racial” “Machiavelli” (The Works of Lord

Macaulay, vol. 7, pp. 63-113), which, as Paul Lazarsfeld has pointed out (1957), contains an account of what is probably the first projective test recorded in the literature; “History” (Works, vol. 7, pp. 167-220), which makes an excellent case for writing the history of societies as a whole, rather than of wars, battles, diplomacy, and politics; “Mill on Government” (Works, vol. 7, pp. 327-371), which argues against the utilitarian theory of government persuasively enough to have convinced John Stuart Mill himself; and “Civil Disabilities of the Jews” (Works, vol. 8, pp. 1-17), which brilliantly places the problem of anti-Semitism into a historical context.

Macaulay was elected to Parliament in 1830. His speeches in favor of the Reform Bill in 1831 and 1832 gained him immense repute as an orator and secured for him, an outsider who lacked both wealth and noble birth, entry into the strongholds of Whig society. For him parliamentary reform was not merely a matter of expediency, although, to be sure, he emphasized that the aristocracy had better make timely political concessions to the middle classes if it wanted to avoid revolution. Reform was, rather, the latest inevitable stage in a series of historical developments that had resulted in a more widespread distribution of property, great increase of wealth, ever greater triumphs of science and industry, and a steady progress from rudeness to refinement. In other words, the Reform Act was merely one way of bringing political arrangements into alignment with an advancing state of society.

In 1834 Macaulay went to India as a member of the governor's Supreme Council. His personal motive for going was to make himself financially independent. In India he made two significant contributions. In 1835 he wrote the historic and still controversial “Minute on Indian Education” ([1831–1853] 1935, pp. 345-361), which proposed English as the principal language of instruction for any national system of education in India, so that Western science, culture, and technology could more easily be transmitted. And he was largely responsible for drawing up a uniform Indian penal code in 1837. Its substance was the English criminal law. Revised by Sir Barnes Peacock, it went into operation in 1862.

In 1838 Macaulay returned to England, and it was in the course of that year that he began seriously to plan his major literary work, which eventually appeared under the title The History of England, From the Accession of James the Second,. .. (1848–1861). He remained active in politics, was Secretary at War from 1839 to 1841, and sat in Parliament for most of the rest of his life.

The first two volumes of the History came out late in 1848, and it was appropriate that a work celebrating the bloodless revolution of 1688 and the establishment of English constitutional stability should make its appearance in the course of a year that had seen revolutionary violence on the continent of Europe, but not in England. In his History Macaulay showed himself to be a master of historical narrative.

The tour de force of the History is undoubtedly “England in 1685,” the first volume's famous third chapter which in the space of 150 pages surveys the nation's geography, population, resources, means of transport, and varied social classes and their occupations, as well as its army, navy, science, literature, and press. It is descriptive rather than analytical social history. Still, of its kind and of its time it remains a magnificent achievement.

The History of England is not without its defects. Macaulay's historical imagination was strong but limited. He approached the past from the vantage point of a more glorious present. He was, as S. R. Gardiner pointed out, a better judge of situations than of character. There are some distortions. But those who expect to find in the History a naively stated parti pris will look in vain.

The popular success of the History (volumes 3 and 4 appeared in 1855, a fifth volume posthumously in 1861) was immense and constituted a unique publishing phenomenon in nineteenth-century England. It appealed to the pride as well as the prejudices of its purchasers and was read with both pleasure and profit by an ever-growing literate public. In historiographical terms it marked, as Leopold von Ranke observed, the triumph of the Whig view of seventeenth-century English history over the Tory view, articulated by David Hume. But the recent tendency to categorize and then dismiss Macaulay as a “mere” Whig historian is giving way to a more balanced sense of his achievement.

Macaulay was awarded a peerage in 1857, the first English historian to be so honored.

John Clive

[For the historical context of Macaulay's work, see History,article onSocial History.!

WORKS BY MACAULAY

(1825–1844) 1963 Critical and Historical Essays. 2 vols. New York: Dutton.

1826 Thoughts on the Advancement of Academic Education in England.Edinburgh Review 43:315–341. → Published anonymously.

1827 [Social and Industrial Capacities of Negroes.] Edinburgh Review 45:383–423. → An anonymously published review of four papers.

(1831–1853) 1935 Speeches by Lord Macaulay, With His “Minute on Indian Education.” Selected with an introduction and notes by G. M. Young. Oxford Univ. Press.

(1835–1837) 1946 Lord Macaulay's Legislative Minutes. Selected with a historical introduction by C. D. Dhaker. Oxford

Univ. Press.

(1848–1861) 1913–1915 The History of England, From the Accession of James the Second,. .. . Edited by Charles Harding Firth. 6 vols. London: Macmillan.

The Works of Lord Macaulay. Albany edition, 12 vols London: Longmans, 1898. →Volumes 1-6: History of

England. Volumes 7-10: Essays and Biographies. Volumes 11-12: Speeches, Poems and Miscellaneous Writings.

WORKS ABOUT MACAULAY

Bagehot, Walter (1856) 1950 Thomas Babington Macaulay. Volume 2, pages 198–232 in Walter Bagehot, Literary Studies. New York: Dutton.

Beatty, Richmond C. 1938 Lord Macaulay: Victorian Liberal. Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press.

Bryant, Arthur 1933 Macaulay. London: Davies.

Clive, John 1960 Macaulay's Historical Imagination. Review of English Literature 1, no. 4:20-28.

Firth, Charles H. (1938) 1964 A Commentary on Macaulay's History of England. New York: Barnes & Noble.

Gladstone, William E. (1876) 1879 Macaulay. Pages 265–341 in William E. Gladstone,Gleanings of Past Years: 1843–1878. Volume 1: Personal and Literary. London: Murray.

Lazarsfeld, Paul F. 1957 The Historian and the Pollster. Pages 242–262 in Mirra Komarovsky (editor), Common Frontiers of the Social Sciences. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press.

Paget, John 1861 The New “Examen”: Or, an Inquiry Into the Evidence Relating to Certain Passages in Lord Macaulay's History Concerning I. The Duke of Marlborough; II. The Massacre of Glencoe; III. The Highlands of Scotland; IV. Viscount Dundee; V. William Penn. Edinburgh and London: Blackwood.

Stephen, Leslie (1876) 1904 Macaulay. Volume 3, pages 227–271 in Leslie Stephen, Hours in a Library. New York and London: Putnam.

Trevelyan, George O. (1876) 1932 The Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay. Oxford Univ. Press.