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Macaulay and America

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

Andrew Hook
Andrew Hook
Affiliation:
University of Aberdeen
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Extract

The phenomenon of the precipitate decline in popular and critical favour of writers immensely successful in their own day is a familiar one. In due course, however, it often happens that decline is halted, and replaced by some degree of renewed interest. Nowhere has this pattern been more clearly revealed than in the case of the eminent Victorians: and Macaulay is an obvious example. In the present flourishing state of Victorian studies it is hardly surprising that the great liberal historian should be once again receiving at least some fraction of the attention he was accorded in his nineteenth-century heyday. Two book-length studies have recently appeared: Jane Millgate's Macaulay (1973), in the Routledge Author Guides series, mainly concerned with Macaulay's status as a literary artist, and John Clive's highly praised biographical study, Thomas Babington Macaulay: the Shaping of the Historian (1973). Somewhat earlier, George Levine's The Boundaries of Fiction (1968) had included extended treatment of Macaulay along with Carlyle and Newman, and the early volumes of Thomas Pinney's collected edition of Macaulay's letters were published in 1974. It is perhaps surprising that more attention has not been paid to the evidence for Macaulay's widely-acknowledged, extraordinary American vogue and to the reasons for it.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 9 , Issue 3 , December 1975 , pp. 335 - 346
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1975

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References

1 Clark, Harry Hayden's article ‘The Vogue of Macaulay in America’, Transactions of the Wisconsin Academy 34 (1942), 237–92Google Scholar, provides an essential starting-point for any reconsideration of the topic. Although I do not share all of Professor Clark's views, my debt to his researches is considerable.

2 Hilen, Andrew (ed.), The Letters of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (Cambridge, Mass., 1972), III, 524Google Scholar.

3 Howells, W. D., My Literary Passions (New York, 1895), pp. 116–17Google Scholar.

4 Alcott, Louisa M., An Old-Fashioned Girl (London, 1949), p. 51Google Scholar.

5 Clark, op. cit., p. 238.

6 Ibid., p. 238.

7 See Gohdes, Clarence, American Literature in Nineteenth Century England (Carbondale, 1944), pp. 43–4Google Scholar.

8 Hilen, op. cit., IV, 5.

9 Clark, op. cit., p. 255.

10 Ibid., pp. 237–8.

11 See North American Review, 18 (1824), 162Google Scholar; and Pattee, F. L. (ed.), American Writers (Durham, N.C., 1937), p. 196Google Scholar.

12 Clark, op. cit., p. 238.

13 Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society (January 1860), pp. 426–7.

14 See ‘Thomas Babington Macaulay’ in The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe (New York, 1902), VII, 138–43Google Scholar.

15 Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Edinburgh, 1906), pp. 327–8Google Scholar. Despite his disapproval of Macaulay's materialism, Emerson was an enthusiastic admirer of other aspects of Macaulay's character. In 1848, having dined with Macaulay in London, he wrote to his wife: ‘Macaulay is the king of diners-out. I do not know when I have seen such wonderful vivacity. He has the strength of ten men; immense memory, fun, fire, learning, politics, manners, and pride, – talks all the time in a steady torrent.’ Rusk, Ralph L. (ed.), The Letters of R. W. Emerson (New York, 1939), IV, 41Google Scholar.

16 Woods, John A. (ed.), Uncle Tom's Cabin (London, 1965), p. xxxviiiGoogle Scholar.

17 Clark, op. cit., p. 240.

18 Ibid., p. 240.

19 See Briggs, Asa, ed., Essays in the History of Publishing (London, 1974), p. 124Google Scholar.

20 See Krause, Sydney J., Mark Twain as Critic (Baltimore, 1967), pp. 227–45Google Scholar. And cf. Baetzhold, Howard G., Mark Twain and John Bull (Bloomington and London, 1970), pp. 186–7Google Scholar.

21 Krause, op. cit., p. 231.

22 Sowerby, E. Millicent, Catalogue of the Library of Thomas Jefferson (Washington, 1952), I, 157Google Scholar.

23 North American Review 34 (1832), 148Google Scholar.

24 Macaulay, Lord, History of England (London, 1858), III, 410Google Scholar.

25 Clark, op. cit., p. 249.

26 Ibid., p. 256.