Biography Essay

Thomas Babington Macaulay was a public figure whose writings were inseparable from the rest of his career. His speeches made him one of the most important members of the House of Commons during the debates on the 1832 Reform Bill; his early essays for the Edinburgh Review were, for the most part, political polemic; and the minutes and penal code he wrote during his years as legislative member of the Supreme Council of the East India Company heavily influenced the course of education and law on the Indian subcontinent. The volumes of his essays collected from the Edinburgh Review were among the most popular books of the Victorian Age, making him for many modern critics the symbol of Victorian philistinism and, at the very least, a useful index of Victorian assumptions and tastes. But it is as a historian that he most vigorously survives today, generally sharing...