Macaulay

Historians on Historians

by Owen Dudley Edwards

Macaulay's Lays of Ancient Rome, Critical and Historical Essays, and above all his History of England have delighted readers ever since they were written. In this vigorous and idiosyncratic account of the historian who wished his book to replace the latest novel on every young lady's table, Owen Dudley Edwards argues for Macaulay's more serious purpose in writing — more serious than the mere Whig party-politicking in which his reputation has become enmired. Macaulay's intense evangelical inheritance gave him the drive to address the widest possible audience of educated people, and to charm and instruct his readers into sharing his own passionate love of classical learning and modern history. Owen Dudley Edwards bring out for the for the first time the importance of Macaulay's Highland ancestry, both in his use of the oral historical tradition and in the alienation which rested at the heart of his apparently English confidence: he saw himself as a racial mixture of Celtic and Saxon, and believed in the necessity for a racially mixed empire in which all racial groups would be subsumed into the great and broadening English tradition. Only full possession of English history and culture would entitle those future masters of the empire to enter into their responsibilities: here was the role his History would play. Owen Dudley Edwards's eloquent re-appraisal of Macaulay is long overdue; in the tercentenary years of the Glorious Revolution, it finds in the Revolution's bard a voice which has indeed shaped our England.

182 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 1988

About the author

Owen Dudley Edwards is Reader in Commonwealth and American History at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, UK. He is the general editor of the Oxford Sherlock Holmes series, and is a recognised expert on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, P. G. Wodehouse and Oscar Wilde, about each of whom he has written.

The son of Professor Robert Dudley Edwards, and brother to the Irish writer, Ruth Dudley Edwards, Owen Dudley Edwards attended Belvedere College, Dublin, University College, Dublin, and The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. In 1966 he married Barbara Balbirnie Lee. They have three children.