Thomas Babington Macaulay is known as one of the most famous historians of all time, and yet has received rather rough treatment on numerous occasions in the past two centuries. From the perspective of the twenty-first century he seems almost anathema – a critic of democracy, latently misogynistic, insensitive to the laboring class, and an unapologetic proponent of chauvinistic colonialism. This is the picture that emerges even in serious recent studies of his life and work. If so, why devote another detailed book to such an unattractive figure? One obvious answer is that this common portrayal of Macaulay is far from satisfactory, though even this fact has been recognized by many of those who have studied him in the past. Another answer is that Macaulay was a central figure in the cultural history of nineteenth-century Britain, indeed of European civilization in general at the time (by which we should also include America), and to study him is also, ipso facto, to study the first half of the nineteenth century in general, and specifically the history of liberalism during this period. Macaulay was probably the bestselling historian of any era, and his writings, in officially sanctioned, but also unapproved editions, sold in hundreds of thousands of copies in the nineteenth century. It is difficult to transpose this precisely to our own time, but it would not be an exaggeration to say that in our terms this would have been millions of copies. Can we think of a historian today selling so many books? Without attempting to discuss what this might say about our own culture, it is clear that a writer who was so popular for several decades, and who continues to be read today (though obviously by far fewer people), represented something vital about his place and time. Studying Macaulay, by definition, is therefore studying the history of nineteenth-century culture more generally. Even this, however, can be taken as a broadly accepted assumption about any central historical figure. So again, why write a whole new book about Macaulay?

First of all, we need to clarify more precisely what it means when we say that studying Macaulay by definition means to study his own era in general. This can mean either that he was a typical figure of his time, or an untypical one, or else a combination of both in different contexts. After all, both the typical and the untypical are important elements of any given culture.