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7 Macaulay's Craftsmanship: Opening up the Narrative
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Published:September 2000
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Abstract
This chapter considers Macaulay's youthful conception of the historian's task and examines how much of it survived from his political experiences. Macaulay's political career both sustained and threatened this ideal. In one sense his reputation was political. It gave him the respectability and the contacts which he valued. Macaulay's later essays were in large part exercises in narrative technique. Political experience may well have increased his scepticism about the primacy of social history, as it impressed upon his mind the impact of political institutions and the forms by which decisions which affect large numbers of people are actually made. He judged his own work against his original aims, and realized he had fallen short of them. But that does not mean that those aims had fundamentally changed. In the event, most critics succumbed to the popular enthusiasm in his History of England. The major exception was John Wilson Croker.
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