TB Macaulay

Thomas Babington Macaulay. "The History of England." Pub. 1849-61. The Broadview Anthology of British Literature. Vol. 5. Ed. Joseph Black et al. Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 2006. Print.

• use with Griffiths 2016, Underwood 2013, evolutionary accounts of history in Charles Darwin and Charles Lyell
• from Ch. 3, "State of England in 1685"
  • the Glorious Revolution (overthrow of James II by William III) as key in his historical model
• starts with succession Charles II -> James II
• 40 Such a description, composed from scanty and dispersed materials, must necessarily be very imperfect. Yet it may perhaps correct some false notions which would make the subsequent narrative unintelligible or uninstructive.
  • the sense of an historical event's narrative importance, its teleological immanence
• In every experimental science there is a tendency toward perfection. In every human being there is a wish to ameliorate his own condition. These two principles have often sufficed, even when counteracted by great public calamities and by bad institutions, to carry civilization rapidly forward.
  • teleology of civilization as "scientific"
• This progress [of national wealth], having continued during many ages [he maps from Tudors on], became at length, about the middle of the C18, portentously rapid, and has proceeded during the nineteenth, with accelerated velocity.
  • contrast with Enlightenment stadial model
• 41 [Estrangement of distance and the consequent use of analogy for mapping teleological progress] Could the England of 1685 be, by some magical process, set before our eyes, we should not know one landscape in a hundred or one building in ten thousand. The country gentleman would not recognize his own fields.
• 42 archival method of his looking for population statistics - skeptical and evaluative
• 43 Within the memory of some whom this generation has seen, the sportsman who wandered in pursuit of game...found the heaths round Keeldar Castle [in Northumberland] peopled by a race scarcely less savage than the Indians of California, and heard with surprise the half-naked women chanting a wild measure, while the men with brandished dirks danced a war-dance.
  • this cited from Lockhart's biography of Scott, and the narrative technique is Scott's too from Waverley: spatialization and even racialization of historical progress (see Armstrong 2005)
• going through taxation then
• 44 Of the blessings which civilization and philosophy bring with them, a large proportion is common to all ranks, and would, if withdrawn, be missed as painfully by the laborer as by the peer.
  • not borne out by economic data at least of print culture as St Clair 2004 shows
• 45 There is scarcely a page of the history or lighter literature of the C17 which does not contain some proof that our ancestors were less humane than their posterity.
• 46 It is true that compassion ought, like all other feelings, to be under the government of reason, and has, for want of such government, produced some ridiculous and deplorable effects. But the more we study the annals of the past, the more shall we rejoice that we live in a merciful age, in an age in which cruelty is abhorred, and in which pain, even when deserved, is inflicted reluctantly and from a sense of duty. Every class doubtless has gained largely by this great moral change: but the class which has gained most is the poorest, the most dependent, and the most defenceless.
  • tell that to Jo in Bleak House (1853)
• And yet it may then be the mode to assert that the increase of wealth and the progress of science have benefitted the few at the expense of the many, and to talk of the reign of Queen Victoria as the time when England was truly merry England, when all classes were bound together by brotherly sympathy, when the rich did not grind the faces of the por, and when the poor did not envy the splendor of the rich.