Macaulay--the shaping of the historian

"Macaulay's History of England stands as a classic more than a century after its completion; his parliamentary speeches and his collected Essays inspired generations of British statesmen; English and American schoolboys by the millions memorized and recited his Lays of Ancient Rome. What were the forces--familial, intellectual, circumstantial, and psychological--that shaped the life and mind of the great English historian and orator whose name became a household word on both sides of the Atlantic? In this book, based in large part on manuscript sources hitherto never fully exploited, historian John Clive shows us Macaulay the child, the youth, and the burgeoning historian and statesman--against the background of pre-Victorian England, in which he made his intellectual and political debut.^ With sympathy and skill, the varied threads of Macaulay's formative years are brought to light: his moralistic, Evangelical upbringing in the pietistic atmosphere of the Clapham Sect; his relationship with his stern, dominating father, his gentle, protective mother, and his two youngest sisters, Margaret and Hannah, who alone were to respond to his immense need for warmth and affection; his youth