Macaulay was the great sage: his History of England (1848) invented and confirmed England's sense of prosperity, progress, and power. He developed the policy for Indian education and for its system of criminal law. He had chambers in Albany and belonged to the club. He was a member of parliament and the first person to be ennobled for his literary merit. Domestic sales of his History totaled 140,000 copies in 1876. His first check from Longman's in 1849 was for £5,500. But he was miserable. At the end of his life he confessed that he felt “warm affection” for fewer than ten people. He projected his misery onto his career and work. Macaulay's “stunted emotional consciousness caused him to live barely attentive to and mostly unconcerned about people and places in front of him, while his masterful intelligence empowered him to interpret and help shape the English public mind during his nation's century” (449). This affected his policy as well as his writing about India and Ireland. Sullivan quotes him: “For it is in truth more merciful to extirpate a hundred thousand human beings at once, and to fill the void with a well governed population, than to misgovern millions through a long succession of generations” (196). His disability also affected his History and the “narrow capacity for human sympathy that informed it began to kill him” (448). “Blind to the humanity he shared even with the unseen thousands he recommended killing, he lived as if riveted to a mirror, contemplating himself hopelessly and finally alone” (449). As a proponent of progress and prosperity, Macaulay “enjoys a place in a certain kind of ‘liberal’ sensibility or ‘imagination.’” He was opposed to state action to relieve economic hardship, but as his reaction to Mill's On Liberty (1859) shows, he was “prepared to have it intervene to stanch the ‘Noah's flood’ of unruly ‘eccentricity’” (462). This is a dark book about the dark side of liberalism.

Macaulay's misery arose from his ancestry in Clapham and what Sullivan calls his “doubleness.” From Clapham came the sense of prim purposefulness, morality, and industriousness. That “pious commune,” “resourceful and well connected,” wished “to use the state's power to impose their morality on the public” (11). When his mother warned him that he should not expect bread and butter at school, young Tom responded, “mamma, industry shall be my bread and application shall be my butter” (21). The dream of family cohesion that inspired so much of Clapham “shaped Tom Macaulay's life and hastened his death” (19). His doubleness was the result of his relations with his father. He increasingly departed from his father's religious and ethical values. Young Macaulay's utilitarianism and skepticism (his religion was public Protestantism without Christianity) forced him into a kind of duplicity and allowed him to express his changing values only indirectly so long as his father lived. Calculation rather than generous impulses guided Macaulay's life, politics, and history. The consequence: often weepy and on the edge of tears, his sentimentality was the result of “living life mostly as a series of transactions” (363).

Another consequence was Macaulay's emotional dependence on his sisters, and, when one died and another married Charles Trevelyan, he was plunged into grief. He forced his sister Hannah to travel with him to India to satisfy his emotional needs, and when she married Trevelyan, she and her husband lived with him much of the time after they returned to England. When his niece married, Macaulay gave her £500 in a “primordial urge” that converted “affection into a commodity” in a gesture of “generosity, need, calculation, and control” (339). Because his relations with the Trevelyans were mere transactions, Macaulay was left with constant feelings of insecurity. His relations with his nephew, George Otto Trevelyan, were not expressed with the same emotional forcefulness, but Macaulay took a keen interest in him, fostering his classical education, expressing pride when he went to Harrow and up to Trinity College, Cambridge. It was another emotional investment that paid emotional dividends because young Trevelyan wrote his uncle's biography. (George Otto Trevelyan may have had his vengeance. On his death bed he was heard to mutter “Uncle Tom was not a gentleman.”)

Sullivan claims to have “backed into Macaulay.” He was writing a book on how “postmodern elites have derived spiritual meaning from the classics” when a friend, over a beer, convinced him to turn it into a “flesh and blood” case study (597). Macaulay was a suitable choice. Sullivan had studied with John Clive, whose book Macaulay: The Shaping of the Historian (Cambridge, MA, 1973) ends before Macaulay returned from India. Sullivan does not seek to amend Clive's treatment of Macaulay's childhood and life as a young adult, and he only “highlights what it slights or overlooks” (3). Sullivan gives ample treatment of the way Macaulay's attachment to the classics “moved him to rewrite modern Europe's moral history by rooting it in the primal Greek values of winning honor and avoiding shame” (189). In reading the classics the way he did, Macaulay was able to sustain his admiration for them as well as his faith in progress. His knowledge of classical learning sustained his social position because of the cultural authority it carried, and he was able to sneer at Disraeli, no gentleman he, whose Greek was incompetent.

Sullivan's writing is not exactly humorless. In discussing Macaulay's treatment of Oliver Cromwell, he says, “Oliver, powerful and progressive, died and was succeeded by a son who was merely nice” (281). Sullivan came to realize in the writing of this book that it was more than a biography; it was “a chapter in the moral history of the modern world” (580). As to whether that is a historian's suitable object, opinions may vary. Perhaps for that reason, though, Macaulay is larded with references to McGeorge Bundy (4), Henry Kissinger, the Sex Pistols (178), Pol Pot (201), Margaret Thatcher (222), John Cleese (358), Potter Stewart (359), and Norman Mailer (453). It is also studded with various contemporary phrases: “collateral damage” (177), “put-down” (181), “airbrush” (216), “buzz” (232), “cost-benefit analysis” (235), and to “retail” a cliché (290). Whether these contemporary usages may or may not establish an intellectual connection with Sullivan's contemporary readers is a matter of taste and conjecture. They are not likely, however, to weather or wear well with another generation of scholars.