Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859) was a Whig politician and an historian, famous for his History of England, who came to fame through the immediate success of the critical and biographical essays which he was already contributing in his early twenties to the leading periodicals of the day.

This 1976 study by Kenneth Young succeeds that of G. R. Potter in 1959. Young surveys Macaulay's many-sided achievement not only as an essayist, historian, and poet, but as an outstanding orator and debater, an able administrator, an exuberant talker, and an indefatigable and entertaining correspondent.

A volume in the Writers and Their Work series, which draws upon recent thinking in English studies to introduce writers and their contexts. Each volume includes biographical material, an examination of recent criticism, a bibliography and a reappraisal of a major work by the writer.