Trevelyan was the third son of Sir George Otto Trevelyan, 2nd Baronet, and great-nephew of Thomas Babington Macaulay. He espoused Macaulay's staunch liberal Whig principles in accessible works of literate narrative unfettered by scholarly neutrality, his style becoming old-fashioned in the course of his long and productive career. The historian E. H. Carr considered Trevelyan to be one of the last historians of the Whig tradition.[2]
Many of his writings promoted the Whig Party, an important British political movement from the 17th to the mid-19th centuries, as well as its successor, the Liberal Party. Whigs and Liberals believed the common people had a more positive effect on history than did royalty and that democratic government would bring about steady social progress.[3]
Trevelyan's history is engaged and partisan. Of his Garibaldi trilogy, "reeking with bias", he remarked in his essay "Bias in History": "Without bias, I should never have written them at all. For I was moved to write them by a poetical sympathy with the passions of the Italian patriots of the period, which I retrospectively shared."[3]
Early life
Trevelyan in 1910 with his eldest son, Theo, and father, Sir G. O. Trevelyan. Theo died of appendicitis in 1911.[4]
Trevelyan's parents used Welcombe as a winter resort after they inherited it in 1890. They looked upon Wallington Hall, the Trevelyan family estate in Northumberland, as their real home. After attending Wixenford and Harrow, where he specialised in history, Trevelyan studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was a member of the secret society, the Cambridge Apostles and founder of the still existing Lake Hunt, a hare and hounds chase where both hounds and hares are human.[3][6] In 1898, he won a fellowship at Trinity with a dissertation that was published the following year as England in the Age of Wycliffe.[3] One professor at the university, Lord Acton, enchanted the young Trevelyan with his great wisdom and his belief in moral judgement and individual liberty.[3]
Garibaldi
Trevelyan made his own reputation by depicting Italian patriot Giuseppe Garibaldi as a great hero who stood for British ideals of liberty. According to historian David Cannadine:
[Trevelyan's] great work was his Garibaldi trilogy (1907–11), which established his reputation as the outstanding literary historian of his generation. It depicted Garibaldi as a Carlylean hero—poet, patriot, and man of action—whose inspired leadership created the Italian nation. For Trevelyan, Garibaldi was the champion of freedom, progress, and tolerance, who vanquished the despotism, reaction, and obscurantism of the Austrian empire and the Neapolitan monarchy. The books were also notable for their vivid evocation of landscape (Trevelyan had himself followed the course of Garibaldi's marches), for their innovative use of documentary and oral sources, and for their spirited accounts of battles and military campaigns.[7]
Historian Lucy Voakes argues that his Garibaldi project was part of a larger movement among English intellectuals to consolidate, celebrate and sometimes critique liberal culture and politics. She sees Trevelyan's conception of the hero, and his study of the Italian Risorgimento emerging from his promotion of a distinctly "English" patriotism based upon Whig gradualism, parliamentary monarchy and a hierarchical anti-republicanism.[8]
Role in education
Trevelyan lectured at Cambridge until 1903, at which point he left academic life to become a full-time writer. In 1927, he returned to the university to take up a position as Regius Professor of Modern History, where the single student whose doctorate he agreed to supervise was J. H. Plumb (1936). During his professorship, he was also familiar with Guy Burgess – he gave a positive reference for Burgess when he applied for a post at the BBC in 1935, describing him as a "first rate man", but also stating that "He has passed through the communist measles that so many of our clever young men go through, and is well out of it".[9] In 1940 he was appointed as Master of Trinity College and served in the post until 1951 when he retired.
Trevelyan declined the presidency of the British Academy but served as chancellor of Durham University from 1950 to 1958. Trevelyan College at Durham University is named after him. He won the 1920 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for the biography Lord Grey of the Reform Bill, was elected a fellow of the British Academy in 1925, made a fellow of the Royal Society in 1950,[1] and was an honorary doctor of many universities including Cambridge.
Place in British ideas
Shocked by the horrors of the Great War he saw as an ambulance driver just behind the front lines, Trevelyan became more appreciative of conservatism as a positive force, and less insistent that progress was inevitable. In History of England (1926), he searched for the deepest meaning of English history. Cannadine says he reported they were "the nation's evolution and identity: parliamentary government, the rule of law, religious toleration, freedom from continental interference or involvement, and a global horizon of maritime supremacy and imperial expansion".[7]
Cannadine concluded in G.M. Trevelyan: A Life in History (1992):
During the first half of the twentieth century Trevelyan was the most famous, the most honored, the most influential and the most widely read historian of his generation. He was a scion of the greatest historical dynasty that (Britain) has ever produced. He knew and corresponded with many of the greatest figures of his time... For fifty years, Trevelyan acted as a public moralist, public teacher and public benefactor, wielding unchallenged cultural authority among the governing and the educated classes of his day.
Once called "probably the most widely read historian in the world; perhaps in the history of the world",[10] Trevelyan saw how two world wars shook the belief in progress. Historiography had changed and the belief in progress declined. Roy Jenkins argued:
Trevelyan's reputation as a historian barely survived his death in 1962. He is now amongst the great unread, widely regarded by the professionals of a later generation as a pontificating old windbag, as short on cutting edge as on reliable facts.[11]
What is perhaps most frequently forgotten, or ignored, is the skill of his literary craftsmanship. Trevelyan was a born writer and a natural storyteller; and this, among historians, is a rare gift ... If one quality is to be singled out, is should be this, for all historians he is the poet of English history ... His work has one other great and enduring merit: the tradition within which it was written. The Victorian liberals and their Edwardian successors have made one of the greatest contributions to science and to culture ever made by a ruling class. To these by birth and by instinct Trevelyan belonged.[12]
Other activities
During World War I, Trevelyan commanded a British Red Cross ambulance unit on the Italian front;[13] his defective eyesight meant he was unfit for military service. On 24 December 1915, he was personally decorated by king Victor Emmanuel III of Italy with the Silver Medal of Military Valor for having bravely cleared out a military hospital made the target of Austro-Hungarian fire.[14]
In 1919, he delivered the British Academy's Italian Lecture.[15][16]
England in the Age of Wycliffe, 1368–1520. Longmans, Green, and Company. 1900. His first book, based on his fellowship dissertation. The title of this work is somewhat misleading since it concentrates on the political, social and religious conditions of England during the later years of Wycliffe's life only. Six of the nine chapters are devoted to the years 1377–1385, while the last two treat the history of the Lollards from 1382 until the Reformation. The work is critical of Roman Catholicism in favour of Wycliffe.[19]
Select Documents for Queen Anne's Reign, Down to the Union with Scotland 1702-7. 1929.
England Under Queen Anne. Longmans. 1930. His magnum opus in 3 volumes: "Blenheim" (1930), "Ramillies and the Union with Scotland" (1932), "Peace and the Protestant Succession" (1934).
English Social History. 1944. ISBN978-0-582-48488-7. Published during the darkest days of World War Two, it painted a nostalgic picture of England's glorious past as the beacon of liberty and progress, stirring patriotic feelings and becoming his best selling book, also his last major history book.
^Carr, E. H. (2001). "The Historian and His Facts". What Is History?. p. 17. ISBN0333977017.
^ abcdefHernon, Jr.; Joseph, M. (1976). "The Last Whig Historian and Consensus History: George Macaulay Trevelyan, 1876–1962". The American Historical Review. 81 (1): 66–97. doi:10.2307/1863741. JSTOR1863741.
^Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Trevelyan, Sir George Otto" . Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 27 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 255; see final three lines. The third son, George Macaulay Trevelyan (b. 1876), became well known as a brilliant historical writer, notably with two books on Garibaldi (1907 and 1909)
^Lucy
Turner Voakes, "The Risorgimento and English literary history, 1867–1911: the liberal heroism of Trevelyan's Garibaldi." Modern Italy 15.4 (2010): 433-450. Online[dead link]
^Francesco degli Azzoni Avogadro, L'Amico del Re - Il diario di guerra inedito dell'Aiutante di campo di Vittorio Emanuele III, Leggiamo la Grande Guerra, I, Gaspari editor, 2009, ISBN 88-7541-177-8
Hernon, Joseph M. "The Last Whig Historian and Consensus History: George Macaulay Trevelyan, 1876–1962". American Historical Review 81.1 (1976): 66–97. online
Raina, Peter. George Macaulay Trevelyan. A Portrait in Letters. Pentland Books, 2001.
Rowse, A. L.Historians I Have Known. London: Duckworth, 1995, 1–11.
Voakes, Lucy Turner. "The Risorgimento and English literary history, 1867–1911: the liberal heroism of Trevelyan's Garibaldi." Modern Italy 15.4 (2010): 433–450. online[dead link]
Winkler, Henry R. "George Macaulay Trevelyan" in E. William Helperin, ed., Some 20th-Century Historians (1961), pp. 31–56.
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