Thomas Babington Macaulay

(1800 - 1859)

Politician, essayist, historian, and poet Thomas Babington Macaulay achieved immediate literary success in 1825 as a twenty-five-year-old with an essay on John Milton in The Edinburgh Review. He then pursued a political career and was elected to Parliament in 1830, later serving as a member of the government’s Supreme Council of India. His best-known work, the five-volume History of England from the Accession of James II, was an unprecedented success in the United Kingdom and the United States, and was soon translated into German, Polish, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, Hungarian, Russian, Bohemian, French, and Spanish. He was raised to the peerage in 1857, died in London in 1859, and was buried in Westminster Abbey.