The Edinburgh Review was the quasi-official organ of the Whig party, and the period from 1825 to 1834--during which Macaulay wrote most of his reviews--was a politically acrimonious time preceding and following the passage of the Great Reform Bill of 1832. Arrogance and invective were characteristic of the Edinburgh's reviewers as a group. In these years, Macaulay wrote twenty-seven articles--ostensibly book reviews but in fact wide-ranging essays on topics suggested, sometimes rather loosely, by the book under scrutiny. They are not today his most impressive writings, but they were the ones that established him both as a political and a literary figure.
Specifically, on the relationship between Macaulay (writing for the Whigs) and J.S. Mill (writing for the Radical party) circa 1830.
It was because of an article in the Edinburgh Review that Macaulay came to the attention of Lord Lansdowne, who in 1830 helped secure him a seat in Parliament through his pocket borough of Calne in Wiltshire. The first essay (January 1825) was an abolitionist argument on the West Indies. This piece was followed by other purely political works, including a series of three attacks on James Mill and the Utilitarians in general. The general line of argument was that Mill was too theoretical and insufficiently pragmatic, that he reasoned from a priori notions rather than from observation of fact. These three essays are important in that they constituted one side of a debate between the Whig Edinburgh Review and the Westminster Review, the organ of the Benthamite Philosophical Radicals or Utilitarians. In his Autobiography (1873) John Stuart Mill recalls his own role in answering Macaulay's objections to his father's writings but also admits that the Edinburgh articles helped modify his faith in his father's views.
No comments:
Post a Comment