Robert E. Sullivan -->reviewed by Jeffrey Collins -->

By the time he died in 1859, Thomas Babington Macaulay, the Victorian historian and parliamentarian, had meticulously plotted his posthumous fame. A founding trustee of the National Portrait Gallery, he sat for no fewer than twenty-one portraits now found in its collection. He served on the committee to decorate the rebuilt Houses of Parliament, the corridors of which were duly adorned with paintings based upon his histories. His Cambridge College, Trinity, immortalized him in marble. In 1876 his nephew George Otto Trevelyan published the stately Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay, a virtually authorized biography that remained standard for generations. He was entombed at Westminster Abbey, one of the few historians to lie in Poet’s Corner.

 

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