Robert Southey, Lord Macaulay and the Standard of Living Controversy

The early nineteenth century witnessed gladiatorial contests in print between the contributors to the conservative Quarterly Review and the radical Edinburgh Review. Among the chief protagonists of the two papers were Robert Southey, leading contributor to the Quarterly from its launch in 1809 until 1839, and Thomas Babington Macaulay, whose first contribution to the Edinburgh, on ‘Milton’, appeared in August 1825, after which he became a mainstay of the periodical. Their ‘reviews’ were long essays of 10,000 or more words, in which the works purportedly being reviewed were mere pegs on which to hang their own observations. They were generally scathing about publications which took an ideological stance opposite to their own, and sympathetic to those which adopted a similar position to that which they held. Though they frequently made barbed references to each other in their reviews, Southey never reviewed a work by Macaulay, who only once criticized one by his rival. Nevertheless, that particular occasion, in January 1830, was a classic clash of Titans. It demonstrated their fundamental disagreement over the prospects facing society from the initial impact of the industrial revolution.