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George Macaulay Trevelyan (16 February 1876 – 21 July 1962) was an English historian and academic. He was a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, from 1898 to 1903. He then spent more than twenty years as a full-time author. He returned to the University of Cambridge and was Regius Professor of History from 1927 to 1943. He served as Master of Trinity College from 1940 to 1951. In retirement, he was Chancellor of Durham University.
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 history.
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.
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."
Trevelyan's parents used Welcombe as a winter resort after they inherited it in 1890. They looked upon Wallington Hall, the Trevelyan family seat in Northumberland, as their real home. After attending Wixenford School and Harrow School, 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. In 1898, he won a fellowship at Trinity with a dissertation that was published the following year as England in the Age of Wycliffe. One professor at the university, Lord Acton, enchanted the young Trevelyan with his great wisdom and his belief in moral judgement and individual liberty.
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.
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.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
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, and was an honorary doctor of many universities including Cambridge.
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", Trevelyan saw how two world wars shook the belief in progress. Historiography had changed and the belief in progress declined. Roy Jenkins argued:
On the other hand, J. H. Plumb argued:
In 1919, he delivered the British Academy's Italian Lecture.
Trevelyan was the first president of the Youth Hostels Association and the YHA headquarters are called Trevelyan House in his honour. He worked throughout his career on behalf of the National Trust, in preserving not merely historic houses, but historic landscapes. He was an International Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1931) and an International Member of the American Philosophical Society. Trevelyan was also a member of the Cambridge Apostles.
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