Trevelyan, historian with a liberal bias

G.M. Trevelyan

It is the birthday of British historian G.M. Trevelyan (1876), whose passionate trilogy on the Italian leader Garibaldi and biography of Earl Gray are among his best known works. Trevelyan wrote with an admittedly partisan bias, celebrating the Whig/Liberal viewpoint. "Without bias," Trevelyan wrote of his Garibaldi works, "I should never have written them at all." Trevelyan also wrote of English philosopher and reformer John Wycliffe, liberal statesman John Bright, England under the House of Stuart (when the arts flourished), and Italian reformer and statesman Daniele Manin. Earl Gray supported constitutional reform in British government and pushed through an act to abolish slave trade.