George Macaulay Trevelyan was an English historian whose work was characterized by an accessible narrative style and literary quality. Trevelyan was a devoted adherent of liberal Whig principles, which he sought to convey to his readers. His history is engaged and partisan, often focusing on the positive impact of common people on history and the progress brought by democratic government. Trevelyan himself noted that without his bias, he would never have written his works, as he was motivated to write by a poetical sympathy with the passions of Italian patriots.
How, in times gone by did the ordinary people of England live? It is unlikely that we shall ever have a better answer to this question than Trevelyan's English Social History, in which a great liberal historian set down all that he had been able to discover of the daily, unspectacular, but endlessly fascinating life of English people between the Middle Ages and Victorian times.