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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 February 2009
SUPERFICIALLY regarded, the foundation of the Royal Historical Society a hundred and twenty years ago belongs to that spate of foundations of academic societies and specialised disciplinary journals, on the continent and in the United States as well as in Britain, which occurred in the concluding decades of the last century and around the beginning of this. Indeed if mere date of foundation were all that counted the Society is considerably more venerable than, for example, the Royal Economic Society, which, even under its earlier title as the British Economic Association, will not celebrate its centenary until 1900, and the British Academy which will not do so for two years beyond that. The Royal Anthropological Institute is three years younger than ourselves, though admittedly it represented an amalgamation of two earlier societies, the Anthropological Society of London which enjoyed a somewhat notorious existence through the eighteen sixties and the still older Ethnological Society. Our Transactions had been published, albeit intermittently, for fifteen years before the first issue of the English Historical Review in 1886. They had not, it has to be admitted, been fifteen glorious years. Although by the mid-'eighties matters were beginning to improve and the names of some notable historians, Acton, Creighton, Seeley, appear on the membership rolls, the productions of the Society and much of its membership were far from distinguished and it still had some way to go to establish itself as a respected institution.
1 Coats, A. W., ‘The Origins and Early Development of the Royal Economic Society’, The Economic Journal, lxxviii (1868), 349–71Google Scholar.
2 Burrow, J. W., Evolution and Society (Cambridge, 1966), 118–36Google Scholar.
3 The early publishing history of the Transactions is given in Milne, A. T., A Centenary Guide to the Publications of the Royal Historical Society 1868–1968 (1968)Google Scholar.
4 Humphreys, R. A., The Royal Historical Society 1868–1968 (1969), 20Google Scholar.
5 Tout, T. F. in his Presidential Address, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 4th ser., ix (1926), 21Google Scholar.
6 Kenyon, J. P., The History Men (1983), 195Google Scholar.
7 For Rogers (1825–1890) see D.N.B. and Rogers, Charles, Leaves from my Autobiography (1876)Google Scholar.
Biographical information for early members of the R.H.S. given here is the D.N.B. unless otherwise stated.
8 Humphreys, , Royal Historical Society, 1–19Google Scholar.
9 See particularly Levine, Philippa, The Amateur and the Professional. Antiquarians, Historians and Archaeologists in Victorian England 1838–1886 (Cambridge, 1986), chs. 2 and 3Google Scholar, and Levy, F. J., ‘The Founding of the Camden Society’, Victorian Studies, vii, no. 3 (1964), 295–305Google Scholar.
10 Humphreys, , Royal Historical Society, 26Google Scholar and Appendix (by Charles Johnson).
11 On the typical membership of such societies see Levine, The Amateur and the Professional, Appendix I.
12 Humphreys, , Royal Historical Society, 11–12Google Scholar.
13 The prize was founded in 1898. By 1908, five of its winners had been women.
14 Humphreys, , Royal Historical Society, 3, 10–11Google Scholar.
15 Transactions, N.S., ii (1885), 77–96 and 349–64Google Scholar.
16 Transactions, N.S., iii (1886), 371–92Google Scholar. Browning's contribution was an article on the flight to Varennes.
17 On this see Slee, Peter R. H., Learning and a Liberal Education. The Study of Modern History in the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge and Manchester, 1800–1914 (Manchester, 1986), 68–73, 127, 150Google Scholar.
18 Transactions, O.S., i, 2nd ed. (1875)Google Scholar originally issued as Transactions of the Historical Society of Great Britain, Volume i, Part 1 (1871) and Part 2 (1872)Google Scholar.
20 Humphreys, , Royal Historical Society, 26Google Scholar.
21 Transactions, 4th ser., ix (1926), 8Google Scholar.
22 Levine, , The Amateur and the Professional, 173Google Scholar.
23 The Collected Papers of Thomas Frederick Tout (3 vols., Manchester, 1935), i. 95Google Scholar.
24 Levine, , The Amateur and the Professional, 72Google Scholar.
25 George Harris, proposing the toast of the Royal Historical Society at its annual dinner on 15 Feb. 1875. The Autobiography of George Harris (London, 1888), 429Google Scholar.
26 On Howorth see Levine, , The Amateur and the Professional, 168, 169, 171Google Scholar.
27 For his own account of his relation to the Manuscripts Commission see The Autobiography of George Harris, ch. xvii.
28 Ibid., 416.
29 Harris, George, A Philosophical Treatise on the Nature and Constitution of Man (2 vols., London, 1876), i. 168–9Google Scholar.
30 Autobiography, 409, 413, 416–17.
31 Ibid., 424–5.
12 He had become a cause célèbre while a schoolboy when his father took legal action to compel Arnold to provide adequately for the education of local boys as prescribed by the school's foundation. See Bamford, T. W., Thomas Arnold (1960), 113–15, 130–4, 140Google Scholar. Harris' father was clerk to the school's trustees. Harris himself claimed to have often had constitutional and philosophical discussions with Arnold while he was working in his father's practice in 1835. Autobiography, 43.
33 On Donaldson, see Burrow, J. W., ‘The Uses of Philology in Victorian England’, in Robson, R. (ed.), Ideas and Institutions of Victorian Britain. Essays in honour of George Kitson Clark (Cambridge, 1967), 192–3Google Scholar.
34 The Council of the R.H.S. sponsored a course of lectures by Zerffi on the science of history given at South Kensington. See Humphreys, , Royal Historical Society, 14Google Scholar.
35 Green to Freeman, E. A., 28 January 1867, in Stephen, Leslie (ed.), Letters of John Richard Green (1902), 173Google Scholar.
36 According to the D.N.B. he was invited to give a course of lectures on Slavonic literature at the Taylorian Institute in 1877.
37 In his Presidential Address printed in 1881, ‘The Science of History’, Zerffi told the Society that ‘I have had the satisfaction of lecturing during the last six years to, at least, 45,576 persons’. Transactions, O.S., ix (1881), 1Google Scholar.
38 Evidence of Zerffi's activities as a spy, which appear to have extended from 1850 to 1865 (and therefore to have been long past by the time of his Presidency of the R.H.S.) is given in Franck, Tibor, The British Image of Hungary 1865–1870 (Budapest, 1976), 275–6Google Scholar, where Zerffi is described as ‘one of the most prominent Austrian secret agents in Britain’. The same author has published a full-length study of Zerffi (Budapest, 1985) in Hungarian. I am indebted for these references and for drawing my attention to this aspect of Zerffi to the kindness of Paul Smith, and regret my inability to read Professor Franck's study of Zerffi in the original.
39 Levine, , The Amateur and the Professional, 2Google Scholar. The recruitment of Hubert Hall and H. E. Maiden were important steps in the Society's advance to respectability. Maiden first published in the Transactions in 1880 and Hall in 1886. Hall was to be the Society's Literary Director from 1891 to 1938, and its Hon. Secretary from 1894–1903. Maiden followed him as Secretary and held the post for twenty-eight years.
40 Rogers, , Autobiography, 349Google Scholar. Bowring contributed an article on ‘Borrowings of modern from ancient poets’ to Transactions, O.S., ii (1873)Google Scholar.
41 This was Charles Buchanan Pearson, who contributed ‘Some account of ancient churchwarden accounts of St Michael's, Bath’ (Transactions, O.S., vii (1878))Google Scholar. Irons contributed to the same volume an article on ‘The transition from heathen to Christian civilization’. Both appear also in volume viii (1880).
42 Ward first became a member in 1870 and remained one, though apparently inactive, in the early 'seventies. Browning appears first in the list of Fellows in 1878, and renewed his membership in 1884.
43 James Bass Mullinger (1834–1917), a Fellow of St John's, was a teacher in the History of Education (a link with Browning) from 1885 to 1895 and Lecturer in History, 1894–1909. A man of legendary irascibility, he was sent to prison as a young man for an attack on his sister-in-law with a carving knife (J. A. Venn, A Alumnae Cantabridgienses). It seems possible that he is the only member of Council to have served a prison sentence.
44 Presidential Address, Transactions, 4th ser., ix (1926), 1Google Scholar.
45 Venn, Alumnae Cantabridgienses and D.N.B. Ropes' papers to the R.H.S. were on eighteenth-century German diplomatic subjects; Browning's influence seems apparent.
46 Anstruther, Ian, Oscar Browning. A Biography (1983), chs. V and VIGoogle Scholar.
47 ‘The world owes some of its greatest debts to men from whose very memory it recoils.’ Stubbs, W., The Constitutional History of England (3 vols., Oxford, 1873), i, p. ivGoogle Scholar.
48 Slee, Learning and a Liberal Education, ch. 5.
49 Wortham, H. E., Victorian Eton and Cambridge. Being the Life and Times of Oscar Browning (new ed. 1956), 47Google Scholar. Browning gave his own account of the development of his educational theories while at Eton and their fruition in Cambridge in Browning, Oscar, Memories of Sixty Tears at Eton, Cambridge and Elsewhere (2nd ed. 1910), 123–4, 179, 258–65Google Scholar.
50 Slee, , Learning and a Liberal Education, 89Google Scholar.
51 See Transactions, N.S., iv (1889), 67–84Google Scholar.
52 Humphreys, , Royal Historical Society, 22Google Scholar.
53 E.g., Prothero's Presidential Address. Transactions, N.S., xvii (1903), vii–viiiGoogle Scholar.
54 Round appears in the Transactions in 1894 (N.S., viii), with an article on the executions of Sir Charles Lucas and Sir George Lisle.
55 Blaas, P. B. M., Continuity and Anachronism: Parliamentary and Constitutional Development in Whig Historiography and the Anti-Whig Reaction between 1890 and 1930 (The Hague, 1978)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
56 Goldstein, Doris, ‘The Organizational Development of the British Historical Profession, 1884–1921’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, lv (1982), 180–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and ‘The Professionalisation of History in Britain in the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries’, History of Historiography, iii (1983), 3–26Google Scholar.
57 Jann, Rosemary, The Art and Science of Victorian History (Columbus, Ohio, 1985), esp. EpilogueGoogle Scholar.
58 Transactions, N.S., xvii (1903), xi–xiiGoogle Scholar.
59 ‘Schools of History’ (1906), in Collected Papers, i. 105–7Google Scholar.
60 Reprinted in Collected Papers, i. 112.
61 Ibid.
62 Collected Papers, i. 132.
