This article explores perceptions of appropriateness in the French second-person pronoun system in relation to various sociopragmatic factors among native and nonnative speakers of French between the ages of 18 and 29. Participants completed an online survey in which a series of five social-interactive situations were presented. Analysis focused on the similarities and differences among native, near-native, advanced and intermediate speakers in their perceptions of formality, social distance, power/equality and appropriate tu/vous use, as well as correlations between the sociopragmatic factors and selection of tu or vous. Results indicate a high degree of variation within and across participant groups, with nonnatives tending to be more conservative (e.g., more formality, higher frequencies of vous) in their choices than their native-speaker counterparts. In concluding, the findings are discussed in relation to pedagogical implications.

Three new cities were created in conjunction with Her Majesty the queen's Diamond Jubilee celebrations in 2012: Chelmsford, Perth and St Asaph. They were the winners of a competition which had no clear rules, no transparency and no proper feedback. The modern style is to create new cities in conjunction with a royal event, the winners to be decided by competition. How has this come to be the case? This article looks at the 2012 competition in the light of the ways in which cities have been created in the United Kingdom since the explicit link with Anglican cathedrals was dropped in 1888, and it asks whether it is worth the effort? The author concludes that what was initially conceived as a means of distinguishing between rivals for the status of city has become a competition driven by modern forms of civic boosterism, and a blatant opportunity for political patronage by governments who hide behind royal ‘privilege’. For all the effort expended, the distinction is hardly recognized outside of the town hall.

The character of public opinion concerning contemporary foreign problems, despite abundant data and sophisticated analyses, is sometimes elusive; it is of course more tenuous respecting issues of an earlier era when polling techniques were unknown. Studies of mid-Victorian public opinion and foreign policy by B. Kingsley Martin on the Crimean War and Miriam B. Urban on the Italian War of Unification have by necessity equated the attitudes of the press, Parliament, and public addresses with public sentiment. They often assume that, under circumstances such as Russophobia and sympathy for national liberty, certain pin pricks of events elicit spontaneous and genuine expressions of public opinion. To be sure, this assumption has some validity. But owing to the paucity of documentary evidence, propaganda has received altogether too little attention.

The writings of Polish agents for 1863 provide a basis for illuminating an instance of propaganda in the mechanics of mid-Victorian public sentiment. Yet J. H. Harley and K. S. Pasieka, while charting the course of English opinion in 1863, have almost completely ignored propaganda, while Henryk Wereszycki has treated it cursorily. This essay, consequently, aims to draw back the curtains a bit, go backstage, and observe how actors received suggestions, inducements, and sometimes even scripts to perform their roles.

Ireland in the eighteen-fifties was quiescent through exhaustion. The great famine of the eighteen-forties had resulted in heavy population losses through death and emigration and demoralized tenant farmers had offered but a feeble resistance to wholesale evictions. The failure of the Irish Confederate risings of 1848-49, the collapse of tenant-right agitation and the disintegration of the Independent Irish Party at Westminster, had left the country sunk in political apathy. The trade union movement did not escape the general paralysis and the Regular Trades Association, a central organization that had developed in Dublin during the eighteen-forties, disappeared. Not until 1859 was there renewed trade union activity in the form of a campaign to abolish night-baking; though it had only limited success, it helped to bring about the appearance in 1863 of a new grouping of Dublin trade unions, the United Trades Association. It was, however, not a trade union organization but the Irish Republican Brotherhood that aroused the country from political torpor.

The I.R.B., known in North America as the Fenian Brotherhood, was a secret oath-bound society pledged to establish an independent Irish republic. Its first leader was James Stephens, who had founded it in 1858 after his return from an exile following the 1848 rising. Its membership was drawn from the rural and urban working class – the sons of small farmers, mechanics, artisans, laborers and petty shopkeepers. In 1861 Stephens skillfully stage-managed the funeral of Terence Bellew McManus, a Confederate exile whose body was brought back for burial in Ireland, and thus aroused an unprecedented interest in “The Organization,” as its members called it.

R. W. Church began his classic work on The Oxford Movement with the remark that “What is called the Oxford or Tractarian movement began, without doubt, in a vigorous effort for the immediate defence of the Church against serious dangers, arising from the violent and threatening temper of the days of the Reform Bill.” Historians of the Oxford Movement who, unlike Church, were not participants in the events of which they write need continually to remind themselves that the Oxford Movement was not a premeditated and carefully planned theological campaign. Rather, it was an ad hoc measure to meet a definite and immediate problem.

In the second and third decades of the nineteenth century, agitation for reform of all the national institutions swept across England, and included in these national institutions was the Church of England. In 1828 a resolution favoring the repeal of the Test Act was carried in the House of Commons by Lord John Russell, and in 1829 the Relief Bill was carried, allowing Catholics to sit in Parliament and to hold offices under the crown. With the Reform Bill of 1832 the electoral structure for seating men in Parliament was brought into partial conformity with contemporary developments and population distribution. And with the success of parliamentary reform, English churchmen feared that church reform would soon be thrust upon them. The bishops as a group had been hostile to parliamentary reform and to reform in general, with the result that popular pamphlets against churchmen and demand for church reform reached alarming proportions.

The purpose of this paper is not to reconsider Sir Lewis Namier either as a person or as a historian. Since his death in 1960 there has been a spate of critiques, ranging from sound discussions of his historical method appearing in this and in two sister journals to the treatment by a Hindu journalist of Namier and other contemporary British historians which appeared in the New Yorker magazine under a title provided by the epigraph to Sir Lewis's most famous work. Whether his work should properly be interpreted in terms of his “continental conservatism” as Sir Edward Carr suggests, or whether Namier's influence on British historiography on balance has been pernicious (as one L.S.E. don believes), are not questions with which this discussion will be concerned. Its function is much narrower; to examine a recent contribution to these pages, the article by Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr., entitled “Sir Lewis Namier Considered.”

In this essay Mansfield purports to explain just how Namier interpreted the early years of George III and exactly what his line of argument was in reaching his conclusions. Inevitably the question is raised: “Was there actual danger of tyranny in the political philosophy of the youthful George III?” This is an important question to which a number of distinguished historians have turned their attention; but Mansfield does not use the methods of the historian — whether sympathetic to Namier like Richard Pares, or admittedly hostile like the Master of Peterhouse. Mansfield is not a historian but a political scientist, and he writes that he is not proposing to question Namier's investigations of political facts.

“The revolution is made,” the Duke of Wellington declared in 1833, “that is to say power is transferred from one class in society, the gentlemen of England professing the faith of the Church of England, to another class of society, the shopkeepers being dissenters from the Church, many of them being Socinians, others atheists.” Wellington's political postmortem was, to say the least, premature. The gentlemen of England and Wales continued to prosper, especially in the counties. In fact, most local government historians have argued that the landed classes virtually monopolized the administration of county affairs before 1888 when county government was institutionally restructured by the County Councils Act. The instrument of their control was the county magistracy acting in Quarter and Petty Sessions. K. B. Smellie, expressing a widely-held viewpoint, describes the county magistracy in the nineteenth century as the “rear guard of an agrarian oligarchy,” the “most aristocratic feature of English government.” Yet no one has furnished statistical evidence for this contention on a countrywide basis or for an extended time span. Is the notion of an aristocratic stranglehold over the counties really more impressionistic than substantive? By examining the “Returns of Justices of the Peace” between 1831 and 1887 in the British Parliamentary Papers, a nearly untapped statistical storehouse, it is possible to determine the degree of continuity in the social composition of the county magistracy.

Before doing so, it might be helpful to sketch the changing character of the Quarter Sessions.

If economists have been accused, like Oscar Wilde's cynic, of knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing, historians, on the other hand, often know the value of everything and the price of nothing. Since value and price are historically related, however, the historian who ignores the economics which both embodies and reflects a value-system and world-view does so at his own cost. Thus, the laws of the early Germanic tribes — and of the Anglo-Saxons in particular, to whom this study is confined — are dominated by virtual tables of prices and compensations for offenses and injuries. To the general historian, and even to the medievalist, these are perhaps the least fascinating elements of the laws. Certainly the more cosmic elements of Germanic society almost vanish here beneath the weight of numbers. Nonetheless, even these apparently raw economic sources reveal, upon investigation, not only societal structure and the relationship of church and state but a concept of kingship which is the key to both. Penalties and fines in Anglo-Saxon law will be analyzed here to illuminate these aspects of the early English world.

The two greatest influences on the actual codification of Anglo-Saxon law are Roman and ecclesiastical. Before the introduction of Christianity no Germanic written code is known, and the written formulation of law is largely stimulated by an attempt to cope with the new religion and with the status of its institution, the Church, in terms of Germanic society. In Kentish law, for example, dooms concerning the Church show less alliteration and consequently may be taken as newer.

There seems to be no doubt about it: the century-old truisms about the literature variously called “Augustan” and “Neo-Classical” are in the process of dissolution. Premises induced by J. S. Mill and Matthew Arnold, explored by Oliver Elton, dogmatized by G. E. B. Saintsbury, and summarized by Leslie Stephen now appear inadequate to more recent scholars, whose research and rereading of Neo-Classical texts run counter to the general testimony as well as the specific judgments of their grandfathers. For the past few decades at least, published commentary has increasingly indicated the need to overhaul received ideas about those writers identified with the revival of classicism in England following the Restoration of Charles II and continuing throughout the eighteenth century.

The deficiencies in Victorian and Edwardian assumptions about Neo-Classicism revealed by latter-day findings are several, some of them due to false criteria of taste, morality, and literary excellence. But chiefly the research of the present age has disclosed a vast range of literature simply ignored — or, perhaps, suppressed — by earlier critics. Based as they were on a limited, prejudged selection of Restoration and eighteenth-century literature, the premises inherited from Victorian criticism have naturally failed to account for the discoveries of twentieth-century scholars.

The resulting disparity between limited assumptions and expanded information has called into question the very possibility of formulating any critical schema that accurately describes the characteristics of English literature between 1660 and 1800. The relativistic — not to say atomistic — inclinations of contemporary scholarship enforce the view that indeed no schema is possible.

None of the early Fabians remains more obscure today than William Clarke (1852-1901 ). Although his contribution to the Fabian Essays ranks as perhaps the most interesting and perceptive essay in that volume, histories of the Fabian Society pass over Clarke with a line or two of praise. Nevertheless, Clarke's socialism deserves more attention. It is interesting in itself as an early English analysis of monopoly capitalism and as another example of the relationship between the growth of radical politics and the Victorian loss of faith. At the same time, of course, Clarke's intellectual history also contributes to an increased understanding of the early evolution of the Fabian society.

At the time Clarke wrote “The Industrial Basis of Socialism” for the Fabian Essays he had been a socialist for only a few years. And in spite of this promising beginning as a socialist theorist, he abandoned socialism in the late 1890's, reverting to a more youthful political individualism. Why Clarke remained a socialist for only a decade is, then, the central question raised by his career. Not surprisingly, the answer is complex, dependent in part on accidental personal factors. Clarke approached socialism from two different directions. Politically, it was a logical extension of his radicalism, a necessary corrective to the limitations placed on political democracy by uncontrolled private wealth. At the same time, Clarke came to see socialism as a kind of religious activity, the means to realize a spiritual ideal. In both cases socialism held out a promise of the imminent realization of these concerns.

The Instrument of Government was England's first and, if we except the Humble Petition and Advice, its only written constitution. It lasted only a little over three years, from 1653 to 1657, and was soon cast aside and all but forgotten in the rapid sequence of events which followed Cromwell's death: the restoration of the Rump, then of the Long Parliament, and finally of the King himself. Thus it is definitely an aberration so far as English constitutional development is concerned, but to an American, in whose country the principle of the written constitution and its concomitant principle of the limitation of legislative sovereignty have won out, the Instrument is of much greater interest.

In order to comprehend fully why the Instrument was made and what it was designed to achieve, the role of the New Model Army and its relation to Parliament must be considered. This army had become a quasi-political body as far back as the summer of 1647 when it first assumed the role of champion of political reform. In its Declaration of the Army it declared that it was not “a mere mercenary army, hired to serve an arbitrary power of a State, but called forth and conjured by the several declarations of Parliament to the defense of their own and the people's just rights and liberties.” From there it had gone on to submit various proposals for the settlement of the kingdom, such as the Heads of the Proposals and the Agreement of the People.

Evangelicals and Evangelicalism seem unable to remain for long either in or out of favor. The line of periodic assessments which began by moving upward from the tart jibes of Sydney Smith to James Stephen's measured rehabilitation, took a plunge with the Hammond's indignant assault, and has continued to trace lesser fluctuations for the past thirty years. E. M. Howse, in Saints in Politics, attacked the Hammonds for lack of balance and attempted a rehabilitation. In the process, however, he lost his own balance and fell over backwards. Now Ford K. Brown's Fathers of the Victorians implies that one can again disparage the Evangelicals. Their legacy to the century, Brown suggests, was a negative and stifling one.

This matter of the legacy makes the question of interpretation and reinterpretation important. Historians of nineteenth-century England agree that Evangelicalism contributed much to the temper of the age. Yet there agreement ceases. Brown, for example, thinks that the legacy, never a rich one, was ill-spent by the likes of Charlotte Brönte's sour-souled Mr. Brocklehurst. Noel Annan, rather, finds it husbanded and flourishing in the sensitive conscience of Leslie Stephen. Both may be right. If so, merely further proof of the strength and complexity of the Evangelical inheritance; further indication, therefore, of the need for its careful examination.

The legacy cannot be examined apart from its source: the Evangelical faith itself. Without an understanding of that faith, one cannot know that while Zachary Macaulay was an Evangelical, Granville Sharp was not; without that understanding the true difference between the Evangelical morality of Henry Thornton and the humanitarian morality of Henry Brougham will go undetected.

By his skillful use of England's resources, more than by his generalship in the field, Edward I became one of the most effective military commanders England produced between the Conqueror and Oliver Cromwell. King of a country rich in men, money, and resources, he was well provided with raw materials, but it was Edward's accomplishment to use them to create and support a large and tenacious army. He called for fighting men from all classes of the population, regardless of tenure; he required all sections of the realm to send provisions; and he required all people in his kingdom to support his wars by granting subsidies. Organization of this nature called all of Edward's political acumen into play, for it implied the existence of a corporate nature for England, one where the people not only must approve measures that touched them, they must also contribute to them. When the matter touching them was the defense of the realm, they responded to royal leadership by forming a proto-national army.

In spite of the importance and implications of this subject, there has been sparse treatment of it by historians. A handful of articles and a few books deal with the subject of military organization directly, while it forms a small part of a number of general works. William Stubbs described the make-up and use of both the militia and the mounted forces of England as pieces in the great game between king and barons and as evidence for the growing sense of nationality in England. J. E. Morris's Welsh Wars of Edward the First is a careful analysis of Edwardian armies based largely upon Exchequer sources.

Greed, avarice, rapacity, the quest for filthy lucre, are none of them traits peculiar to western Europeans of the last few hundred years — the capitalist epoch. Eastern potentates, feudal lords, magnates of the church, humble peasants, noble Romans, cultured Greeks and many others have been infected with the love of gold. The desire for wealth is not confined to capitalism; wealth for high living, conspicuous display or hoarding are all non-capitalist. Mediaeval and Renaissance monarchs shared with a number of ‘primitive’ tribes a taste for extravagant display. The hoarding of treasure typical of French peasants (at least until quite recently) is strikingly similar to the practices of wealthy Romans described by M. I. Finley.

None of these people are capitalists in any strict sense of the word. Some of them own some means of production — although this would not necessarily be true of churchmen or princes who were the beneficiaries of systems forcibly expropriating a surplus from the producers. But even those who, like some peasants, own means of production, do not necessarily live in a capitalist system in a capitalist manner. They do not reinvest in order to procure further income; they merely exchange commodities for money, which is then exchanged for other commodities or hoarded (not ‘saved’ or invested, merely hoarded). Capitalism, on Marx's account, involves a different process — money is exchanged for commodities which are exchanged for money once more: M-C-M rather than C-M-C. In Capital Marx describes hoarding as a petrification of money; it exists in a naive form in traditional societies producing for a limited circle of wants.

Samuel Johnson's dislike of Jonathan Swift has provoked a continuing interest among scholars and critics. Commentators on the subject have described the attitude as an inherent prejudice and have questioned its possible causes. From James Boswell's repeated comments that Johnson apparently had an unaccountable prejudice against Swift and his pointed question to discover the source (“I once took the liberty to ask him, if Swift had personally offended him, and he told me, he had not”) to Walter Raleigh's facile summation that an essential difference in their characters separated them, speculation has been persistent, if not always rewarding. Perhaps the final statement of explanation is set forth in W. B. C. Watkins's essay, “Vive la bagatelle,” where Watkins maintains that though Johnson had “a residue of sheer, inexplicable prejudice” against Swift, much that appears prejudice can be made understandable. That understanding comes largely from Watkins's well-documented theory that Johnson and Swift were more alike than different: “Curiously, his antagonism is intensified by certain similarities between the two men in circumstance and personality.” Watkins's theory convincingly explains the source of a behavioral trait clearly revealed in Boswell's record of Johnson's conversation.

Yet the character of Johnson's biography of Swift has its own peculiar problem. Most of Johnson's attacks on Swift came at impromptu moments when conversation led Johnson to lash out hastily at the Dean. Boswell indicates that Johnson's behavior was habitual: “He attacked Swift, as he used to do upon all occasions.” Watkins explains this in part by referring to Johnson's belief that Swift was overpraised; thus Johnson voiced his irritation whenever excessive acclaim prompted a reply.