The slightly more diverse fare in this year's Transactions reflects two developments. First, the Society has adopted a new format for its regional visits. Whereas previously the visits to UK Higher Education Institutions were accompanied by a formal paper reading by a speaker nominated by the Society, it has been decided to offer our support to regional symposia, preferably involving more than one institution, from which we will publish a selection of papers. The first of these symposia on the subject of ‘Poverty and Welfare in Ireland, c. 1833–1948’ hosted by the Queen's University Belfast and Oxford Brookes University was held at the Institute of Irish Studies at the Queen's University Belfast on 26–7 June 2009, and three of the papers presented are published here. We have also decided that the Gresham Lectures for the Public Understanding of History founded in memory of Colin Matthew deserve a wider audience, and if appropriate, we propose to publish them in Transactions. Charles Saumerez Smith's lecture on the institutionalisation of art in the nineteenth century therefore appears in print here.

Under the general title, ‘French Crossings’, the presidential addresses over the next four years will explore intersections and relationships between cultures, periods, disciplines, approaches, historiographies and problems, all within the general field of early modern and modern French history. ‘Tales of Two Cities’ takes as its approach both comparative history and l'histoire croisée. It compares and contrasts the very differing cultural impact on each side of the Channel of one of the most influential British novels about Franco-British political culture, namely, Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities (1859). The novel has been conventionally hailed in England, especially from the end of the nineteenth century, as a parable unfavourably contrasting France's revolutionary tradition with the allegedly more humane political evolutionism of England. In France, the novel has been largely ignored or else viewed as a Burkean rant. Yet Dickens's personal attitudes towards France and in particular Paris suggests a more ambiguous and complicated history. For Dickens, modern Paris, as regenerated under Haussmann, was a brilliant success story against which he contrasted both Paris in the 1790s and the social and political circumstances he claimed to detect within English metropolitan culture in the recent past and present. Dickens views the radical and disinherited workers’ suburb of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine less, it is suggested, as quintessentially French than as quintessentially plebeian, and the prospect of a slide into revolutionary politics as a lurking threat within England as well as France.

Framed by consideration of images of treasurers on the books of the treasury in thirteenth-century Siena, this article uses evidence for the employment of men of religion in city offices in central and northern Italy to show how religious status (treated as a subset of ‘clerical culture’) could become an important object of negotiation between city and churchmen, a tool in the repertoire of power relations. It focuses on the employment of men of religion as urban treasurers and takes Florence in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries as a principal case study, but also touches on the other tasks assigned to men of religion and, very briefly, on evidence from other cities (Bologna, Brescia, Como, Milan, Padua, Perugia and Siena). It outlines some of the possible arguments deployed for this use of men of religion in order to demonstrate that religious status was, like gender, more contingent and fluid than the norm-based models often relied on as a shorthand by historians. Despite the powerful rhetoric of lay–clerical separation in this period, the engagement of men of religion in paid, term-bound urban offices inevitably brought them closer to living like the laity.

It is often said that if Oliver Cromwell had lived longer the Puritan Revolution could have survived. The monarchical component of protectoral rule, and the protector's endeavours to broaden the base of his regime, are taken to have signalled a return towards normality and thus towards stability. That mood has been contrasted with the self-destruction of the revolution in the two years after Cromwell's death, a period of twilit anarchy which only the restoration of the Stuarts could end. That interpretation has its points but is misleadingly one-sided. The protectorate had frailties which it never overcame. It failed to live down its origins in the military coups of 1653. Those episodes affronted principles of civilian rule and parliamentary supremacy which commanded widespread support but which have been obscured by the ‘revisionist’ trend of parliamentary history. Though he aimed at ‘healing and settling’, the protector healed little and settled nothing. His attempts to woo mainstream opinion were unsuccessful. In so far as he won its compliance or tolerance, the achievement was conditional upon his readiness to submit to the principles of rule which his seizure of power had broken. It was a condition he could not or would not meet. By the end of his life, military obstruction to civilian and parliamentary rule had reduced his regime to paralysis, and had deepened the divisions between civilian and military aspirations that would soon bring down his successor and would destroy each of the fleeting regimes that followed.

The position of the Church of England in colonial New England has usually been seen through the lens of the ‘bishop controversy’ of the 1760s and early 1770s, where Congregational fears of the introduction of a Laudian style bishop to British North America have been viewed as one of the key factors leading to the American Revolution. By contrast, this paper explores some of the successes enjoyed by the Church of England in New England, particularly in the period from the 1730s to the early 1760s, and examines some of the reasons for the Church's growth in these years. It argues that in some respects the Church in New England was in fact becoming rather more popular, more indigenous and more integrated into New England life than both eighteenth-century Congregationalists or modern historians have wanted to believe, and that the Church was making headway both in the Puritan heartlands, and in the newer centres of population growth. Up until the early 1760s, the progress of the Church of England in New England was beginning to look like a success story rather than one with in-built failure.

This article explores the political and intellectual circumstances which led to the efflorescence of cultural institutions between the foundation of the National Gallery in 1824 and the National Portrait Gallery in 1856: the transformation of institutions of public culture from haphazard and rather amateurish institutions to ones which were well organised, with a strong sense of social mission, and professionally managed. This transformation was in part owing to a group of exceptionally talented individuals, including Charles Eastlake, Henry Cole and George Scharf, accepting appointment in institutions to foster the public understanding of art. But it was not simply a matter of individual agency, but also of coordinated action by parliament, led by a group of MPs, including the Philosophical Radicals. It was much influenced by the example of Germany, filtered through extensive translation of German art historical writings and visits by writers and politicians to Berlin and Munich. It was also closely related to the philosophy of the utilitarians, who had a strong belief in the political and social benefits of the study of art. Only the Royal Academy refused the embrace of state control.

The most detailed contemporary ethnographic representation of early nineteenth-century Ireland can be found in the reports produced by the Poor Inquiry of 1833–6. Despite their richness, however, these reports remained marginal to contemporary policy discussions and public debate. This is normally, and correctly, attributed to the unpopularity and impracticability of the specific recommendations of the Inquiry. This paper argues that the marginalisation of the reports was also due to their discursive originality. It focuses on the voluminous oral evidence which was collected and published by the Inquiry. This evidence was taken in public from large groups representing all social classes, and much of it was printed verbatim. This method was unique among state reports of the nineteenth century in the United Kingdom, and unusual in social discourse more generally. It emerged from an equally unusual conception of truth as social consensus, a theory which the Inquiry adopted in order to overcome what it saw as the socially fragmented nature of representation in Ireland.

This paper investigates the way in which the ‘problem of poverty’ in Ireland was encountered, constructed and debated by members of the Irish intellectual and political elite in the decades between the Great Famine and the outbreak of the land war in the late 1870s. This period witnessed acute social upheavals in Ireland, from the catastrophic nadir of the Famine, through the much-vaunted economic recovery of the 1850s–1860s, to the near-famine panic of the late 1870s (itself prefigured by a lesser agricultural crisis in 1859–63). The paper focuses on how a particular elite group – the ‘Dublin School’ of political economists and their circle, and most prominently William Neilson Hancock and John Kells Ingram – sought to define and investigate the changing ‘problem’, shape public attitudes towards the legitimacy of welfare interventions and lobby state officials in the making of poor law policy in this period. It suggests that the crisis of 1859–63 played a disproportionate role in the reevaluation of Irish poor relief and in promoting a campaign for an ‘anglicisation’ of poor law measures and practice in Ireland.

This paper focuses on the campaign to reform the Irish poor law in the 1860s. Debate on poor law reform highlighted fundamental divisions over the principles underlying the New Poor Law as well as widespread dissatisfaction with the poor law system in Ireland particularly within the Catholic community. Led by the leading Catholic cleric, Archbishop Paul Cullen, critics of the Irish poor law sought to lessen reliance on the institution of the workhouse and to expand outdoor relief thus bringing the system closer to its English model. The poor law authorities supported by the Irish landed elite fought successfully to maintain the limited and restrictive nature of the system fearful of the consequences of extending local discretion. The paper reveals the contested nature of poor relief both in principle and in practice, and the centrality of social issues to Irish political debate in decades after the Great Famine.

This paper revisits two generations of highly talented and significant historians who flourished in Britain between c. 1870 and 1920. George Prothero stood high among them and he, with his brother Roland, receives a good deal of attention at the centre of the argument here. But others stood still higher: Tout, Firth, Poole, Acton, the incomparable Maitland; and the purpose of the piece is to present a portrait of the British historical profession as a whole during a crucial period of its formation by using the Protheros’ experience as a platform from which to depart. The journey inevitably begins with that Prothero experience seen as a microcosm of greater tendencies; but it soon winds away toward Germany and Scotland and France; we pause to admire fresh perspectives yielded in what had become an age of edition and what would become an age of economic and social history. Of course the track leads also to Sarajevo and the implications of European war for a fledgling profession. All this itinerary lends an opportunity, therefore, to think through some of the themes and characteristics which made this period of development distinctive; but it also warns and guards against reducing these years to a time of ‘transition’, remarkable only for what would follow it. The personalities and achievements discussed here deserve better of us and recommend that we devote more energy to considering the features of the age of Prothero, for their own sake and in their own terms.