Victorian Historians and the Royal Historical Society (The Prothero Lecture)

Abstract

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.