An Anniversary and New Departure: Transactions, 1872–2022

Abstract

On 26 November 1872, members of the Royal Historical Society gathered for their annual meeting at the Scottish Corporation Hall, off Fleet Street, London. The Society was marking its fourth anniversary since formation, and was delighted to have recently received recognition ‘as “Royal” by Her Majesty the Queen’. A buoyant annual report described a year of ‘extraordinary’ growth and change, which included the election of 158 new Fellows and of a popular new president. The minutes of the meeting also drew attention to the Society’s recent and successful foray into the publishing sphere, noting the ‘general satisfaction with the first volume of the Society’s Transactions’ which had recently been circulated to the membership. This publication was not, strictly speaking, the first occasion on which scholarly papers read to the Society had been made available in print. It did, however, mark the beginning of a more ambitious and structured approach to the Society’s publishing programme. In an editorial preface by Charles Rogers, the Society’s founder and self-styled ‘historiographer’, volume 1 of the Transactions of the Royal Historical Society promised ‘the recovery, from recondite sources, of materials which might illustrate the less explored paths of national and provincial history’. The volume opened with an article by the Cork-based historian Louis de Vericour on ‘The Study of History’ which lamented the ‘absence of historical studies in British education’ and argued for the subject’s ‘dignity and pre-eminent utility ... as a regulator of the human mind and as a teacher of Christian morality’. Members’ warm reception of this first volume of Transactions, as recorded on 26 November 1872, led the Council to ‘recommend that a volume of Transactions should be printed annually’.