Covenanter Politics: Evangelicalism, Political Liberalism and Ulster Presbyterians, 1798-1914

Historians of Ireland have devoted considerable attention to the Presbyterian origins of modern Irish republicanism in the 1790s and their overwhelming support for the Union with Great Britain in the 1880s. On the one hand, it has been argued that conservative politics came to dominate nineteenth-century Presbyterianism in the form of Henry Cooke who combined conservative evangelical religion with support for the established order. On the other hand, historians have long acknowledged the continued importance of liberal and radical impulses amongst Presbyterians. Few historians of the nineteenth century have attempted to bring these two stories together and to describe the relationship between the religion and politics of Presbyterians along the lines suggested by scholars of Presbyterian radicalism in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. This article argues that a distinctive form of Presbyterian evangelicalism developed in the nineteenth century that sought to bring the denomination back to the theological and spiritual priorities of seventeenth-century Scottish and Irish Presbyterianism. By doing so, it encouraged many Presbyterians to get involved in movements for reform and liberal politics. Supporters of ‘Covenanter Politics’ utilised their denominational principles and traditions as the basis for political involvement and as a rhetoric of opposition to Anglican privilege and Catholic tyranny. These could be the prime cause of Presbyterian opposition to the infringement of their rights, such as the marriage controversy and the Disruption of the Church of Scotland in the early 1840s, and they could also be employed as a language of opposition in response to broader social and political developments, such as the demands for land reform stimulated by the agricultural depression that accompanied the Famine. Despite their opposition to ascendancy, however, the Covenanter Politics of Presbyterian Liberals predisposed them towards pan-protestant unionism against the threat of ‘Rome Rule’.

Early modern Ireland and the history of the child

Analysis of public policy on the care of children and youth in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Ireland has generated a substantial historiography in recent years. By contrast there has been far less exploration of the state's attitude to young people in early modern Irish society. The historical dimension to the current debate on state care of minors is usually identified as beginning in the nineteenth century but the institutional custody of children originated in the sixteenth century. A central aim of this essay is to document the early modern context of public concern with children and youth in order to provide a more precise historical dimension to the contemporary debate.

Crystal Creatures: Context for the Dublin Blaschka Congress

The ‘Dublin Blaschka Congress’ was conceived as a gathering to bring together the diverse scholarly disciplines that are uniquely, if eccentrically, joined in the study of scientific glass models. Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka are best known for the ‘Glass Flowers’ of Harvard but in the nineteenth century they also invented techniques to sculpt anatomically accurate marine invertebrates in glass. In the course of preparing the Congress and a coordinated temporary exhibition, much new information was uncovered about the collections of Blaschka objects in Ireland, including a total of nearly 800 surviving models. The history of the artists shows a clever business model that was designed to tap a niche market in the contemporary fascination with natural history, and improved through the course of several decades with input from clients and their own passion for understanding their biological subjects. From a modern perspective, a single Blaschka glass model of a marine invertebrate can embody biology, the history of science, craftsmanship, glass chemistry, aesthetics and art. This ability to cross interdisciplinary bridges is a singular strength of the Blaschka works, and is evident in the published proceedings of the Congress.

The Irish fossil Polyplacophora

Three species of fossil polyplacophoran molluscs are known from Ireland. Two species were originally described in the nineteenth century: Helminthochiton griffithi Salter in M‘Coy, 1846 and Pterochiton thomondiensis (Baily, 1859), and an articulated specimen representing a third indeterminate species, described here for the first time. Previous work on the evolutionary context of these species has relied on published illustrations and descriptions without examination of the type material. as chitons are considered rare in the fossil record, these specimens represent an interesting and important aspect of Irish palaeobiology.

Decadence in the Forest: Smyth's Der Wald in its Critical Context

Ethel Smyth’s opera, Der Wald, met with mixed reactions at its premiere in Berlin in 1902. Many factors contributed to this, not least, as Smyth herself observed, anti-British sentiment in Germany following the second Boer War. One might have expected that the reception of the opera at its British premiere on 18 July at Covent Garden might have been more positive, but even here critical opinion was divided. Even positive reviews were not free from gender discrimination, and other reviews condemned the opera for being too German or Wagnerian. What was meant by ‘Wagnerian’? This article answers the question in three ways. Firstly, I argue that ‘Wagnerian’ meant not a leitmotif-filled, through-composed work (as distinct from a number opera), but simply a lyrical drama; for British audiences the model for this was Tannhäuser or Lohengrin, not the Ring or Tristan. Secondly, taking this definition on board, I analyse the musical language of the opera, in particular the key structure. The central duet sung by the doomed lovers, Heinrich and Röschen, is in F major, almost the furthest possible distance from the home key of the opera (E major), which characterizes the forest and ‘nature’ in general; by contrast, the next scene, where the Kundry-like Iolanthe attempts to seduce Heinrich (a crucial reversal of the more conventional power relations of the love duet), sees a return to the home key. Thirdly, I set the hermeneutical implications of this reversal in the context of the decadent movement, with which late nineteenth-century Wagnerism was associated, and which, following the conviction of Oscar Wilde in 1895, was discredited. Der Wald thus failed because of its ‘guilt by association’ with an aesthetic that had fallen into disrepute.

Anthropology, Socialist Prediction and William Morris’s Commonweal

In the late nineteenth century, a number of writers turned to anthropology to predict a socialist future. They included prominent revolutionary socialists: Friedrich Engels, William Morris and members of the Socialist League. Contextualising the appropriation of the anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan by such readers, this article also pays particular attention to socialist popularisations of anthropology, particularly those by Morris and his fellow writers in his penny weekly, the Commonweal. Focusing on Morris’s articles on ancient society helps to illuminate his own understanding of history, art and socialism. It also sheds new light on his predictive fiction News from Nowhere, which was originally read alongside Commonweal non-fiction. Both, I will argue, encouraged readers to see the future in the struggles of the ancient past.

The character and denomination of shares in the Victorian equity market

The seminal work of J. B. Jefferys highlighted two unusual features of the Victorian equity market, namely high share denomination and uncalled capital. This article examines the extent to which publicly traded company stocks in the nineteenth century had these features. It also analyses the effect of these features on stock returns using monthly data for the London Stock Market over the period 1825–70. We find that stocks with unpaid capital earned a higher return, which is consistent with investors being rewarded for the risk of a call on their personal assets. We also find that stocks with a high share denomination earned a lower return, which is consistent with the view that this feature was conducive to superior corporate governance.

Leisure goods, education attainment and fertility choice

This paper proposes a novel mechanism for the fertility decline that occurred across the world since the late nineteenth century. It suggests that the rise in the cost of children relative to leisure goods in the process of development contributed to the decline in fertility. The paper develops a unified growth model in which children are substitutes for leisure goods in the parental utility function. The theory suggests that the rise in income, the decline in the relative price of leisure goods and the increase in educational attainment in the process of development speed up the demographic transition from high to low fertility and contributed to the transition from stagnation to growth.

Geographical Influences on Long-Run Development

We show that geographical factors influence long-run per capita income directly, as well as indirectly, through the quality of institutions. The direct influence of geography on per capita incomes is robust to the inclusion of a sub-Saharan Africa dummy and other tests. We obtain our results by replacing the usual instrument (settlers’ mortality (SM)) by stronger instruments for institutional quality (latitude, the share of the country in the temperate climatic zone). We also provide evidence that SM suffers from endogeneity with respect to institutional quality for early colonies, because of its dependence on nineteenth-century mortality data.

‘”Like an Old Cathedral City”: Belfast Welcomes Queen Victoria, August 1849’,

Belfast, with its history of communal violence, is normally seen as lying outside the mainstream of nineteenth-century British urban development. The visit of Queen Victoria in 1849 suggests a more complex, less linear picture. What emerges is an urban identity in transition, in which aspirations to conform to an ideal of civic harmony temporarily overrode acute sectarian and political divisions, where pride in recent economic achievement sat uneasily alongside an awareness of the town’s newcomer status, and where an emerging sense of regional difference competed with a continuing assumption of Irish identity.