Revivals are powerful explosions of popular religious fervour which can occur at periodic intervals within the life-cycle of a particular church or denomination. During the nineteenth century, revivals lost much of their spontaneous and ecstatic character and became routine events within the average church calendar. Starting in 1859, the year of the great revival in Ulster, and ending in 1905, with the outbreak of the revival in Wales, this book examines the phenomenon of revivalism in a period of decline. Even within this period of decline, revivals continued to be popular events for those within the evangelical community. Prayer services, week-day meetings, alternative venues and popular music were all used by evangelicals to provoke an outburst of revival fervor. As well, revivals were increasingly conducted by a growing number of full-time professionals. This book explores the changing character of late nineteenth-century revivalism by looking at those who promoted it, such as working-class men, visiting American preachers, like Moody and Sankey, and a small, but significant number of women. This book also explores the response to this more 'professionalised' revivalism from within the evangelical community. Evangelicals had deeply contradictory attitudes towards the purpose and functioning of revivals. They were torn between their desire for renewed religious vitality and their concern for ecclesiastical structures and spiritual propriety, and as a result, revivalism was consistently marginalized as a method of promoting church growth.

Paralleling his friend Alexis de Tocqueville's visit to America, Gustave de Beaumont traveled through Ireland in the mid-1830s to observe its people and society. In Ireland, he chronicles the history of the Irish and offers up a national portrait on the eve of the Great Famine. Published to acclaim in France, Ireland remained in print there until 1914. The English edition, translated by William Cooke Taylor and published in 1839, was not reprinted. In a devastating critique of British policy in Ireland, Beaumont questioned why a government with such enlightened institutions tolerated such oppression. He was scathing in his depiction of the ruinous state of Ireland, noting the desperation of the Catholics, the misery of repeated famines, the unfair landlord system, and the faults of the aristocracy. It was not surprising the Irish were seen as loafers, drunks, and brutes when they had been reduced to living like beasts. Yet Beaumont held out hope that British liberal reforms could heal Ireland's wounds. This rediscovered masterpiece, in a single volume for the first time, reproduces the nineteenth-century Taylor translation and includes an introduction on Beaumont and his world. This volume also presents Beaumont's impassioned preface to the 1863 French edition in which he portrays the appalling effects of the Great Famine. A classic of nineteenth-century political and social commentary, Beaumont's singular portrait offers the compelling immediacy of an eyewitness to history.