The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (SDUK) was founded in London in 1826, mainly at the instigation of Whig MP Henry Brougham, with the object of publishing information to people who were unable to obtain formal teaching or who preferred self-education. It was a largely Whig organisation, and published inexpensive texts intended to adapt scientific and similarly high-minded material for the rapidly-expanding reading public over twenty years until it was disbanded in 1846. [1]
Henry Brougham considered that mass education was an essential prerequisite for political reform. In October 1824 he contributed an article on "scientific education of the people" to the Whig Edinburgh Review , in which he argued that popular education would be greatly enhanced by the encouragement of cheap publications to complement the numerous recently founded provincial mechanics' institutes. The following year a version of this article was issued as a pamphlet entitled Practical Observations upon the Education of the People Addressed to the Working Classes and Their Employers, [2] selling at least 19 editions. In April 1825 Brougham set about trying to found a society to produce cheap educational books, although it was not until November 1826 that the SDUK was formally founded. [3] One of those present at the first meeting was the philosopher James Mill, and the founding committee included many Fellows of the Royal Society and Members of Parliament, as well as twelve founding committee members of the newly formed University College London. [4]
SDUK publications were intended for the working class and the middle class, as an antidote to the more radical output of the pauper presses. The Society set out to achieve this by acting as an intermediary between authors and publishers by launching several series of publications. Its printers included Baldwin & Cradock, later succeeded by Charles Knight. The SDUK commissioned work and dealt with the printers, and finally distributed the publications; profits were used to continue the Society's work. By using the new technologies of mass production, such as steam presses and stereotype, the Society and its printers kept costs low and were able to sell the books at much cheaper prices than was usual. [5]
The Society was not without opposition, and the Literary Gazette mounted a campaign on behalf of the book trade, supported by publications such as the Royal Lady's Magazine, who complained in the early 1830s that:
Few persons are aware that the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge have done, and are still doing, more to ruin the Book trade than all the change of times, the want of money, the weight of taxes, and even the law of Libel have accomplished; yet they – a committee of Noblemen and pretended Patriots – are permitted to go on in their unfeeling, nay, considering the hundreds of thousands engaged in the Book trade, we may add brutal, career, without interruption. [6]
The SDUK publishing programme began with the Library of Useful Knowledge. [7] Sold for sixpence and published fortnightly, its books focused on scientific topics. Like many other works in the new genre of popular science—such as the Bridgewater Treatises and Humphry Davy's Consolations in Travel—the books of the Library of Useful Knowledge imbued different scientific fields with concepts of progress: uniformitarianism in geology, the nebular hypothesis in astronomy, and the scala naturae in the life sciences. According to historian James A. Secord, such works met a demand for "general concepts and simple laws", and in the process helped establish the authority of professional science and specialised scientific disciplines. [8]
The first volume of the Library of Useful Knowledge, an introduction to the series by Brougham on the "objects, advantages and pleasures of science", sold over 33,000 copies by the end of 1829. Despite the initial success of the series, however, it soon became clear that it was too demanding for many readers, and the Society began to offer more varied and attractive publications, starting with the Library of Entertaining Knowledge (1829–38) and the Penny Magazine (1832–1845), a lavishly illustrated [9] weekly that achieved unprecedented success, with sales in excess of 200,000 copies in the first year. [10] The scope and scale of the Society's activities expanded further over the following decade, and included the production of a Penny Cyclopaedia (1833–1843) in 27 volumes.
Although sales of these publications may have been more among the middle- than the working-classes, [11] the Society had a significant role in pioneering "the idea of cheap, improving publications, freely and easily available, well produced and distributed on a scale hitherto unknown," and became iconic of the "March of Intellect". [12] The publisher Charles Knight bears much of the credit for the success that SDUK publications had; he engaged in extensive promotional campaigns, and worked to improve the readability of the sometimes abstruse material. [13]
The Society's continuing commitment to the high intellectual standards with which it was conceived probably contributed to its ultimate decline, as subscribers and sale of publications fell away. The Biographical Dictionary begun in 1842 was immensely ambitious and contributed to the Society's demise. [14]
An American group of the same name was founded as part of the Lyceum movement in the United States in 1829. Its Boston branch sponsored lectures by such speakers as Ralph Waldo Emerson and was active from 1829 to 1947. [21] In 1838 and 1839, an American Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge published a fifty-volume set of books called The American School Library . [22] Henry David Thoreau cites the Society in his essay "Walking" in which he jestingly proposes a Society for the Diffusion of Useful Ignorance. [23]
Robert Chambers was a Scottish publisher, geologist, evolutionary thinker, author and journal editor who, like his elder brother and business partner William Chambers, was highly influential in mid-19th-century scientific and political circles.
Charles Knight was an English publisher, editor and author. He published and contributed to works such as The Penny Magazine, The Penny Cyclopaedia, and The English Cyclopaedia, and established the Local Government Chronicle.
Mechanics' institutes, also known as mechanics' institutions, sometimes simply known as institutes, and also called schools of arts, were educational establishments originally formed to provide adult education, particularly in technical subjects, to working men in Victorian-era Britain and its colonies. They were often funded by local industrialists on the grounds that they would ultimately benefit from having more knowledgeable and skilled employees. The mechanics' institutes often included libraries for the adult working class, and were said to provide them with an alternative pastime to gambling and drinking in pubs.
John Lindley FRS was an English botanist, gardener and orchidologist.
Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation is an 1844 work of speculative natural history and philosophy by Robert Chambers. Published anonymously in England, it brought together various ideas of stellar evolution with the progressive transmutation of species in an accessible narrative which tied together numerous scientific theories of the age.
The Penny Magazine was an illustrated British magazine aimed at the working class, published every Saturday from 31 March 1832 to 31 October 1845. Charles Knight created it for the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge in response to Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, which started two months earlier. Sold for only a penny and illustrated with wood-engravings, it was an expensive enterprise that could only be supported by very large circulation. Though initially very successful—with a circulation of 200,000 in the first year—it proved too dry and too Whiggish to appeal to the working-class audience it needed to be financially viable. Its competitor—which included a weekly short story—grew more slowly, but lasted much longer.
The Constitution of Man first published in 1828 is a work by George Combe, who is credited with popularizing the pseudoscience of Phrenology. Combe argues that the human mind is best understood through phrenology, and that the relative size of the various regions of the brain defined by phrenology determines a person's behavior and potential interactions with the external world. In The Constitution of Man, Combe uses phrenology to create a practical science of morality, proposing that conforming to natural laws leads to happiness based on the phrenological understanding of human nature. The book was an international bestseller, selling at least 100,000 copies in Britain alone and over 300,000 copies worldwide by 1855, largely due to the publication of the 'people's edition,' making it one of the best-sellers of the nineteenth century.
The Faculty of Medicine at Dalhousie University, also known as Dalhousie Medical School, is a medical school and faculty of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.
The Boston Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge in Boston, Massachusetts, was founded "to promote and direct popular education by lectures and other means." Modelled after the recently formed Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge in London, the Boston group's officers included Daniel Webster, Nathan Hale, Jacob Bigelow, William Ellery Channing, Edward Everett, Nathaniel L. Frothingham, and Abbott Lawrence. The society published the American Library of Useful Knowledge, a series of scholarly works by British and American authors. Public lectures on a variety of topics were held at Boston's Masonic Temple, and other venues.
William Youatt was an English veterinary surgeon and animal welfare writer.
The Library of Entertaining Knowledge was founded by the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. The books appeared from 1829 to 1838, published in London by Charles Knight, and complemented the Society's Library of Useful Knowledge, which had not sold as well as hoped. The volumes were priced at 4s. 6d, more expensive than rival non-fiction series.
John Horsefield was an English handloom weaver and amateur botanist after whom the daffodil Narcissus 'Horsfieldii' is named. Horsefield had little formal schooling, and acquired most of his botanical knowledge through self-study and involvement in local botanical groups, which provided a venue for working class people to share knowledge, in part by pooling money to purchase books.
Bernard Vise Lightman, FRSC is a Canadian historian, and professor of humanities and science and technology studies at York University, in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. He specializes in the relationship between Victorian science and unbelief, the role of women in science, and the popularization of science.
Henry Waymouth, also spelt Weymouth, was a Baptist activist and campaigner, and a founder of the South Australian Company.
Murray's Family Library was a series of non-fiction works published from 1829 to 1834, by John Murray, in 51 volumes. The series editor was John Gibson Lockhart, who also wrote the first book, a biography of Napoleon. The books were priced at five shillings; Murray's approach, which did not involve part-publication, is considered a fundamentally more conservative business model, and intention, than used by the contemporary library of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge.
Christian Ramsay, Countess of Dalhousie informally Lady Dalhousie, néeBroun; was a Scottish botanist and natural historian. She married George Ramsay, 9th Earl of Dalhousie and travelled with him when he was appointed Lieutenant Governor of Nova Scotia, Governor General of Canada and Commander in Chief of the Indian Army. While travelling, she collected and catalogued many species of plants, presented scientific papers to societies and donated many collections to different botanical groups.
Taxes on knowledge was a slogan defining an extended British campaign against duties and taxes on newspapers, their advertising content, and the paper they were printed on. The paper tax was early identified as an issue: "A tax upon Paper, is a tax upon Knowledge" is a saying attributed to Alexander Adam (1741–1809), a Scottish headmaster.
The March of Intellect, or the 'March of mind', was the subject of heated debate in early nineteenth-century England, one side welcoming the progress of society towards greater, and more widespread, knowledge and understanding, the other deprecating the modern mania for progress and for new-fangled ideas.
Traité de mécanique céleste is a five-volume treatise on celestial mechanics written by Pierre-Simon Laplace and published from 1798 to 1825 with a second edition in 1829. In 1842, the government of Louis Philippe gave a grant of 40,000 francs for a 7-volume national edition of the Oeuvres de Laplace (1843–1847); the Traité de mécanique céleste with its four supplements occupies the first 5 volumes.
Newton laid the foundations of Celestial Mechanics, at the close of the seventeenth century, by the discovery of the principle of universal gravitation. Even in his own hands, this discovery led to important consequences, but it has required a century and a half, and a regular succession of intellects the most powerful, to fill up the outline sketched by him. Of these, Laplace himself was the last, and, perhaps after Newton, the greatest; and the task commenced in the Principia of the former, is completed in the Mécanique Céleste of the latter. In this last named work, the illustrious author has proposed to himself his object, to unite all the theories scattered throughout the various channels of publication, employed by his predecessors, to reduce them to one common method, and present them all in the same point of view.
If one were asked to name the two most important works in the progress of mathematics and physics, the answer would undoubtedly be, the Principia of Newton and the Mécanique Céleste of Laplace. In their historical and philosophical aspects these works easily outrank all others, and furnish thus the standard by which all others must be measured. The distinguishing feature of the Principia is its clear and exhaustive enunciation of fundamental principles. The Mécanique Céleste, on the other hand, is conspicuous for the development of principles and for the profound generality of its methods. The Principia gives the plans and specifications of the foundations; the Mécanique Céleste affords the key to the vast and complex superstructure.
James Andrew Secord is an American-born historian. He is a professor of history and philosophy of science within the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge, and a fellow of Christ's College. He is also the director of the project to publish the complete Correspondence of Charles Darwin. Secord is especially well known for his award-winning work on the reception of the anonymous Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, a pioneering evolutionary book first published in 1844.