The Society For The Diffusion Of Useful Knowledge
With information, often of questionable authenticity, available at a click of a button, it is easy to forget how difficult it was to accumulate knowledge or check a basic fact even thirty years ago. It required thumbing through encyclopedias or going to reference libraries. Two hundred years ago it was even more difficult but the emergence of two technological advances, the development of high speed printing presses and the promise of the railway, gave Henry Brougham and several education reformers of a Whig persuasion an idea.
At Furnivall’s Inn in November 1826 Brougham proposed the foundation of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (SDUK), whose aim was through exploiting recent advances in printing and distribution to publish cheap, informative works to “supply the appetite which had been created by elementary instruction” and “to direct the ability to read to useful ends”. A series of pamphlets were to published as part of the Library of Useful Knowledge and to reach the widest audience and to minimize controversy they were to steer clear of topics involving political or religious controversy.
The first, A Discourse of the Objects, Advantages, and Pleasures of Science, published in 1827, provided a brief survey of mathematics, natural philosophy, the solar system, electricity, and the workings of the steam engine, had sold 42,000 copies by 1833. In 1828 the Society launched a series of pamphlets written in what was termed an “anecdotal style”, aiming to provide practical information in an easily understood format. Known as A Library of Entertaining Knowledge, its subjects included brewing, insects, and birds.
One of its most successful publications was a two-volume work by George Lillie Craik called The Pursuit of Knowledge under Difficulties, issued in 1830 and 1831. It was an account of how several ordinary people had surmounted the difficulties caused by educational disadvantage or physical incapacity such as blindness. Running into several editions over the next decade or so, it even merited a namecheck in chapter 33 of Dickens’ Pickwick Papers when Sam Weller’s father, seeing his son struggling over the composition of a message for a Valentine’s card, remarks “But what’s that you’re a doin’ of? Pursuit of knowledge under difficulties, Sammy?”
In an attempt to widen its reach the Society launched a weekly paper of miscellaneous information called the Penny Magazine in March 1832. It use of innovative and high-quality woodcut illustrations brought it a circulation of over 200,000 in its first year. As Passmore Edwards noted in his autobiography, A Few Footprints (19055), it was the only London periodical that came to his remote Cornish village. He recalled as a boy reading an article on the anatomist, John Hunter, which aroused in him “boyish flutterings of ambition to become known and useful in some way myself”. Edwards achieved his dream and devoted some of his wealth in the 1880s and 1890s to supporting educational projects, including libraries, in both London and his native Cornwall.
However, as we shall see, the Society’s existence was not all plain sailing.
