Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge

The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (SDUK) was founded in 1826, mainly at the instigation of Lord Brougham,[1] with the object of publishing information to people who were unable to obtain formal teaching or who preferred self-education. A Whiggish London organisation that published inexpensive texts intended to adapt scientific and similarly high-minded material for the rapidly-expanding reading public, it was wound up in 1848.

Lecture-Hall of the Greenwich Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge at its opening on 15 February 1843

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.[2] 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.[3] Henry David Thoreau cites the Society in his essay "Walking" in which he jestingly proposes a Society for the Diffusion of Useful Ignorance.[4]

Aims

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. It was run by a committee of eminent persons, and had a close association with the newly formed University College London, as well as the numerous provincial Mechanics' Institutes. Its printers included Baldwin & Cradock, later succeeded by Charles Knight. The Society commissioned work and dealt with the printers, and finally distributed the publications; profits were used to continue the Society's work.

Development

While conceived with high ideals the project gradually failed, as subscribers fell away and sale of publications declined. Charles Knight was largely responsible for what success SDUK publications did have; he engaged in extensive promotional campaigns, and worked to improve the readability of the sometimes abstruse material.[5] Nonetheless many of the titles had little interest to readers, though the Penny Magazine at its peak had a circulation of around 200,000 copies a week. The Society eventually wound up in 1848, though some of its works apparently continued to be published. The archives of the Society are in the possession of University College, London.

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]

Publications

Library of Useful Knowledge

One significant set of publications by the SDUK was the Library of Useful Knowledge;[7] sold for a sixpence and published biweekly, its books focused on scientific topics. The first volume, an introduction to the series by Brougham, sold over 33,000 copies. However, attempts to reach the working class market were largely unsuccessful; only among the middle class was there sustained interest in popular science texts.[5]

Like many other works in the new genre of popular scientific narratives—such as the Bridgewater Treatises and Humphry Davy's Consolations in Travel—the books of the Library of Useful Knowledge focused on natural theology and imbued 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]

Other SDUK publications
Map of Naples published by SDUK
  • Thomas Love Peacock satirised the SDUK in 1831 in Crotchet Castle as the 'Steam Intellect Society':[11] a vicarage is almost set on fire by a "cook taking it into her head to study hydrostatics, in a sixpenny tract, published by the Steam Intellect Society".[12]
  • In the Notes to Anthony Trollope's book, Framley Parsonage, published by Oxford University Press as a World's Classic in 1980, P. D. Edwards writes that Trollope's character, Lord Boanerges, "may have been modelled in some respects on Lord Brougham.... founder of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge".
  • References to the Society are rare in the modern era, but within Steampunk culture, it is not entirely uncommon to refer to the Society itself and/or its better-known publications in an attempt to lend Victorian verisimilitude. The in-house publishing organ of the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles is called the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Information; while many communities in North America have established Societies for Learning in Retirement which are partially modelled along the same lines with the goal of disseminating knowledge amongst people who, although retired, are still interested in continuing to learn.
  • The Blackwood Gallery, a contemporary art gallery at the University of Toronto Mississauga, has published a series of free print and PDF broadsheets since 2018, which adopt the SDUK moniker. These publications reflect on contemporary issues in the arts, humanities, and social sciences by questioning the nature of “useful knowledge,” in dialogue with the history of the  SDUK.[13]

References

Citations
  1. B. Hilton, A Mad, Bad, & Dangerous People? (Oxford 2008) p. 174
  2. Helen R. Deese and Guy R. Woodall (1986). "A Calendar of Lectures Presented by the Boston Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (1829–1847)". Studies in the American Renaissance: 17–67. JSTOR 30227545.CS1 maint: uses authors parameter (link)
  3. Barnard, Henry (1865). "The American Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge". The American Journal of Education. 15: 239–245. Retrieved 20 June 2020.
  4. Thoreau's Walking – 3 Archived 4 July 2010 at the Wayback Machine
  5. Secord, Victorian Sensation, pp 48–50
  6. The Royal Lady's Magazine
  7. Library of Useful Knowledge (Baldwin & Craddock; then Charles Knight) - Book Series List, publishinghistory.com. Retrieved 14 June 2018.
  8. Secord, Victorian Sensation, pp 55–62; quotation from p 55.
  9. Tim St. Onge, Maps for the Masses: Geography in the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, Library of Congress blog, 13 July 2016.
  10. Clarke, Ernest (1900). "Youatt, William" . In Lee, Sidney (ed.). Dictionary of National Biography. 63. London: Smith, Elder & Co.
  11. B. Wilson, Decency and Disorder (London 2007) p. 377
  12. T S Peacock, Nightmare Abbey and Crotchet Castle (London 1947) P. 106
  13. "Publications". Blackwood Gallery. Retrieved 27 April 2020.

Sources
  • Patricia Anderson, The Printed Image and the Transformation of Popular Culture, 1790–1860. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991.
  • Ian J. Barrow, 'India for the Working Classes: The Maps of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge,' Modern Asian Studies 38 (2004): 677–702.
  • Mead T. Cain, 'The Maps of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge: A Publishing History', Imago Mundi, Vol. 46 (1994), pp. 151–167.
  • Valerie Gray, Charles Knight: Educator, Publisher, Writer. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006.
  • Monica C Grobel, 'The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge 1826-1846' (Unpublished MA diss., 4 vols, London University, 1933).
  • Thomas Palmelund Johansen. 'The World Wide Web of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge: On the Global Circulation of Broughamite Educational Literature, 1826–1848,' Victorian Periodicals Review 50 (2017): 703–20.
  • Richard Johnson, '"Really Useful Knowledge:" Radical Education and Working-Class Culture 1790–1848.' In Working-Class Culture: Studies in History and Theory, ed. by John Clarke, Chas Crichter, and Richard Johnson (London: Hutchinson, 1979), 75–102.
  • Janet Percival, 'The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, 1826–1848: A handlist of the Society's correspondence and papers', The Library of University College London, Occasional Papers, No 5 1978, ISSN 0309-3352
  • James A. Secord. Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. University of Chicago Press, 2000. ISBN 0-226-74410-8
  • Harold Smith. 1974. The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, 1826–1846: A Social and Bibliographical Evaluation. Halifax, N.S.: Dalhousie University Press.
  • University College London has virtually a complete set of publications and numerous letters from authors and readers and other records.
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