About this Event
Instigated by the notable Whig MP Henry Brougham, and established at the offices of the new London University on 6 November 1826, the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge became an icon of the movement for the “education of the people” in early nineteenth-century Britain. Over the space of twenty years, it was responsible for commissioning a vast array of cheap knowledge publications, ranging from the sixpenny treatises of the “Library of Useful Knowledge” (1827–43) and the ground-breaking Penny Magazine (1832–46) to its astonishing collection of sixpenny maps (1829–44) and its twenty-seven volume Penny Cyclopaedia (1832–45).
This talk, based on research undertaken as the 2023 RIC Visiting Fellow at UCL, introduces the Society and its activities, shedding new light on its origins and motivations. In particular, I will show that it was rooted in a much broader view of the role of popular education than has previously been appreciated, that it emerged out of an initiative within the British and Foreign Schools Society to expand its programme of elementary instruction, and that its foundation in November 1826 represented an attempt by Brougham to wrest back control of his initiative from commercial publishers and more radical reformers.
The talk will be accompanied by a display of items from UCL Special Collections and Professor Topham's own collection.
Jonathan R. Topham is Professor of History of Science at the University of Leeds, UK. He has written extensively on the history of science and print culture in nineteenth-century Britain, including most recently Reading the Book of Nature: How Eight Best Sellers Reconnected Christianity and the Sciences on the Eve of the Victorian Age (Chicago, 2022). He is currently running a project entitled “Science for the People,” funded by a Leverhulme Trust Project Grant, to re-examine the history of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge.
The UCL Research Institute for Collections is a virtual centre for scholarship, pedagogy and impact based around UCL’s exceptional range of collections. The RIC Special Collections Visiting Fellowship offers opportunities to conduct research on a topic centred on the UCL holdings of archives, rare books, and records and the Liberating the Collections Fellowships of focuses on unearthing underrepresented voices in the UCL collections of museum objects, artworks, archives, rare books and manuscripts and finding new ways of engaging with collection stories and presenting them to wider society.
Image: © The Trustees of the British Museum
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
UCL Main Campus, Gower Street, London, United Kingdom
GBP 0.00