ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Popular Science Goes Global: The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge and the Transnational Project of the Future

• In Event: Popularisation and the 19th Century History of British Science

English Abstract

In June 1837, British geologist George Greenough expressed his satisfaction with the achievements of the London-based Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (SDUK) over the space of the preceding decade: he and his collaborators had, he complacently wrote, spread “even in distant lands a taste for a much more useful and intellectual description of reading than was before required.” While historians are broadly familiar with the role of the SDUK in establishing the publication of cheap but high-quality science for “the people” in early nineteenth-century Britain, they have largely overlooked its engagement with other initiatives for the deployment of cheap print in advancing popular education in other parts of the world. Rejecting the Society’s own triumphalist rhetoric (as exemplified by Greenough), this paper examines the divergent ways in which the SDUK – whose committee numbered many key agents of Britain’s imperial ambition – became enmeshed with related initiatives across the globe. While it is true that the Society’s own activities included establishing auxiliary societies in various localities in Britain and abroad, providing resources to independent societies, libraries, and individuals, and engaging commercially with publishers (especially to aid the re-use of images), the SDUK also had its eye firmly trained on the activities of reformers, educators, and publishers overseas. Focusing particularly on the SDUK’s widely appropriated Penny Magazine, this paper explores the manner in which the Society’s project drew on pre-existing Continental initiatives. It also examines how the materials and example of the Penny Magazine were rapidly appropriated in Europe, North America, and beyond, analysing how the periodical was repackaged, translated and augmented for use in widely different contexts and with widely different purposes.

Author

• Jonathan Topham, University of Leeds