Index no. 0041

Family Atlas
Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge

by the Rev. James Mickleburgh, M.A.
with a geological map of England and Wales by Sir R. Murchison
and six star maps by Sir John Lubbock published by Letts, in London
1876

The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, or SDUK, was established in 1826 to provide scientific and other information to the British middle and working classes. Many of its works were beyond the means of the working classes, as can be deduced from plate 2 – a single plate of this work cost from 6d to 2/6, at a time when a labourer might earn a pound a week, so this complete work (without the binding) with 78 plates at 1/- each would have cost almost four pounds, his wages for a month.

I suspect, from its name, that the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge was set up partly as a rival to the better known Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge. If I am right, the SDUK preferred diffusion to the more forceful propagation, and preferred scientific truth to the religious kind.

The SDUK published several editions of its atlas. Dates I have seen quoted are 1829-32, 1840, 1844, and 1846. In 1848 the SDUK ceased to be active, but works which it had commissioned continued to be published. An edition of the SDUK Atlas was published in 1873 by Stanford in London, and included twelve plates of India and sixteen of the USA.

The work presented here was printed from some of the same plates as the 1873 edition, by Letts, also in London. It does not include the twelve Indian and sixteen USA plates, though it does, strangely, include the key maps to them. I assume that the original owner bought the plates separately, without realising that a key to absent maps might be a waste of money. I have examined a copy of the 1873 edition (which was once the property of the Earl of Normanton – so much for the SDUK's intended market) and its plates are sharper, and on higher-quality paper, than those of the 1876 edition presented here.

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