Beasley E. Empire as the Triumph of Theory: Imperialism, Information and the Colonial Society of 1868 (British and Foreign and Colonial Policy)
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these associations were indeed in the purview of the antiquarian, and the surviving coffee
houses were too social and too informal to allow for them to serve as centres for new
kinds of intellectual endeavour, much less for organized national associations.
8
Indeed,
many of the City coffee houses were disappearing—torn down to make room for the
wider, purpose-built business premises.
9
Very soon after Timbs published his chatty
catalogue of the old clubs, Bernard H. Becker published Scientific London, in which he
sought to write more substantial histories for a very different and newer kind of club. He
noted that the ‘learned Societies’ whose meetings he had made a habit of attending had
not as yet had their origins written up, except for the one book on the Royal Society
itself. Of the thirteen non-governmental bodies whose history he went on to write in
Scientific London, nine were founded after 1815, and six of these after 1830.
10
With its
ambitious but potted histories of science—he was looking only at science—Becker’s
book was a characteristically mid-Victorian production, as were so many of the
institutions he wrote about. Collectively, these institutions changed the tenor of society,
first in scientific fields and then, in mid-century and after, outside of science. Lectures
and journals proliferated.
11
Interests that had been confined to shady, far-flung corners
could now bloom and cross-
p
ollinate in ways they never could before the concentration
of humanity that came with the foundation of the new clubs. Perhaps some of the new
institutions were no more than hothouses for the arcane or the archaic; others soon
developed a global reach.
One of the more global of the new institutions was in fact the Colonial Society. Its
name would change frequently,
12
as would its size and influence, but its purpose woul
d
not. The idea was to encourage ‘all objects likely to create a better knowledge and
understanding of the Colonies, to strengthen the connection and good feeling between
them and the mothercountry, and also to promote a closer intercourse between the
Colonies themselves’.
13
The Colonial Society, as an example of the new kind of interest-
b
ased, purposefully founded London institution, held many practical advantages as a
meeting-
p
lace for people interested in the colonies as such. It was better than the last o
f
the old, unspecialized meeting-places that were still frequented. These were the huge City
of London coffee houses that served as centres for overseas and shipping news. Although
in the 1860s a person could still find out a great deal about the colonies by taking his
coffee in the right place, the main coffee houses were getting too big, too busy, and too
unfocused to allow for any sustained contact between people with more specialized
interests. Witness the periodical subscriptions of the three most important City coffee
houses associated with overseas affairs: Peele’s Coffee House, Fleet Street, had complete
files of English newspapers going well back into the eighteenth century, as well as
current foreign and colonial papers; the very busy Jerusalem Coffee House, Cornhill,
b
rought together people and publications touching on the whole of the world east of the
British Isles, all the way to Australia; and the New England and North and South
American Coffee House, Threadneedle Street, had a daunting 400 newspapers on file,
including titles from Germany and Russia. Such buzzing coffee houses, especially the
Jerusalem and the ‘New England and North and South American’, were frequented by
merchants and ships’ captains interested in reviewing nearly the whole world, howeve
r
cavalierly.
Each of these great coffee houses was less a social institution than a key information
The founding of the colonial society 13
centre for world trade. A few more focused coffee houses, such as the Jamaica in St
Michael’s Alley, Cornhill, which covered the West Indies, and the Baltic Coffee House,
Threadneedle Street, which covered Northern Europe and those parts of South America
which produced tallow, were frequented by people interested only in one part of the
world (more or less), rather than that everywhere Britain was active colonially.
14
As its
circular says, the Colonial Society was founded expressly to give people who were
interested in all the colonies—but not the whole world—a place to exchange views abou
t
colonies (and not about trade) with colonists and with each other. Only one person in the
Colonial Society gave a coffee house, the Jerusalem, as his London address.
15
Members
could go to the Society instead, whether to meet each other or to read colonial
newspapers in peace and quiet, undisturbed by people looking for a ship, seeking news o
f
the tallow trade in Denmark (at the Baltic Coffee House), or looking up English political
rags from the 1780s (at Peele’s).
The Colonial Society would be frequented by people interested in the colonies per se,
and it would be quieter and more refined than the buzzing coffee hives of the City.
Indeed, the Society was also supposed to establish a library and a scholarly journal—in
short, it was to be everything for which the scientists had begun to look to their societies:
The intention is to establish in London a Colonial Society, consisting of Fellows
and a Council, which shall occupy as regards the Colonies the position filled by
the Royal Society with regard to science, or the Royal Geographical Society
with regard to geography. In this Society each Colony may be represented. It is
proposed eventually to open a lecture hall, a library and reading room, and a
museum of science, industry and commerce, where the natural and other
products of the several Colonies will be exhibited….
The library of the Society will be furnished with information on all
commercial, agricultural, manufacturing, mining and other matters, coming
statistical, useful, and interesting details, often urgently required by the
statesman, the merchant, the colonist, the man or science, the intending
emigrant, and other classed in the Mothercountry. This information will be
carefully classified, registered, and made as much as possible accessible to all
concerned.
16
These assurances about the mission and the library show that the founders knew just the
kind of formal and highly specialized institution they wanted, and they knew that they
were aiming high.
17
The Colonial Society would be ‘a Literary and Scientific Body’ in
the words of the founder, Lord Bury, who repeated elsewhere that the Royal
Geographical Society was one of the chief models.
18
The founders admitted in their circular that what they had in mind was the kind o
f
headquarters that a few other rather prestigious but not quite so specialized groups
already had:
The Society will also afford opportunities for the reading of papers and the
holding of discussions upon Colonial subjects generally, and will undertake
those investigations in connection with Colonies, which are carried out in a
more general field by the Royal Society, the Royal Geographical Society, the
Empire as the triumph of theory 14
Society of Arts, and by similar bodies in Great Britain.
19
A
ll of those bodies held public lectures and discussions, and the Colonial Society woul
d
t
oo. Besides, the Society would be easier to get into than the models that the founders ha
d
i
n mind; the Fellows may have invented some varieties of imperialism, but they did no
t
h
ave to invent the scientific theories or tangible objects expected from candidates for th
e
R
oyal Society, or to show interest in actually making or manipulating things that unite
d
t
he Society of Arts.
20
The early ambitions for the Society were not only fulfilled but soon transcended. In th
e
1870s and 1880s, as the British people grew more enthusiastic about maintaining an
d
e
xpanding their empire, the Society grew far beyond the plans of its founders. Som
e
p
eople even used the Society to organize a political pressure group—although ‘an
y
o
rganization for political purposes [was] forbidden by the fundamental rules of th
e
S
ociety’.
21
And the Society quickly grew beyond London. The founders were happil
y
s
urprised at the number of subscriptions (and the amount of money) that came pouring i
n
f
rom Canada and Australia even before the end of 1868, and the Society’s rules kep
t
c
hanging to accommodate overseas members.
22
Over the next few years, the popularity o
f
i
mperialism took off.
Indeed, it would not be long before even the simple fact of London’s size would lea
d
s
ome people to a dream of worldwide empire. Henry James caught this aspect of Londo
n
l
ife in 1888:
It is perfectly open to [the London-lover] to consider the remainder of the
United Kingdom, or the British empire in general, or even, if he be an American,
the total of the English-speaking territories of the globe, as the mere margin, the
fitted girdle.
It is for this reason—because I like to think how great we all are together in
the light of heaven and the face of the rest of the world, with the bond of our
glorious tongue, in which we labour to write articles and books for each other’s
candid perusal, how great we all are and how great is the great city which we
may unite fraternally to regard as the capital of our race—it is for this reason
that I have a singular kindness for the London railway stations.
23
T
he founders were beginning to put together the general idea of empire that James in hi
s
r
ailway reverie would rely upon twenty years later.
A misleading precedent
N
o such idea had been shared thirty years before the Colonial Society of 1868 wa
s
f
ounded. And yet in 1837, a ‘Colonial Society’ was founded in London to bring togethe
r
m
en from different parts of the empire. The day-to-day aims of this society and the 186
8
v
ersion were remarkably similar.
24
Much as the 1868 Society would be, the 1837 versio
n
w
as:
intended to afford a place of rendezvous to persons interested in the various
The founding of the colonial society 15
dependencies of the empire in every corner of the Globe, by which means
information may be diffused respecting the valuable resources of the British
Colonial possessions, hitherto comparatively unknown.
For the attainment of the above named objects, an extensive library will be
formed, consisting of all important works relating to the colonies, together with
a selection of the most approved Maps, Charts, and the latest Surveys. There
will also be provided a regular supply of one or more newspapers from each
colony.
25
B
ut the 1837 Colonial Society was not the model for the 1868 Colonial Society. Onl
y
f
our members of the older club joined the newer one,
26
and the full council of the newe
r
s
ociety went to the trouble of formally declining the offer of a certain Captain Whitty t
o
d
onate a copy of the rules of the 1837 organization.
27
Indeed, it was important to distance the new society from the old. Pointed controversie
s
o
ver the morality of imperialism had torn the older Colonial Society apart. It would see
m
t
hat people were happy enough to go back to coffee houses—or that they found it easie
r
t
o do so than to come to a general agreement about Great Britain’s imperial control.
The disagreement had first broken out in Parliament. In 1840 the Tories came withi
n
n
ine votes of defeating the Whig government over its alleged incompetence in starting
a
w
ar with China.
28
It was against this partisan background that the four-year-old Colonia
l
S
ociety itself debated the use of British force in bombarding the Chinese—as well as i
n
i
nvading Afghanistan. In both places British forces had simply attacked with no forma
l
d
eclaration of war (until later). This fact bothered sensitive people, and the Colonia
l
S
ociety formed a committee to examine the issue.
After months of work, the committee came back with two reports, one for China an
d
o
ne for Afghanistan. Each was full of complicated legal arguments about the Crown’
s
u
nique prerogatives in declaring war, pre-rogatives that according to the committee ha
d
b
een breached by the commanders in both theatres:
The departure from these forms constitutes that difference, among the parties
engaged in war…between the policeman who preserves order, and the
housebreaker that infringes it—between the guardian of public safety and the
assassin.
A State dispensing with these formalities, recognises that it has set aside the
essence of justice.
B
ut that was not all. The men on the spot were not in fact out of control; their barbarit
y
a
nd cruelty had been directed from Whitehall:
It was the same men holding the same offices of power and trust in England,
who sent British armies into Affghanistan [sic], and British squadrons into the
coast of China. If we found, in the first of these transactions, certain defined
characters, we may expect to find the same in the last. We found in the former a
public crime, committed without a necessity—committed without an object,
concealed during the course of its committal, and misrepresented after its
occurrence. We found documents, mutilated, perverted, and suppressed, with a
Empire as the triumph of theory 16
view, first to keep the nation in the dark, as to the acts of which it ought to have
been informed, and which, if necessary, it might have prevented, and, then, to
pervert its judgement respecting them, after they had taken place.
29
T
he committee adopted its reports unanimously. Then, in the autumn of 1842, it proudl
y
s
ubmitted them to a general meeting of the Society—which rejected them unanimously
,
s
ave for the votes of the committee members themselves. The only thing that the genera
l
m
embership of the Society found barbaric was the way their own committee calle
d
B
ritish behaviour in China and Afghanistan barbarous—‘to be murder and piracy’, in th
e
w
ords of the committee.
30
The committee members stuck to their anti-Whig guns. That night in 1842 was the en
d
o
f the Colonial Society of 1837; any record of the society stops cold, save for an abortiv
e
m
eeting on colonization that fewer than twenty men attended.
31
Meanwhile th
e
c
ommittee went on to publish its reports, but under the name of the committee itself an
d
n
ot of the society.
32
There could be no clearer demonstration that the moment had not ye
t
c
ome for the general imperialism reflected in the Colonial Society of 1868. It seems tha
t
s
ome members of the 1837 society were afflicted with the morality of the evangelical era
,
w
hich had barely passed. Not all of its members had the time to transform thei
r
e
vangelical fervour into a more diffuse Anglo-Saxon boosterism, as so many peopl
e
w
ould do by 1868. The members of the 1837 society were divided on questions o
f
i
nternational morality—they were divided over the specifics of British conduct in tw
o
p
arts of the world. The members of the 1868 society would be united in a grand vision o
f
e
mpire that overrode specifics.
Counting the founders
T
he membership of the Colonial Society of 1868 is of interest chiefly in the period befor
e
i
mperialism made it into the headlines the following year. From then on, membershi
p
f
igures rose more steeply; we might be looking at the snowballing of imperialism rathe
r
t
han at the people who had been developing their own imperial ideas for their ow
n
r
easons for some considerable period of time. So, for how many months or years after th
e
S
ociety was founded should we follow the Society’s membership?
Fifty-eight men attended the first organizational meeting of the Colonial Society o
n
F
riday night, 26 June 1868, and another eleven had sent letters of interest. The member
s
h
ad come together because of a circular written by the Viscount Bury, MP, and two othe
r
m
en—Alfred R.Roche, who had been a clerk in Canada and who would become th
e
S
ociety’s working secretary, and Hugh E.Montgomerie, who had played a minor part i
n
C
anadian politics.
33
The three prime movers were thus a nobleman, a clerk who ha
d
t
ravelled, and a Canadian. This mix of classes and origins was to be a pattern in the ne
w
S
ociety (see Table 2.1).
The circular announced that an organizational meeting was to be held in Willis’
s
R
ooms, a place that Londoners would associate with the RGS and with other groups tha
t
h
ad been organized there. And Londoners do seem to have been Bury’s target audience
.
T
he circular was dated 22 June, a Monday, only four days before the meeting. Who coul
d
The founding of the colonial society 17
be in London so quickly in the summer besides Londoners and MPs? Parliament sat until
the end of July that year (to finish its business before a summer break and the expected
dissolution in the autumn),
34
but for most people the summer had well and truly begun.
Furthermore, the meeting was held on a Friday afternoon, when the well-off who had
b
een engaged in London for the week might have been leaving town. Clearly, Bury was
not considering the great and the good who had estates to leave town for. Indeed, only
three peers took notice of the meeting.
35
A
p
art from the peers, attendance was good despite the inauspiciousness of the time.
Five of the six MPs joining that night were in attendance, although only one was a
London member.
36
Of the sixty-nine men who attended, or who sent a letter of suppor
t
that was read out, fifty-two went on to join the Society (see Appendix 1B). Out of these
fifty-two, a few would never appear in the Society’s membership rolls, but none the less
they attended one or more meeting of the steering committee in the early days. Others
had some other sustained contact with the fledgling Society over and above attending the
first meeting, or writing letters to it. I have included such men in this study, while I have
excluded eighteen not at all famous names whose only contact with the Society was a
single silent appearance at the organizational meeting.
The Colonial Society enrolled the rest of what its records call the original membership
b
etween the June meeting and that of 12 August 1868. On that day, a second large
meeting was held at one o’clock in Willis’s Rooms; the attendance was still about fifty,
even in high summer.
37
In the interim, the Provisional Committee had met three times,
each time approving new members.
38
On these occasions, many aristocrats were added to
the rolls of professional men and MPs who had attended the first meeting. Bury recruited
some of the newer and more aristocratic members directly on to the provisional
committee; the committee in turn prepared a list of officers, all great names, to be elected
Table 2.1 New members by period and by status on joining
New members Peers MPs Others Total
By first meeting, 26 June 1868 3 4 45 52
27 June 1868 to 12 August 1868 (second
general meeting)
212 38 52
15 August 1868 to 3 November 1868
(Greater Britain still unfinished)
1 2 19 22
11 November 1868 to 30 December 1868 0 0 16 16
20 January 1869 to 25 February 1869 4 3 22 29
10 March 1869 (Inaugural Dinner) to 13
April 1869 (Dilke joins)
1 1 50 52
Total 11 22 190 223
Note
Although the periods covered in this table are discontinuous, they match the
intake of members; this table covers all members through to 13 April 1869.
Empire as the triumph of theory 18
at the meeting on 12 August.
The few members who joined from 1 September through 3 November were not among
the ‘original members’ simply because the Society’s secretary, Roche, began noting on
12 August the date of joining next to the name of each new member, whereas the
‘original’ memberships had been undated (see Table 2.1; for their names, see Appendix
1D). This was merely a change in the paperwork. But perhaps the best reason to treat
these new members as part of the initial coming together of the Society is that they
dribbled in very slowly and quietly over a period of more than two months, rather than
being carried into the Society on some new wave of popular enthusiasm.
Now that the Society’s organization was in place, new memberships were approved a
few at a time by the Council in its private meetings. There were only four new
memberships approved in the second half of August, none in September, and four in
October; eight were approved on 3 November, among them the memberships of the
officers of the Society whom we surveyed above.
39
Joining took some effort. The
treasurer, W.A. Sargeaunt, could not be found at the Society’s temporary offices in 80
Lombard Street, and the Society simply used that bare street address until 6 Octobe
r
1868, when the words ‘Colonial Society’ were added at the top (as yet the Society had no
letterhead).
40
Joining also cost money. Initiation was £3, plus a £20 annual fee (£1 for non-residents
of the British Isles). Twenty pounds was fully one tenth of the annual income needed to
keep a small family in the ‘middle-middle class’—that stratum composed of low-ranking
professionals and well-to-do tradesmen who usually sent their sons to public school an
d
university, and then back into a life of office work or trade.
41
If for the most part the
Colonial Society attracted very comfortable gentlemen of a higher station than this, the
£20 annual fee was one reason. Paying the Colonial Society one-tenth of one’s income
would be rather too much. Yet some of the earliest members did not pay at all, and
although they were struck from the rolls after a year or two, they were there at the
b
eginning. Therefore the 126 members through 3 November 1868 hailed from a broade
r
wedge of the population than did the membership in later years. The poorest of these 126
were sufficiently interested in the empire to help found the Society or to seek it out in its
earliest period—even if, in the long run, some of them could not (or would not) pay thei
r
subscriptions.
Soon after 3 November, Charles Dilke finished Greater Britain, and it was published
within the month. Before that November, no one could have read much of the book, even
in draft. Even then its effect was not immediate. About two months passed before it got
into the bookshops, and over that Christmas season only a few people read it. The first
person to record doing so was the ever-
p
erspicacious William Ewart Gladstone, newly
Prime Minister, whose diary entry for 10 November 1868 says that he ‘Read Dilke’s
Greater World’ [sic].
42
Dilke himself first received comments on the book in December;
the people who wrote to him so early received copies directly from the publisher, or from
Dilke himself.
43
Soon the book would go further afield. The Governor of New Zealand had received it
in Wellington at the very end of March 1869, about three weeks after reviews began to
appear in the British press.
44
The Times ran seven pieces about Greater Britain between
10 March and 19 April 1869, beginning with their review itself, and continuing with a
The founding of the colonial society 19
sequence of factual criticisms from colonials that ran next to Dilke’s responses.
45
But the
lag between the book’s going to press and the splash it made in the newspapers had been
a matter of two or three months. Perhaps to a man, the members of the Colonial Society
who had joined by early November 1868 had never heard of the book. And those who
j
oined still later in Novembe
r
—or indeed at any time in the three months between the
release of Greater Britain and when The Times reviewed it—were as yet unlikely to have
been caught up in some Dilke-inspired frenzy. They too will be included in this study.
46
The day on which The Times reviewed Greater Britain, 13 April 1869, is a convenient
p
lace to stop tracing the prehistory of the imperialism that produced the Society. Those
who had joined the Society by then were doing so for their own reasons, not because they
had been reading about Dilke in The Times. Forty-five people joined the new society
b
etween 11 November 1868 and 10 March 1869, when the inaugural dinner was held (see
Appendices 1E and 1F). Another fifty-two, mainly those who joined at the dinner, had
their names approved by 13 April 1869, which was also the day when Dilke’s own name
appeared on the roster for the first time (see Appendix 1G). Thus, 223 members of the
Colonial Society had their names approved on or before 13 April 1869 (see Appendix
1A). Within the 223, sixty-one cannot be positively identified, sometimes because o
f
namesakes,
47
but usually because they made no impression worth speaking of outside o
f
the Society’s own membership lists. However, over 70 per cent (162) left good evidence
about themselves, since the members were a remarkably active bunch, active as
travellers, professionals, politicians, and writers.
Who were the members?
There are intellectual links between the most distant parts of the earth,
and men cannot remain strangers to each other for a single day or fail
to know what happens in any corner of the world.
(Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. 1,
‘Conclusion’ [1835])
48
An exhaustive review of the Society’s membership turns up a few interesting patterns.
49
One of the larger groups that can be identified among the 223 men who had joined the
Colonial Society by 13 April 1869 were the fifty-one with some kind of government job
touching on the empire. These people ranged from Whitehall clerks to New South Wales
legislators. But too many of these men were the Cabinet Ministers who had taken
Buggin’s turn at the Colonial Office or elsewhere; therefore, the fifty-one were not a
united front of men who had long been interested in empire. Slightly more numerous, but
no more cohesive, were the fifty-four founders who seem to have been businessmen,
either at home or abroad. Especially in the colonies, these two groups, the men in
government and the businessmen, substantially overlapped.
Next in line come the forty-three founders who were members of the Athenaeum, yet
this number tells us little except that the establishment was well represented in the
Society—
b
ecause of all the Cabinet Officers drafted into the Colonial Society, this is no
Empire as the triumph of theory 20
surprise.
50
Then come the Members of Parliament. Of the men who joined the Society by
13 April, thirty-three had served in Parliament by 1869; a few others would serve later.
N
ext come the thirty peers, heirs to peerages, close relations of peers, and men late
r
created peers whose political careers might very well have led them to expect
ennoblement—a group that may be referred to as the aristocracy. The aristocrats overlap
with the MPs and the officials. Meanwhile the number of members who may be classified
as military men or missionaries or members of other familiar categories is much smaller,
but once again covers many of the same people.
This problem of overlap is severe. After going through all of the categories so far, we
have looked at less than half of the membership. Thus, the ideas of the majority of the
members still remain in the dark. But while fifty-one members had imperial employment
and an overlapping fifty-four can fit into the category of businessmen, at least seventy-
three members published something that wound up in the British Museum or anothe
r
national library or national bibliography; and sixty of these men had published something
early enough to show that their interest in the empire pre-dated the Colonial Society.
Another twenty-two (on top of the seventy-three) left substantial manuscripts, often
showing the same intellectual interests well before 1868. To look at it in another way, i
f
the sixty-one unidentifiable members are set aside, 162 members are left. Of these,
ninety-five left meaningful prose and sixty-seven did not (except for leaving a social
letter or two in some cases)—and many of the silent sixty-seven were highly place
d
people whose ideas we can approach in other ways.
The ninety-five members who did write something were a larger, more representative,
and more socially diverse group than any other subset of members. Writers were almost
twice as numerous as businessmen, even when we include among the latter those who
simply gave the Colonial Society a business address. Moreover, the writers are especially
significant for figuring out the earliest origins of the Society. Writers joined in especially
high numbers during the first summer of the Society’s existence (see Table 2.2).
The number of published authors in the Society would be even higher if there were
perfect knowledge of all 223 members, since some of the sixty-one who cannot be
p
roperly identified (because they shared their names with others) were indeed prolific
writers—and could be counted as such if we could accept one namesake rather than
another. Excluding such men, the sixty positively identified members who had published
something before April 1869 made up well over one-third of the positively identifie
d
membership of 162. In addition, the ninety-five members who wrote something at some
period made up more than nine-sixteenths, or nearly 59 per cent, of the identifiable
membership. This is double the approximate percentage of writers and other learned
gentlemen and noblemen that one scholar, R.C.Bridges, has found in the membership o
f
the Royal Geographical Society from 1848 to 1855—while the proportion of military
officers in the Colonial Society was about half that of the RGS.
51
What does it signify that there were so many writers in the Colonial Society? The
logorrhoea of the mid-nineteenth century is astonishing; it affected a vast number o
f
upper- and middle-class Victorians. Statesmen, judges, medical men, bureaucrats,
churchmen—all manner of men and some women could take up their pens and ponder in
p
rint the stirring social or intellectual problems of the day. Human evolution, socialism,
technical progress, democracy, decimal coinage, continental literature, newly active
The founding of the colonial society 21
volcanoes in South America, how to build conservatories—
upon questions like these, and so many others, the rising masses of half-educated
Englishmen wanted comfort or guidance.
52
In a later age, men and women from a variety
of walks of life might well talk about such issues at a party, but they would hardly hold
forth on very many of them in print. Nor are there many generalists today who can
command thirty pages at a time in The New Yorker.
In the 1860s, by contrast, practically anyone who wanted to and who could write could
p
ublish minor dissertations in major reviews. There were literally hundreds of upscale
p
eriodicals, dozens of which published long, serious pieces on the order of those in the
E
dinburgh or Westminster Reviews. Most of the articles shared not only the length but
also the didactic tone and anonymity pioneered by the Edinburgh Review, reinforcing the
homogeneity of tone in the world of what Bagehot called ‘the review-like essay and the
essay-like review’.
53
The appetite for these pieces, with all their promise of recreation,
information, and self-improvement, was huge. In the mid-Victorian years, the greatest
j
ournals (such as the Edinburgh itself) had circulations of 10 to 15,000, while Cornhil
l
had twice that and the even more popular Household Words topped 40,000. What is
more, copies were passed from person to person, so a large number of the educated
reading public of about 3,000,000 people saw the more famous journals. With hundreds
Table 2.2 Members who wrote
New
members
Published
authors (books
or articles)
Members
leaving only
MSS
Non-
writers
Unidentified
*
Total
26 June 1868 19 3 19 11 52
27 June to 12
August 1868
16 8 14 14 52
15 August to 3
November
1868
12 1 6 3 22
11 November
to 30
December
1868
82 3 316
20 January to
25 February
1869
11 6 4 8 29
10 March to
13 April 1869
7 2 21 22 52
Total 73 22 67 61 223
Note
*
Some may be authors—these founders cannot be positively identified,
sometimes because two or more people had the same name.
Empire as the triumph of theory 22