The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (SDUK) was an educational society established in 1826 that published a series of inexpensive books on scientific and technical subjects.
The goal of the SDUK, which has been characterized as “a Benthamite-oriented group”,[1] was to “improv[e] workers’ efficiency and ad[d] to the nation’s pool of inventors and engineers.”[2] In a letter to John Stuart Mill, Thomas Carlyle—famous for his criticisms of democracy, economics, and utilitarianism—derided the Society’s “triumphant quackle-quackling intent only on sine and cosine.”[3]
Further reading
Ashton, Rosemary (2008) Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (act. 1826–1846), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, May 24.
Grobel, Monica Christina (1933) The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, 1826-1846, MA thesis, University of London.
Hamzo, George & James E. Crimmins (2013) Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, in James E. Crimmins (ed.) The Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Utilitarianism, London: Bloomsbury Academic, pp. 527–528.
Related entries
communities adjacent to effective altruism
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Fuller, Margaret (1991) ‘These Sad but Glorious Days’: Dispatches from Europe, 1846-1850, edited by Larry J. Reynolds & Susan Belasco Smith, New Haven: Yale University Press, p. 41, fn. 5
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Altick, Richard D. (1973) Victorian People and Ideas: A Companion for the Modern Reader of Victorian Literature, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, p. 257.
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Carlyle, Thomas (1835) Letter to John Stuart Mill: 30 October 1835, The Carlyle Letters Online.