by The Penny Magazine of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, a British periodical that ran from 1832 to 1845, was an outgrowth of several important social and technological advances that developed rapidly in nineteenth-century Britain. Increased access to education created a surge in literacy rates, giving new markets and audiences to publishers of books, periodicals, and newspapers. New steam-powered presses, combined with the mechanized production of paper, allowed for a greater volume of materials to be printed faster and cheaper than ever before.
Published materials began to cater to working class issues, including the labor movement and radicalism. The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge sought to mitigate the disruptive influence of the radical press by initiating an extensive, nonprofit publication program aimed at educating (and simultaneously moralizing to) the lower classes. Its Penny Magazine was a short weekly periodical generously illustrated with detailed wood engravings meant to entice those with limited reading skills. The miscellaneous subject matter of its articles combined straightforward factual instruction with moral undertones, emphasizing the importance of temperance and self-improvement through education. It was highly successful in building an audience in its first year, selling over 200,000 copies with an estimated overall readership of a million, greatly outpacing similar periodicals. The volume held by SLU’s Special Collections, whose front-page illustrates the capture of enormous turtles, is an American re-issue from 1832, which indicates the transatlantic ambition of the project. The high cost of the engravings, however, eventually forced the magazine to raise its price, losing readers and leading to its closure.
