In the midst of all the excitement that preceded parliamentary Reform, two agencies were silently at work, the immense future influence of which was then unforeseen. These were the spread of cheap literature, and the introduction of railways. Shortly after the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, bent upon teaching the working-classes something of everything, if not everything of something, started on its educational crusade, with its science made easy, philosophy popularized, biography boiled down, history in a nutshell, and the like, Mr Henry Brougham, its president, made haste to proclaim that the schoolmaster was abroad.

A few years later the society, in order to capture a humbler and more youthful class of readers, issued its “Penny Magazine,” the immense success of which was due, it was thought, largely to the taking adjective “penny” in the title. In this instance, however, the word was not applied to a popular periodical for the first time, a “Penny Medley” having been published nearly a hundred years before. The success which the “Penny Magazine” secured, induced the Christian Knowledge Society speedily to follow suit with a “Saturday Magazine.” Both publications were started on much the same lines as “the Mirror,” a twopenny weekly, which had already been in existence sixteen years, and the contents of which comprised occasionally long, and by no means lively, articles on topographical and other topics, varied by an abundance of “facts and scraps, original and select.”