The first of these promising institutions came into existence in 1823. George Birkbeck had given free courses of lectures to artisans at the Andersonian Institution in Glasgow, where, after his removal to London, there had been a schism. The seceding members set up for themselves the Glasgow Mechanics’ Institution, and elected Birkbeck their first president. Next year, the London Mechanics’ Institution, now Birkbeck College, was started in emulation, speedily enrolling some 13,000 working men as members. That same year saw the establishment of an institute at Manchester, which had had a Literary and Philosophical Society since 1781, an offshoot of this, the College of Arts and Sciences, being a sort of prototype of the new working men’s institution. Huddersfield, Leeds, and other industrial towns followed suit next year; and by 1837 the West Riding had so many that a union of mechanics’ and similar institutions was formed, to be followed in 1839 by a Metropolitan Association, and by a Lancashire and Cheshire Union in 1847. “In 1851 it was estimated that there were 610 institutes in England with a membership of over 600,000, that the number of lectures delivered in 1850 was 3,054, and that the number of students attending classes was 16,029.”[1] In 1849, four hundred Mechanics’ Institutes had between three and four hundred thousand volumes, with a circulation of more than a million. In his Practical Observations upon the Education of the People, Brougham, one of the four trustees of the London institution, announced the programme of what Peacock in _Crotchet Castle_ nicknamed the “Steam Intellect Society.” Lectures and conversation classes, on the lines of a modern tutorial class, libraries and book-clubs, were to be provided; and, as a more extended enterprise, elementary primers and other cheap works on science and the useful arts were to be published for the benefit of the working classes. Brougham was the first president of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, founded in 1827 to give effect to this second part of the scheme. Dr. Folliott tells the company at Crotchet Castle how his house was nearly burned down by his cook taking it into her head to study hydrostatics, in a sixpenny tract published by the Steam Intellect Society, and reading what he calls “the rubbish” in bed. Other persons, besides Peacock, were disturbed by this portentous “march of intellect.” The Mechanics’ Institutes spread to all parts of England and Scotland, but they failed, from lack of means, to find the qualified lecturers and experienced teachers that their well-meaning but ambitious aims required. Good teachers were very scarce in those days. It was more than combinations of the lower middle classes unaided by public funds could be expected to achieve. When, in the course of two decades, the first enthusiasm faded, the buildings fell more and more into the hands of those who could afford to maintain them as comfortable lounges and literary clubs.