Short Street Schools...To the Working Classes...A Course of Interesting Lectures.

£500 · Offered by Maggs Bros Ltd

A handbill advertising a series of “instructive” lectures on various subjects for the very poorest people living in London in the middle of the 19th-century. The lecture subjects include chemistry, phrenology, astronomy, geology and physiology. The lecture on “The South Sea Islands” was delivered on February 8th 1853 by Samuel Tamatoa Williams (1826-1906) who was born in the Leeward Islands to the missionaries John and Mary Williams, Samuel returned to England in 1833 with his parents (and a native of Samoa named Leota) but his father returned to the Polynesian Islands in 1837 and was killed and eaten by cannibals in the New Hebrides in 1839. The introduction to the lectures is delivered in the typical language of the missionary societies with the intended audience told, “The lectures are arranged to take place once a fortnight, so as not to occupy too much of your time, and it will depend on you if they shall be continued on succeeding years…Read attentively the list below, and resolve that you will, even if it cost you a little trouble, BE PRESENT AT THEM ALL, and believe us you will gather much interesting information…”

• Binding: Hardcover

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