Study title

Abstract copyright UK Data Service and data collection copyright owner.

The National Association for the Promotion of Social Science (or Social Science Association as it was known in short) provided a highly influential forum for the discussion of social, political, economic, educational, sanitary, legal and cultural issues between the 1850s and 1880s. Its debates featured leading Victorians, among them prime ministers and other politicians; intellectuals; social reformers; the first British feminists; trade unionists; and civil servants. Approximately 4,500 papers, published in more than 50 volumes, were delivered to the Association by more than 2,000 speakers but they have been little used by scholars because their contents are largely unknown. The aim of the project has been to produce a searchable catalogue, freely accessible over the World Wide Web, to assist researchers in finding some of the most important social commentary of the Victorian era.
Main Topics:

The resource is a relational database containing the titles of all papers in the serials published by the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science, as well as those in the Association's Report on Trades Societies (1860), the report of the Congrés International de Bienfaisance de Londres (1862) and Lectures on Economical Science (1870). For each paper, the database holds its author, citation, where a full text of it may be found if the paper is only a summary or no more than a listed title, any notes about the content of the paper made by the original editor of the catalogue. The database also contains a classificatory scheme, devised by the original editor, in which every paper is allocated a place. The database also contains any biographical information about authors given in the publications.