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In his preface to Everyman's encyclopaedia the editor traces the ancestry of such compendia “back via Knight's Encyclopaedia to the great Penny Cyclopaedia published between 1833 and 1843 at the instigation of Lord Brougham by the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, a body which did much in its day to further the education of ordinary men and women”. It's a good idea to brush up one's sense of this social background by re‐reading George Eliot's Middlemarch. Here, at the beginning of Chapter 38, is a typical group of Top Middlemarchers in discussion: