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  UCL BLOOMSBURY PROJECT

 

Bloomsbury Project

Bloomsbury Institutions

Spiritual

English Monthly Tract Society

Also known as Monthly Tract Society

History

It was founded in 1837 to send religious tracts out free each month to families felt to be in particular need of them; the money for this was raised by subscription (Sampson Low, The Charities of London, 1850)

According Charles Knight’s English Cyclopaedia: A New Dictionary of Universal Knowledge, vol. 4 (1857) it was one of the many religious societies founded by David Nasmith

Its Secretary in 1850 and again in 1861 was John Stabb (Sampson Low, The Charities of London, 1850; Sampson Low, The Charities of London in 1861, 1862)

Its address was 20 Red Lion Square in 1850 and 27 Red Lion Square in 1861 (Sampson Low, The Charities of London, 1850; Sampson Low, The Charities of London in 1861, 1862)

Its Secretary, John Stabb, was also involved with the Midnight Meeting Movement at the latter address, 27 Red Lion Square (The Revival: An Advocate of Evangelical Truth, 2 July 1862)

It no longer exists

What was reforming about it?

It was targeted not at the irreligious poor, but ambitiously and controversially at the nobility and gentry, an ambition satirised by a contemporary journal:

“The rich are to be saved by envelopes,—handsome embossed envelopes, perfumed, and containing essays and memoirs, in the most attractive form, so as to induce the elegant and refined to read them...Only think of a society addressed to the elegant and refined, headed by Mr Stabb. They really must enclose Mr Stabb, like Scripture truth, in an envelope, or some other attractive form” (The British Critic and Quarterly Theological Review, vol. XXIX, no. LVIII, April 1841)

Where in Bloomsbury

Its address was 20 Red Lion Square in 1850 and 27 Red Lion Square in 1861 (Sampson Low, The Charities of London, 1850; Sampson Low, The Charities of London in 1861, 1862); these were successive addresses of David Nasmith’s “Philanthropic Institution House”

By 1873, according to the Royal Blue Book of that year, the Society was based at no. 5 Red Lion Square; this address was also home to the UK Beneficent Society

Website of current institution

It no longer exists

Books about it

A Short Statement of the Object and Operations of the English Monthly Tract Society (c. 1880)

Archives

None found

This page last modified 13 April, 2011 by Deborah Colville

 

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