Society of Science, Letters and Art

Society of Science, Letters and Art

Gold medallion and Society emblem: Athena with attributes of science, letters and art
Founder(s)	Dr Edward Albert Sturman, M.A., F.R.S.L.
Established	1882
President	Sir Henry Valentine Goold
Chairman	Sir Henry Valentine Goold (1882–1893)
Members	1,500 (1892)
Owner	Dr Edward Albert Sturman, M.A., F.R.S.L.
Location	Addison House, 160 Holland Road, Kensington, London (demolished), England
Dissolved	after 1902

The Society of Science, Letters and Art, also known as the Society of Science or SSLA, was a soi-disant learned society which flourished between 1882 and 1902. Dr Edward Albert Sturman, M.A., F.R.S.L., owned and ran the Society for his own financial benefit from his house at Holland Road in Kensington, London. He took the title of Hon. Secretary and worked under the name of the Irish baronet Sir Henry Valentine Goold, who was given the title of President and Chairman, until Goold died in 1893.

The Society sold the privilege of wearing academic dress and using the postnominal letters F.S.Sc. to both eminent and ordinary people around the world, without the obligation to sit an examination or to submit papers. Many members of legitimate learned societies were duped into thinking that they were being offered fellowships by a department of their own respected institution. The Society also sold diplomas and masqueraded as an examination board for schools, although it merely provided exam papers and did not examine candidates. In 1883 Sir Henry Trueman Wood accused the Society of Science, Letters and Art of needing the "borrowed light" of the Royal Society of Arts, after the SSLA sold its own Fellowships to members of the RSA, allowing them to assume that the offer was supported by the RSA. After an 1892 exposure of the Society in the investigative journal Truth, the Evening Post in Auckland said the SSLA was "a bogus literary society."

The Society appears to have been active from 1882 or 1883. Its laws, dated 10 November 1885, said that the Society was entitled to charge a fee, and that the members may not retain any of the Society's money, but were entitled to use the letters F.S.Sc. after their name, and to pay for the privilege. To use these letters, a member did not have to pass an examination or achieve anything in the disciplines of science or art. The society's aims, according to the 1884 prospectus, were to promote science, literature and art and to encourage its Fellows "to form scientific, literary and musical circles of the Society throughout the world." Membership was limited to 1,000 Foundation Fellows who paid half price, and any number of Ordinary Fellows and Members, who paid full price. For a Foundation Fellow, annual subscription was one guinea and life subscription cost five guineas. The Society's apologist, the former embezzler Joseph Ostler alias C. Frusher Howard, described it as follows, in a letter dated December 1893: