former embezzler Joseph Ostler alias C. Frusher Howard, described it as follows, in a letter dated December 1893:"Its affairs are managed by a president, several vice-presidents, a numerous Council and two paid secretaries; its fellows and members are university graduates, Fellows of learned societies, authors, and others eminent in science, literature and art. It holds periodical meetings for lectures etc., for the reading of original and interesting papers, for the promotion of new works, discoveries and inventions, and for the diffusion of useful knowledge; it also publishes a quarterly journal of its transactions." Journal The image of the Latin seal on the Society's certificate presented to members is dated MDCCCLXXXI, or 1881. Its Chairman, Sir H.V. Goold, stated in 1884 that the Society had been "established for some years." There are records of fellowships being granted by the Society from 1883. However the earliest known Journal was published on 10 November 1884, and gives the Society's address as Addison House, 160 Holland Road, near Addison Road Station, Kensington, West London. It functions as a prospectus for the Society, and sets out its aims and aspirations. It contains a list of its honourable representatives, its officers and its council; a list of "scientific, literary, & musical circles about to be formed;" the conditions and privileges of fellowship. It also contains an "application for admission as Fellow of the Society," with name left blank to be filled in, and pre-stamped with the Chairman's facsimile signature of acceptance, and a "Formal certificate of a candidate for admission as Fellow," for recommendation, similarly pre-stamped. The prospectus was followed in 1885 by a printed programme of exhibitions in the sciences and arts. Papers and addresses One of the academic papers published in 1884 by the Society was Some notes on the stage and its influences on the education of the masses, players and playgoers etc., by Henry Blau. Another of these papers was The ideographic ornamentation of Gothic buildings written in 1902 by the artist and antiquarian Thomas Tindall Wildridge. This article was informed by his book, The Grotesque in Church Art. In 1897 the Society sent an Address to Queen Victoria on the occasion of her Diamond Jubilee. Officers Sir Henry Valentine Goold, baronet The chairman and president of the society from 1882 to 1893 was the impecunious and propertyless Irish baronet Sir Henry Valentine Goold (1803–1893), the third of the Goold baronets of