CROYDON CHRONICLES: A quiet residential street in South Croydon was where one of the leading works of 19th-Century philosophy was drafted and written. DAVID MORGAN looks at the life and works of Benjamin Kidd
After Benjamin Kidd died of heart failure at his home at 39 Blenheim Park Road in South Croydon on Monday October 2, 1916, obituaries were published nationally as well as locally. The news even reached Australia, with a paragraph in the Adelaide Advertiser later that week.
Kidd had been catapulted into worldwide status in 1894 with the publication of his book, Social Evolution.

Social pioneer: Benjamin Kidd was published around the world in the 1890s
Born in Ireland, Kidd was a career civil servant. But he spent much of his spare time with his nose deep in books, and had been writing essays, pamphlets and articles for several years. But Social Evolution was his first venture into writing at length about a subject which fascinated him.
It took him two years to draft, write and edit the book, after collecting evidence and developing his thoughts about life. Not for Kidd the academic view of the world from a university chair, but from a working man’s perspective.
As with all authors, stories of angst emerged about the writing process.
On one sunny day Kidd was writing outdoors when a breeze carried away a few pages of foolscap. Kidd was not amused. “Those pages carried sentences which, one day, would have been read by the whole civilised world,” he said. Continue reading →