Charles William Heckethorn

Died 1902

Charles William Heckethorn was a language teacher and writer whose best-known work surveyed secret societies. In The Secret Societies of All Ages and Countries, he brought religious mysteries and political organisations into a single history, arguing that distant traditions preserved traces of shared ancient knowledge.

Life and career

Heckethorn’s early life is only partly documented, and accounts disagree about his birth year. His own later recollection places him in Basel in 1840, when he attended a celebration of the history of printing at the cathedral. By 1850 he was teaching French and German at Mr Bass’s school in Ryde on the Isle of Wight. His Exercises in French Orthography grew out of that work: written exercises, dictation and oral repetition were intended to make pupils attend closely to grammar as well as spelling.

His interests eventually extended far beyond the classroom. The Secret Societies of All Ages and Countries appeared in 1875, and he returned to it more than twenty years later with a substantially enlarged edition. Basel remained important to him. In The Printers of Basle in the XV and XVI Centuries (1897), he described the people, books and printer’s devices behind the city’s publishing history. His preface identifies an earlier history by Immanuel Stockmeyer and Balthasar Reber as its main framework and acknowledges further published sources.

He also wrote about London’s streets, trades and historical associations. London Souvenirs appeared in 1899, followed by London Memories in 1900. Contemporary responses to the latter differed: The Freemason’s Chronicle praised its readable accounts of the city, while The Spectator objected to his dismissive view of earlier generations and his confidence in progress through science. Heckethorn died in 1902, leaving a varied body of historical and literary writing.

Books and contributions

1 work in the current library

Secret Societies of All Ages and Countries

Charles William Heckethorn

Esoteric Traditions

Sources and further reading

Secret societies and the search for connections

The origins of Secret Societies were partly those of a translation project. In his first preface, Heckethorn explained that he had considered translating Giovanni De Castro’s Il Mondo Segreto before expanding the undertaking with material from other sources. He defined secrecy broadly: a group might be publicly known while reserving its rituals or teaching for initiates. That definition allowed him to bring religious mysteries, medieval associations and modern political organisations within the same survey.

The library holds Volume I of George Redway’s revised 1897 edition. Its subjects range from ancient mysteries to heretics, tribunals, mystical writers and clandestine associations. Heckethorn did more than assemble descriptions: he argued that similarities between distant traditions pointed back to a shared ancient knowledge. His interpretations of symbolism and his judgments about religions belong to that nineteenth-century outlook. They should be distinguished from independently established connections between the groups he described. The book preserves an ambitious attempt to arrange a large, uneven literature into a connected history.