William Mattieu Williams was born in 1820 and apprenticed to a mathematical and optical instrument maker in Lambeth. After working from seven to eight, he ran over two kilometres to Southampton Buildings to attend classes at the London Mechanics’ Institute. He was also a painter, operatic singer and traveller.  

Williams contended that his classes were of “great value in training their members in independent and vigorous habits of thought, and fitting them to communicate to others any knowledge they possessed.” He exemplified this, eventually giving lectures himself at the Institution and becoming a long-term member of the management committee. He admitted to an “ever-increasing conviction of the solid truth of the great natural laws” of phrenology, a now-debunked early Victorian science on how the shape of the human skull influenced the personality of the individual.