 Samuel Smiles by Sir George Reid | |
| Author | Samuel Smiles |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Publisher | John Murray |
Publication date | 1859 |
| Publication place | United Kingdom |
| Preceded by | The Life of George Stephenson |
| Followed by | Brief Biographies |
| Text | Self-Help at Wikisource |
Self-Help; with Illustrations of Character and Conduct is a book published in 1859 by Samuel Smiles. The second edition of 1866 added Perseverance to the subtitle. It has been called "the bible of mid-Victorian liberalism". [1]
Smiles was not very successful in his careers as a doctor and journalist. He joined several cooperative ventures, but they failed for lack of capital. Disillusioned, he turned away from middle-class utopianism, and finally found intellectual refuge and national fame in the isolation of self-help. [2] He extolled the virtues of self-help, industry, and perseverance. However, he rejected the application of laissez-faire to critical areas such as public health and education. [3] According to historian Asa Briggs:
Smiles built his argument using three concepts from the 18th-century Enlightenment. The concept of environmental determinism gave rise to the "passive" component in his thought. That allowed him to argue for the removal, by government intervention, of major hindrances that prevented the full development of the individual. A second theme was that a person's intellectual faculty matured last. That led him to emphasize the "active" role, stressing self-education and self-help. Finally he assumed there existed a beneficent natural order. [5]
Self-Help sold 20,000 copies within one year of its publication. By the time of Smiles' death in 1904 it had sold over a quarter of a million. [6] Self-Help "elevated [Smiles] to celebrity status: almost overnight, he became a leading pundit and much-consulted guru". [7] The book was translated and published in Dutch, French, Danish, German, Italian, Russian, Japanese, Arabic, Turkish, and in several Indian languages. [8] In the preface to his 1880 book, Duty, Smiles wrote of Self-Help, "In America, the book has been more widely published and read than in Great Britain".
The three didactic self-help juvenile novels published by English author G. A. Henty in the 1880s shows Smiles' influence. Each was an exposition of the philosophy of self-help as expressed by Smiles. [9]
When an English visitor to the Khedive's palace in Egypt asked where the mottoes on the palace's walls originated, he was given the reply: "They are principally from Smeelis, you ought to know Smeelis! They are from his Self-Help." [10]
The socialist Robert Tressell, in his novel The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists , said Self-Help was a book "suitable for perusal by persons suffering from almost complete obliteration of the mental faculties". [11]
The founder of Toyota, Sakichi Toyoda was significantly influenced by his reading of Self-Help. A copy of Self-Help is under a glass display at the museum that exists on Sakichi Toyoda's birth site. [12]
Robert Blatchford, a socialist activist, said it was "one of the most delightful and invigorating books it has been my happy fortune to meet with" and argued it should be taught in schools. However he also noted that socialists would not feel comfortable with Smiles' individualism but also noted that Smiles denounced "the worship of power, wealth, success, and keeping up appearances". [13] : 68–9 A labour leader advised Blatchford to stay away from it: "It's a brutal book; it ought to be burnt by the common hangman. Smiles was the arch-Philistine, and his book the apotheosis of respectability, gigmanity, and selfish grab". [13] : 68 However Jonathan Rose has argued that most pre-1914 labour leaders who commented on Self-Help praised it and it was not until after the First World War that criticisms of Smiles in worker's memoirs appeared. [13] : 68–9 The Labour Party MPs William Johnson and Thomas Summerbell admired Smiles' work and the Communist miners leader A. J. Cook "started out with Self-Help". [13] : 69 Alexander Tyrell, (1970) argues that there were multiple value systems among the middle class, and that Smiles approach was one of many. [14]
Self Help public domain audiobook at LibriVox 
The Age of Enlightenment was an intellectual and philosophical movement that occurred in Europe in the 17th and the 18th centuries. The Enlightenment featured a range of social ideas centered on the value of knowledge learned by way of rationalism and of empiricism and political ideals such as natural law, liberty, and progress, toleration and fraternity, constitutional government, and the formal separation of church and state.
In the history of the United Kingdom and the British Empire, the Victorian era was the reign of Queen Victoria, from 20 June 1837 until her death on 22 January 1901. Slightly different definitions are sometimes used. The era followed the Georgian era and preceded the Edwardian era, and its later half overlaps with the first part of the Belle Époque era of continental Europe.
Samuel Smiles was a British author and government reformer. Although he campaigned on a Chartist platform, he promoted the idea that more progress would come from new attitudes than from new laws. His primary work, Self-Help (1859), promoted thrift and claimed that poverty was caused largely by irresponsible habits, while also attacking materialism and laissez-faire government. It has been called "the bible of mid-Victorian liberalism" and had lasting effects on British political thought.
The Georgian era was a period in British history from 1714 to c. 1830–1837, named after the Hanoverian kings George I, George II, George III and George IV. The definition of the Georgian era is also often extended to include the relatively short reign of William IV, which ended with his death in 1837. The subperiod that is the Regency era is defined by the regency of George IV as Prince of Wales during the illness of his father George III. The transition to the Victorian era was characterized in religion, social values, and the arts by a shift in tone away from rationalism and toward romanticism and mysticism.
Robert William Dale was an English Congregational church leader based in Birmingham.
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Robert Peel Glanville Blatchford was an English socialist campaigner, journalist, and author in the United Kingdom. He was also noted as a prominent atheist, nationalist and opponent of eugenics. In the early 1920s, after the death of his wife, he turned towards spiritualism.
George Alfred Henty was an English novelist and war correspondent. He is best known for his works of adventure fiction and historical fiction, including The Dragon & The Raven (1886), For The Temple (1888), Under Drake's Flag (1883) and In Freedom's Cause (1885).
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Benjamin Seebohm Rowntree, CH was an English sociological researcher, social reformer and industrialist. He is known in particular for his three studies of poverty in York, conducted in 1899, 1935, and 1951.
Robert Phillipe Noonan, born Robert Croker, and best known by the pen name Robert Tressell, was an Irish writer best known for his novel The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists.
The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists (1914) is a semi-autobiographical novel by Irish house painter and sign writer Robert Noonan, who wrote the book in his spare time under the pen name Robert Tressell. Published after Tressell's death from tuberculosis in the Liverpool Royal Infirmary in 1911, the novel follows a house painter's efforts to find work in the fictional English town of Mugsborough to stave off the workhouse for himself, his wife and his son. The original title page, drawn by Tressell, carried the subtitle: "Being the story of twelve months in Hell, told by one of the damned, and written down by Robert Tressell."
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The Clarion was a weekly newspaper published by Robert Blatchford, based in the United Kingdom. It was a socialist publication with a Britain-focused rather than internationalist perspective on political affairs, as seen in its support of the British involvement in the Anglo-Boer Wars and the First World War.
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Victorian People: A Reassessment of Persons and Themes, 1851-1867 is a book by the historian Asa Briggs originally published in 1955. It is part of a trilogy that also incorporates Victorian Cities and Victorian Things.
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