Self-Help

This is the book the entire category is named after. Published in 1859, it was called the bible of mid-Victorian liberalism and it shaped British political thinking for decades. Smiles had campaigned on a Chartist platform, and his argument here is that progress would come from changed attitudes rather than from new laws.

He was unhappy with his own title. In the preface to a later edition he notes that people who judged the book by its name assumed it was a eulogy of selfishness, and that it was too late to change it.

What is in the book

It argues through lives rather than principles. Chapter after chapter of engineers, inventors, industrialists and self-taught men, offered as evidence that application beats brilliance over a long enough stretch. There is a chapter on the great potters, Palissy, Böttgher and Wedgwood, that is worth the entry price on its own.

Smiles is candid about how it was made. It came from jottings collected over years, originally given as readings to young men with no thought of publication, and he calls it fragmentary himself. That is a fair description, and it is also why it works better a piece at a time than in a straight run.

The recurring finding is that the people who got somewhere were rarely the quickest. They were the ones still working after the interesting part ended. Perseverance and application, in his vocabulary, and character as the thing all of it is for.

Which is the surprise for a modern reader. This is not a Victorian manual for getting rich. Smiles attacks materialism directly, and treats money as a poor measure of a life. The self-improvement he is selling ends in character, not in a fortune.

Samuel Smiles

Smiles was a Scottish doctor turned author and government reformer who lived from 1812 to 1904, long enough to watch his own book become a national institution. His politics are worth arguing with: the claim that attitudes matter more than statutes is doing real work in the book, and it is the most contested thing in it.

Read against your objections rather than with them, it becomes something closer to a case study collection than a sermon, which is exactly what a coach can help you do with it.