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| Samuel Smiles from the frontispiece of Self-Help Public domain |
1859 was a great year for important books. It saw the publication of George Eliot's Adam Bede, John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, and Samuel Smiles’ Self-Help. Mill set out the attractions of individuality - the need to create a tolerant society (although raising the possibility of the tyranny of the majority); Darwin explained evolution in terms of struggle. These were both controversial books. The third - Self-Help- was not.
Self-Help has now been digitised and can be downloaded from a number of sites. Here is one. It's probably no coincidence that it's American.
The gospel of work
Smiles did not believe he was expounding something controversial but something old and profoundly true - a gospel not a thesis.Many people have claimed that the Victorians invented the gospel of work - but it can be found in Hogarth’s 'Industry and Idleness' and the whole eighteenth-century ethos of inculcating ‘habits of industry’ in the poor. But the work ethic was given a new vitality by a lapsed Presbyterian, Smiles’s fellow Scotsman, Thomas Carlyle, who had praised the nobility and dignity of work - and he was one of Smiles’s heroes.
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| Thomas Carlyle Public domain |
The life of Smiles
Smiles was born in Haddington near Edinburgh in 1812. Although brought up in an extreme Calvinist sect, he described his youth as ‘frolicsome’ and ‘prodigal’. He admitted in Self-Help that it was more ‘natural’ to be prodigal than thrifty, more easy to be dependent than independent.After the 1848 revolutions Smiles retreated from radicalism. He became less concerned with public causes and more with writing and business. In 1845 he became secretary of the Leeds and Thirsk Railway, and in 1857 he produced his first popular book, The Life of George Stephenson. From this time onwards, his future as a writer was secure. After Self-Help, he published Lives of the Engineers (1862), Character (1871), Thrift (1875), Duty (1887). All have the same confident style, full of improving anecdotes.
In 1871 Smiles had a stroke which paralyzed his right hand and robbed him of his memory for proper names. In a striking demonstration of his own principles, he taught himself to write and to remember again.
Self-Help
Smiles adopted the phrase ‘Self-help’ (which proved to be difficult to translate into other languages) from a lecture by the American essayist and philosopher, Ralph Waldo Emerson, delivered in 1841. Smiles's own lectures became so popular that he sought a wider audience. His manuscript was turned down in book form by Routledge because of publishing difficulties during the Crimean War, but then published by John Murray (who was also Darwin's publisher, so 1859 was a good year for him!).The book was a remarkable success. 20,000 copies were sold in the first year, 55,000 by the end of 1864, 150,000 by 1889, 250,000 by 1904. The sales far exceeded those of the great novelists. The book was translated into many languages, including Japanese.
The speed of transmission was determined by the circumstances of the time as well as by the readability of the book. Self-Help was the creed of a more mobile society than had ever existed before. Smiles was part of a ‘success literature’ that reached its peak in the USA. There were many similar books, but unlike many of these, Smiles did not offer ‘easy’ ways of acquiring knowledge. The book was enormously influential. William Lever was given a copy on his sixteenth birthday and gave copies to the young men he employed at Port Sunlight. Smiles received many letters from people telling them how much his book had helped them.
Here are some key quotes.
Individualism
'National progress is the sum of individual industry, energy, and uprightness as national decay is of individual idleness, selfishness, and vice.'
'Men cannot be raised in masses as the mountains were in the early geological states of the world. They must be dealt with as units; for it is only by the elevation of individuals that the elevation of the masses can be effectively secured.'
Perseverance
Smiles followed Carlyle in the praise of perseverance. Carlyle: ‘Perseverance is the hinge of all the virtues’.'Nothing of real worth can be obtained without courageous working. Man owes his growth chiefly to the active striving of the will, that encounter with difficulty which he calls effort; and it is astonishing to find how often results apparently impracticable are then made possible.'
One of his heroes was Joseph Paxton.
'The architect of the Crystal Palace was simply a man who cultivated opportunities, — a laborious, painstaking man, whose life had been a life of labour, of diligent self-improvement, of assiduous cultivation of knowledge. The [design for the Crystal Palace] … was slowly and patiently elaborated by experiments extending over many years; and the Exhibition of 1851 merely afforded him the opportunity of putting forward his idea, — the right thing at the right time, — and the result was what we have seen. It is not accident, then, that helps a man in the world, but purpose and persistent industry.'
Thrift
His analysis of thrift contains the essentials of his theory of society. Individual savings provided the foundation of the national accumulation of capital and this was essential to economic growth.‘The principal industrial excellence of the English people lay in their capacity of present exertion for a distant object’.Smiles thought the thrifty man was also the good man - the ideal working man was the one with a bank account. By a combination of prudence and industry, he could become a little capitalist. He approved of corporate institutions such as co-operative societies and savings banks; savings, not state help was to be the security for old age. He distrusted periods of full employment and believed that prosperity was often caused by over-speculation.
He refused to see a possible connection between thrift and avarice, and claimed to hate the miser. He believed that if applied universally among the working classes thrift would raise their whole social position and widen rather than narrow their horizons. He disapproved of pay-nights - ‘a Saturnalia of riot and disorder’.
Competition
In 1847 he met the Corn Law rhymer, Ebenezer Elliott and agreed with him that competition was ‘the great social law of God’ .'All life is a struggle. ... Under competition the lazy man is put under the necessity of exerting himself; and if he will not exert himself, he must fall behind, If he do not work, neither shall he eat.'
This fitted in very well with Darwinism.
He believed that competition applied to all classes. Men of all classes had to live within their incomes, and he hated the fact that the son of a self-made man became a gentleman-idler. He hated all forms of snobbery. He did not believe that the acquisition of wealth was a proof of moral worth.
The gentleman
The final chapter of Self-Help is a discussion of the ‘gentleman’. Smiles, who hated snobbery, took the term out of its upper-class context and associated it purely with character. The true gentleman was not the creature of inherited privilege but a person with certain moral qualities. This was also the message of Mrs Craik's best-seller, John Halifax, Gentleman (1856).Reputation
Smiles's message was essentially mid-Victorian, and when the mid-Victorian consensus broke down in the 1880s, he was accused by socialists of only being interested in the individual. Economic writers and socialists were now attacking the whole basis of his philosophy. He was seen as a man of the 'right', whereas at the height of his popularity he inspired many socialist thinkers.However, though he was consistently hostile to socialism and state intervention, which he saw as an attack on personal liberty, he was not as individualist as many of his socialist critics believed. He believed in economic laissez-faire and expressed sympathy for the businessman who protested against too much interference in his affairs, but he also advocated certain forms of state intervention in areas such as public health.
He also wanted a national system of education and approved of the 1870 Act. He believed that education had to be run by the state and rejected the analogy between education and free trade in commodities. Education was not a consumer product.
We often hear that ‘Knowledge is Power’, but we never hear that Ignorance is Power.He attached even more importance to adult than to school education:
The highest culture is not obtained from the teacher when at school or college, so much as by our ever diligent self-education when we become men.
Conclusion
- Smiles exemplified mid-Victorian optimism. His passion for self-improvement was in line with the ethos of the times.
- He was a radical in that he believed in self-help and hard work rather than inherited privilege.
- His individualism and his scepticism about state intervention were also thoroughly mid-Victorian. For this reason he came under attack from socialists.
