Nonfiction · 1859
Self Help
With Illustrations of Conduct and Perseverance
Drawing on the lives of engineers, inventors, scientists, and tradesmen who rose from humble origins through sheer diligence and character, this book makes the case that individual perseverance, not birth or privilege, is the true engine of both personal success and national progress.
Samuel Smiles published Self-Help in 1859, expanding it from lectures originally delivered to a mutual improvement society of working men; it became one of the best-selling books of the Victorian era and gave the English language its enduring sense of the phrase that titles it.
This Bibliomancer edition presents the complete text.
Contents
- Epigraph
- Preface
- Introduction to the First Edition
- Chapter I — Self-Help—National and Individual
- Chapter II — Leaders of Industry—Inventors and Producers
- Chapter III — Three Great Potters—Palissy, Böttgher, Wedgwood
- Chapter IV — Application and Perseverance
- Chapter V — Helps and Opportunities—Scientific Pursuits
- Chapter VI — Workers in Art
- Chapter VII — Industry and the Peerage
- Chapter VIII — Energy and Courage
- Chapter IX — Men of Business
- Chapter X — Money—Its Use and Abuse
- Chapter XI — Self-Culture—Facilities and Difficulties
- Chapter XII — Example—Models
- Chapter XIII — Character—The True Gentleman
- Footnotes
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About this edition
The text is free of copyright. This edition was prepared from an authoritative digitisation, processed by Bibliomancer under its own review protocol; every automated correction is recorded in its transformation log. Rights assessed for CA, EU, GB, US.
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About the author
1812–1904 · Victorian
Samuel Smiles (1812–1904) was born in Haddington, Scotland, trained as a physician, and worked as a newspaper editor and railway administrator before finding lasting fame as a writer. Self-Help (1859), expanded from a series of lectures to a mutual improvement society of working men, argued that individual character, diligence, and perseverance — not birth or privilege — were the true engines of personal and national progress, illustrated throughout with brief biographical sketches of engineers, inventors, and self-made men; it became one of the best-selling books of the Victorian era and gave the English language its enduring sense of the phrase "self-help." He followed it with further books in the same vein, including Lives of the Engineers, a multi-volume study of the era's great civil engineers. He died in London at ninety-one.
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