Samuel Smiles

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.