Short answers, pulled from the story.
Samuel Smiles (the 23rd of December 1812 - the 16th of April 1904) was a British author and government reformer from Haddington, East Lothian, Scotland. He is best known for Self-Help (1859), a book that sold over a quarter of a million copies by the time of his death and has been called "the bible of mid-Victorian liberalism."
Self-Help sold 20,000 copies within one year of its publication in 1859. By the time Smiles died in 1904, total sales had exceeded a quarter of a million copies.
John Murray offered to publish Self-Help on a half-profits system, but Smiles rejected the arrangement because he did not want the book to lose its anecdotes. He self-published in 1859, retaining the copyright and paying Murray a ten per cent commission. Routledge had already rejected the manuscript in 1855.
In May 1840, Smiles became secretary to the Leeds Parliamentary Reform Association, which held to all six Chartist objectives including universal male suffrage and the secret ballot. By the late 1840s he grew concerned about Chartists who advocated physical force, and in the 1850s he abandoned parliamentary politics entirely in favour of the idea that self-help was the most important site of reform.
Smiles submitted Conduct to his publisher John Murray in 1896 and again in 1898; both times Murray declined. After Smiles died in 1904, the manuscript was found in his desk. On Murray's advice, it was destroyed, and no copy is known to exist.
Smiles's grandchildren include Sir Walter Smiles, an Ulster Unionist Party MP. Through that branch of the family, Smiles is also the great-great-grandfather of Bear Grylls, the well-known adventurer.