Samuel Smiles

• 1. Introduction

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  Samuel Smiles died on the 16th of April 1904 in Kensington, leaving behind a manuscript locked in his desk that no one was ever allowed to read. His publisher, John Murray, had already turned it down twice. After Smiles's death, Murray advised that the manuscript of a book called Conduct be destroyed. No copy is known to exist.

  That story captures something essential about a man who preached self-discipline his entire career, yet ended it silenced by the very institution he depended on. Smiles had spent decades telling working-class readers that they alone held the keys to their own improvement. His book Self-Help, published in 1859, sold 20,000 copies within its first year. By the time he died, it had sold over a quarter of a million. He became, almost overnight, a celebrity thinker in Victorian Britain.

  But the questions worth asking are less about his fame and more about the tensions underneath it. Here was a man who started as a Chartist reformer demanding radical political change, then turned his back on politics entirely. A man who denounced laissez-faire government in vivid, almost furious prose, yet argued that poverty was largely the result of bad habits. A man whose mother kept a general store and raised eleven children after her husband died in the 1832 cholera epidemic, whispering that the Lord would provide. Her example, Smiles later wrote, strongly influenced his future life.

• 2. From Haddington to Leeds

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  Smiles was born on the 23rd of December 1812 in Haddington, East Lothian, Scotland, one of eleven surviving children in a family of strict Reformed Presbyterians. He did not share their faith. He left the local school at the age of 14 and apprenticed under Dr. Robert Lewins, an arrangement that carried him into the University of Edinburgh in 1829. There he sharpened a political appetite that would shape the next two decades of his life, becoming a strong supporter of the parliamentary reformer Joseph Hume.

  His father's death in the 1832 cholera epidemic could have ended his studies. Instead his mother kept the family general store running and kept him in school. The image stayed with him: a woman working ceaselessly to support herself and nine younger siblings, trusting that the Lord would provide. He absorbed her industriousness, though he developed what the source describes as a more benign and tolerant outlook than his Reformed Presbyterian forebears.

  In 1837 Smiles was writing reform articles for the Edinburgh Weekly Chronicle and the Leeds Times. By November 1838 he had accepted the editorship of the Leeds Times, a position he held until 1842. He moved to live on Woodhouse Cliff in 1847. On the 7th of December 1843 he married Sarah Ann Holmes Dixon in Leeds. They had three daughters and two sons. Leeds was not merely a stop on his journey; he spent the next twenty years of his life there.

• 3. The Chartist Years

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  In May 1840, Smiles became secretary to the Leeds Parliamentary Reform Association, an organisation that held to six specific Chartist demands: universal male suffrage for men over 21; equal-sized electoral districts; the secret ballot; no property qualification for Members of Parliament; pay for MPs; and annual Parliaments. These were considered radical positions, and Smiles argued for them openly in the pages of the Leeds Times.

  As editor he pushed causes ranging from women's suffrage to free trade. By the late 1840s, though, he grew uneasy about Chartists Feargus O'Connor and George Julian Harney, who were advocating physical force. Yet his unease was not simply with the violence. He seems to have agreed with O'Connor and Harney that the movement's current tactics were not working. He said that "mere political reform will not cure the manifold evils which now afflict society." That line contains the seed of everything that followed: if laws could not fix the underlying problem, then something else had to.

  In 1845 he left the Leeds Times and became secretary for the newly formed Leeds and Thirsk Railway. After nine years there, he moved to work for the South Eastern Railway. The shift from political journalism to railway administration was not just a career change. It pointed toward his emerging conviction that practical, institutional work was more useful than political agitation. His railway years fed directly into some of his biographical writing, including his celebrated Lives of the Engineers.

• 4. Self-Help and Its Contradictions

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  The speech that eventually became Self-Help was delivered in March 1845 at the request of a Mutual Improvement Society. Smiles told his working-class audience that the point of self-education was not merely wealth or social eminence. He said: "Knowledge is of itself one of the highest enjoyments. The ignorant man passes through the world dead to all pleasures, save those of the senses." He framed the mission grandly: every human being had noble faculties to cultivate and a vast destiny to accomplish.

  The Routledge publishing house rejected the manuscript in 1855. Twenty years later Smiles found himself seated at a dinner next to George Routledge himself, who asked when Routledge would have the honour of publishing one of his books. Smiles replied that Mr. Routledge already had that honour, having rejected Self-Help. John Murray was willing to publish it on a half-profits system, but Smiles turned Murray down because he did not want to lose the book's anecdotes. In 1859 Smiles self-published, retaining the copyright, and paid Murray a ten per cent commission.

  The book elevated him to what one contemporary account called celebrity status, almost overnight making him a leading pundit. He was deluged with invitations to lay foundation stones, sit for portraits, and address public meetings. He declined nearly all of them. He believed, as an admiring contemporary put it, that his duty lay in his office, with his work. The contradiction was not lost on later observers: a man who became famous for promoting self-reliance had made his fortune off the very aspiration he described, selling a vision of independence to readers who bought it in enormous numbers.

• 5. The Writings Against Nobody

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  Self-Help was only the most famous of a long shelf of books. Smiles published Lives of the Engineers in five volumes from 1862, tracing the careers of engineers including James Brindley, Thomas Telford, and George Stephenson. He wrote biographical works on individual figures such as Josiah Wedgwood and James Nasmyth. He produced studies of the Huguenots, of Scottish naturalist Thomas Edward, and of Jasmin, a French barber-poet.

  In 1875 his book Thrift appeared, and it contained a passage that cuts against the image of Smiles as a simple champion of the free market. He wrote a scorching satirical address to the figure he called Nobody: "When typhus or cholera breaks out, they tell us that Nobody is to blame. That terrible Nobody! How much he has to answer for." He catalogued what Nobody supposedly did: adulterating food, poisoning drink, spreading fever in unswept lanes, leaving towns undrained. The remedy offered was always the same two-word phrase, laissez-faire: let alone. His attack on that philosophy in Thrift sits in productive tension with his reputation as a preacher of individual responsibility.

  In the same book he wrote that riches do not constitute any claim to distinction, and that it is only the vulgar who admire riches as riches. He praised the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 as one of the most valuable pieces of legislation placed on the statute-book in modern times, a judgment that reveals how far his politics had travelled from his Chartist days. The 1861 article Workers Earnings, Savings, and Strikes included an anecdote about a workman earning fifty to sixty shillings a week who chose to house his family of five in a single room; the witness asked whether this was from inability or carelessness answered: they were careless.

• 6. Fame, Portrait, and a Private Politics

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  In 1866 Smiles became president of the National Provident Institution, a role he left in 1871 after suffering a debilitating stroke. Sir George Reid was commissioned to paint his portrait, completed in 1877, now held in the collection of the National Gallery in London.

  His private correspondence reveals a man whose politics were not straightforwardly liberal. In 1892, when Prime Minister William Gladstone introduced his Second Irish Home Rule Bill, Smiles wrote to his son in Ulster urging him not to rebel but also calling Gladstone a maniac and mourning what he called the state of turmoil the bill created. In 1893 he wrote to Lucy Smiles calling the Home Rule Bill horrid, describing Gladstone as a wretched hound miscalled a statesman, and lamenting that so many people followed him, just like a flock of sheep. He asked whether he needed to give six months notice to withdraw his loans to a railway company so he could keep money for wife and bairns rather than for arming Ulstermen.

  Shortly before his death in 1904, Smiles was reportedly offered a knighthood. He declined. He was buried in Brompton Cemetery. His grandchildren include Sir Walter Smiles, an Ulster Unionist Party MP. Through that branch of the family, Smiles is also the great-great-grandfather of the adventurer Bear Grylls.

• 7. A Legacy Fought Over

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  George Bernard Shaw, in his Fabian Essays in Socialism published in 1889, called Smiles "that modern Plutarch", a comparison that measured his reach as a chronicler of great lives while keeping him at arm's length from socialist politics. The American writer Orison Swett Marden read Self-Help in his youth and went on to write Pushing to the Front in 1894, becoming a professional inspirational author in direct response to Smiles's influence.

  The Liberal MP J. A. Roebuck quoted from Smiles's Workmen's Earnings, Strikes and Savings in Parliament in 1862, calling it a very remarkable book. Decades later, the Labour MP David Grenfell used a 1932 debate to argue that a government bill penalized self-help and, by extension, poured contempt on Samuel Smiles and all his works. The two invocations came from opposite ends of the political spectrum, which tells you something about how contested his ideas became.

  The economists J. A. Hobson and A. F. Mummery argued in their Physiology of Industry in 1889 that saving actually produced underemployment during trade depressions, a direct challenge to thrift as Smiles understood it. John Maynard Keynes extended that critique in the General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money in 1936. F. A. Hayek, writing in 1976, expressed a different reservation: he thought it was probably a misfortune that popular writers like Smiles had defended free enterprise by arguing it regularly rewarded the deserving, because that defence gave businessmen an air of self-righteousness that made them less popular rather than more. The Halifax Building Society, for its part, printed a leaflet in 1897 explicitly modelled on the message of Thrift, illustrating a worn-out house and a well-off house side by side under the labels Want of Thrift and Thrift. The note at the bottom read: little and often fills the purse.