Samuel Smiles

I'm doing a talk about Samuel Smiles and the invention of self-help at the Sydney Unitarian Church on Sunday August 8, so have been immersing myself in the wonderful world of Smiles.
Possessed of what is quite possibly the most gorgeous name in the world, Samuel Smiles was a Scottish doctor, newspaper editor and pamphleteer who went on to become the biggest selling author of the Victorian age.
The book that rocketed him to fame was the simply named Self-Help - he being the first ever person to employ the term.
Now Self-Help is quite different to contemporary self-help books - it is frequently moralistic in tone, and is really just a collection of biographies of the great and good and how they became that way. Smiles also moralises about the virtues of a simple life, and how through hard work and self denial the working classes might be able to improve their lot. I doubt such advice would be very popular these days. But all in all it is the original, the very template for a genre that has gone on to become one of the most popular in modern publishing. Mr. Smiles probably never dreamed that he'd spawned a monster industry - though he certainly made plenty of money from his book, and from the subsequent follow-ups that were all variations on a theme: Thrift, Duty, Character etc.
But criticise him as much as you like, Mr. Smiles set out a moral and social vision that is still admirable, and his great conviction was that honesty and good cgaracter were infinitely more important than riches and social position. He disparaged cleverness for its own sake, and he despised the various elites that held sway during the Victorian era. He was an unpretentious man, a country doctor with Unitarian leanings.
The fact is that Smiles believed that everyone was capable of improving and becoming something better, regardless of natural talents or inherited social class. His was an egalitarian vision that has ultimately triumphed, and I think he was a great visionary.