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.

Helping Me Help Myself

Most books about self-help books tend to be hyper-critical, relying on time-worn old platitudes about the culture of selfishness and the lameness of most self-help writing. I thought that Helping Me Help Myself would be more of the same, though I was duty-bound to read it.

Instead I discover that Beth Lisick, a very funny and accomplished writer, has instead approached the subject with something of an open mind.
Deciding to spend a year being guided by different self-help gurus, Ms. Lisick details the standard domestic traumas of any 12 month period (incipient poverty, a car accident, a regular job dressing up as a banana) and how her new interest in the philosophies of self-help may be changing her usual reactions. And perhaps re-shaping her state of mind.
She reads Jack Canfield (even ends up spending a Thanksgiving weekend with him!), Julia Cameron and Stephen Covey. She goes on a cruise with Richard Simmons and has an epiphany during a Sylvia Browne live show.
Interestingly, the only person for whom she bristles with suspicion is John Gray, who during his seminar seems most intent on shifting his suspect range of health supplements.
Lisick manages to identify the genuine need which people possess as they seek out some meaning in life, and attempt to gain some control of their futures. Though many of our efforts can appear pathetic to the more cynical, the fact is that in one way or another the human creature will always, as Ms. Lisick says, "take stabs at being better or happier people." Those who poke fun at this impulse seem to forget that it remains the driving force behind all efforts at art, culture, spirituality - all forms of transcendence.
This book represents a genuine, and often touching, struggle to understand why regular people turn to mass-produced literature and information in an attempt to improve their lives and their sense of self.

Orison Swett Marden

Marden was an interesting character. One of the great popularisers of the New Thought movement, Marden was in his day an extraordinarily well-known and successful author, though he's largely forgotten today.
Born of humble stock, Marden was something of a child prodigy, and at an early age had managed to earn himself a slew of higher-educaion degress, including Masters Degrees in both medicine and law. Having written a bestselling book based on the principles of New Thought - principles that had helped turn Marden into such an extraordinary achiever - he promptly gave up the professional careers he'd spent so long studying for and concentrated on being a wildly successful author of self-help books.
At present I am reading his The Miracle of Right Thought, an edition printed in Australia in 1935, which is a clue as to his popularity even here.
It is a charming book, filled with the old-fashioned kind of exhortations to positive thinking and trust in God that are so common in the New Thought books of the period. Marden urges us never to complain, as our complaints shape our lives as much as our praises. "Right thinking will produce right living" he reminds us.
Marden was a monumental figure in the history of self-help publishing, and I think I will enjoy reading his old books. I'm not sure I will be able to cover them all, however. He was enormously prolific, and his titles run into the dozens.
He calls God "The Great Dispenser of All Good" - a truly worthy title, and one I'd like to steal, were it not such a mouthful.