Samuel Smiles: And the Construction of Victorian Values

Samuel Smiles (1812-1904) is remembered as the popular moralist who wrote Self-Help and the Lives of the Engineers yet his considerable output numbered around thirty books, another thirty pamphlets and hundreds of articles. His work was extremely popular, particularly from the 1860s to the 1890s, and he was, for a time, a considerable celebrity. This new work is the first not only to examine Smiles as a whole but also to identify the unifying theme of his work. He was, according to Jarvis, solving the 'Condition of England Question' and abandoning many of the conventional values of middle-class Victorian Britain he is popularly thought to personify. In their place came an assault on anything he regarded as socially divisive: the remedy lay in cooperation, and the means to that lay in synthesising responses which bridged many of the great controversies of his time. Smiles is still highly relevant for many today, although not always for the right reasons. His work lives on as a formative influence in the way we approach the history of technology but a distorted image of him as an advocate of individual responsibility and a critic of over-government led to his emergence as the darling of the Tory right in the l980s. Jarvis' controversial biography aims to set the record straight, revealing the truth about this hugely influential character and his significance for both Victorian and late twentieth-century society.