Samuel Smiles and the construction of Victorian values

Adrian Jarvis

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...

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