Self-help: With Illustrations of Conduct and Perseverance: 1 (Rediscovered riches) - Softcover

Smiles, Samuel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0255363656 ISBN 13: 9780255363655

Publisher: Civitas:Institute for the Study of Civil Society, 1996

Synopsis

"Samuel Smiles is alive and well and available to lead us into the next decade...The Victorian moralist's universal best-seller...is a better guide to the prevailing political and economic orthodoxy than the incomprehensible texts of that other 19th century thinker, Karl Marx." Joe Rogaly, The Financial Times. "The message of this book, which is readable and full of stunning quotations, is: God helps those who help themselves. A century after smiles' death we have had to learn this all over again - the hard way." Paul Johnson, The Daily Mail. "Samuel Smiles' Self-Help is one of those books whose titles is so familiar that we think we have read it. To my shame I had not actually done so until it was splendidly reprinted this year." Peter Lilley, The Sunday Telegraph. "Self-Help is about the nobility of strengthening one's character and should provide food for thought." Times Higher Education Supplement. "As a storyteller [Smiles] is vivid, most of all when he conjures up the industrial revolutionaries: Wedgewood, Watt, Arkwright, George Stephenson and even Jonas Hanway, who taught City men their habit of carrying umbrellas." Christopher Fildes, The Spectator.

About this title

Review

Much in Self-Help is still stimulating. Its central precept - the value of hard work, ingenuity, perseverance, thrift, a solid education - is in tune with American notions of workfare, not to mention the Labour party's espousal ... of a shift in the mission statement of the British social security system from 'hand-out' to 'hand-up'. Welfare financed by taxation is no longer chic. -- The Financial Times, 29.06.96

So far from a shallow exposition of 'economic man', Self-Help is an uplifting study of individual morality brought to life by personal examples. -- Lord Harris, The Times, 29.06.96

About the Author

For the much of his career, Smiles advocated individual self improvement. Smiles' self-help books have been cited as influential on the New Thought Movement in late 19th century America and England, and, in particular, on the career of the New Thought author Orison Swett Marden, who said that his early ambition had been to become "the Samuel Smiles of America." This classic book has been called "the bible of mid-Victorian liberalism".

Edition details

• Publisher: Civitas:Institute for the Study of Civil Society
• Publication date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0255363656
• ISBN 13: 9780255363655
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 281