Self-help: With Illustrations of Conduct and Perseverance

Smiles, Samuel

ISBN 10: 0255363656 / ISBN 13: 9780255363655

Published by Civitas:Institute for the Study of Civil Society, 1997

About this Item

Most items will be dispatched the same or the next working day. A copy that has been read but remains in clean condition. All of the pages are intact and the cover is intact and the spine may show signs of wear. The book may have minor markings which are not specifically mentioned.

Seller Inventory # wbs4572857310

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Self-help: With Illustrations of Conduct and Perseverance
• Publisher: Civitas:Institute for the Study of Civil Society
• Publication Date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0255363656
• ISBN 13: 9780255363655
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: Good

About this title

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.

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