Samuel Smiles: The Father of Modern Self-Help

August 31, 2024 Daniel

Long before folks like Tony Robbins and Deepak Chopra and Rhonda Byrne and James Allen and Wallace D. Wattles and Orison Swett Marden came onto the self-help scene, there was Samuel Smiles, who has a pretty valid claim to being called the father of modern self-help.

Samuel Smiles was born in Scotland in 1812, and the British writer and government reformer is best known for his 1859 book Self-Help, which focused on the concept of thrift as personal development and made Sammy an instant celebrity practically overnight. The famous playwright George Bernard Shaw called Smiles “that modern Plutarch,” and Orison Swett Marden basically credited his entire life to finding a copy of Self-Help as a teenager.

The Samuel Smiles approach to self-improvement is more grounded in Victorian ideas about character. According to Smiles, success comes from education and discipline and integrity and perseverance and patience and all the other goody two-shoes characteristics. This is a pretty basic formula for success that self-help gurus and while Sammy did not invent the idea of personal development, he certainly popularized the concept and a whole genre was built around it.

From here, though, we can uncover a sort of evolutionary tree of personal development literature. Orison Swett Marden published Pushing to the Front in 1911, and he added the concept of optimism to Smiles’s recipe for success. Then we start getting to the New Thought school of philosophy, with James Allen talking about how our thoughts can shape our character and our circumstances. In The Science of Getting Rich, Wallace D. Wattles incorporated visualization and gratitude and thoughts of abundance into action.

As these concepts of manifestation culture became more and more refined, folks like Napoleon Hill and Dale Carnegie added their own brand of success psychology and positive thinking, and that’s led to modern productivity literature and self-help books from cultural significant figures like Tony Robbins and Deepak Chopra.

It’s been more than 165 years since Self-Help was published, and the world Samuel Smiles knew has mostly disappeared. The questions at the hear of his book, however, have not. Like, how much control do we have over the direction of our lives? Can we change our circumstances with discipline and perseverance and building good habits? What can we learn from successful people who have overcame adversity?

It’s far too easy to read this book through modern eyes and question Smiles’s tendency to underestimate (if not dismiss) the economic and social forces that limit opportunities in post-capitalism. His central message still rings true, though: we may not control how life began for us but we do have some control over what action we can take next. Strip away all of that Victorian language with outdated 19th-century examples and Self-Help still makes arguments that we’re still hearing in podcasts today.

Click on the book cover to buy Self-Help!