Routledge rejected Self-Help, so Samuel Smiles published it himself and sold a quarter million
In 1855 a young London publisher turned down a manuscript about ordinary people bettering themselves. Samuel Smiles paid to print it himself in 1859, kept the copyright, and sold 20,000 copies in a year. Two decades later George Routledge asked when he might publish something of his. Smiles reminded him.
Smiles was born in Haddington, East Lothian, in 1812, one of eleven surviving children of strict Reformed Presbyterians, though he did not practise himself. He left school at 14, apprenticed with a local doctor and studied medicine at Edinburgh. When his father died in the 1832 cholera epidemic, his mother kept the family shop going and supported nine younger siblings, an example of unrelenting work that shaped everything he later wrote.
Medicine did not suit him. From 1838 he edited the radical Leeds Times, backing women's suffrage, free trade and parliamentary reform, and in 1840 became secretary of a Leeds reform association committed to the Chartist programme. By the late 1840s he recoiled from Chartist leaders who talked of physical force and concluded that political change alone would not cure society. He moved into railway administration, and several cooperative ventures he joined failed for want of capital.
Self-Help grew out of an 1845 talk to a mutual improvement society. The finished book preached thrift and argued that much poverty came from careless habits, yet Smiles also scorned the worship of wealth, and in Thrift he ridiculed laissez-faire with a long riff on the villain called Nobody, who adulterates food and leaves towns undrained. He even argued in print that railways should be nationalised. The book made him a celebrity overnight and has been called the bible of mid-Victorian liberalism.
His later years were quieter. A stroke in 1871 ended his presidency of the National Provident Institution. His publisher, John Murray, twice refused a final manuscript called Conduct, and after his death it was found in his desk and destroyed on Murray's advice; no copy survives. He died in Kensington in 1904, reportedly having turned down a knighthood, by which time Self-Help had sold over a quarter of a million copies.
Source: Samuel Smiles
