Character

Samuel Smiles, (born Dec. 23, 1812, Haddington, Berwickshire, Scot.—died April 16, 1904, London), Scottish author best known for his didactic work Self-Help (1859), which, with its successors, Character (1871), Thrift (1875), and Duty (1880), enshrined the basic Victorian values associated with the “gospel of work.”

One of 11 children left fatherless in 1832, Smiles learned the meaning of self-reliance. Although he qualified in medicine at Edinburgh in 1832, he soon abandoned medical practice for journalism, moving to Leeds, where from 1838 to 1842 he edited the progressive and reformist Leeds Times. His radicalism was a practical application of the doctrines of the utilitarian philosophers (“philosophical radicals”) Jeremy Bentham and James Mill. He was a zealous advocate of material progress based on individual enterprise and free trade. From 1845 to 1866 he was engaged in railway administration, and in 1857 he published a life of the inventor a