Self-Help
Samuel Smiles, 1859
Pupils who taught each other in a former cholera hospital inspired the doctor Samuel Smiles to write a book about people who made themselves. Patience instead of genius, failure as a teacher, spare minutes, money and character. A classic from 1859 that makes no promise of easy success.
Who it is for
For those who are tired of waiting for the right moment, for help or for talent, and want to understand what they can do themselves with what they have.
Luck usually sides with the hard-working, as the wind and the waves side with the best sailors.
Lessons in a former hospital
In a northern English town, two or three young workers decided to teach each other on winter evenings. At first they met in a cottage room, and in summer in the garden by a wooden shed, where a sudden rain sometimes washed the sums off the slates. By the next winter there were so many of them that they had to rent a large, gloomy room. Nobody wanted it: it had once been a temporary cholera hospital. They set up benches and a table, and those who knew a little taught those who knew less.
When almost a hundred had gathered, they asked the doctor and journalist Samuel Smiles to talk to them. He told them about people who had made themselves, and for years afterwards he wrote down such stories in the evenings after work. That is how “Self-Help” came out in 1859.
The title misled many, and the author later regretted it: the book was taken for praise of selfishness. Smiles means something else. A person's real growth comes from within, from their own work, patience and character, and to help yourself in the best sense means to help your neighbour too.
This is a book of its century: hundreds of short portraits, almost all of men, and an imperial pride that cannot be shared today. Here is what has not aged. And there is one warning from the author himself: success cannot be ordered, it can only be earned. If you are waiting for something from circumstances right now, let's see what you can do without waiting.
Help from outside weakens, help from within strengthens
The book opens with an old saying: heaven helps those who help themselves. Smiles explains it simply. Everything that is done for a person takes away his reason to do it himself. A law can protect life and property, but no law will make a lazy man diligent or a spendthrift thrifty. For that, he says, you need better habits, not greater rights.
His best example, Alexis de Tocqueville, was born into a noble family. At the age of twenty-one, influential relatives arranged a post for him as a judge at Versailles. Tocqueville, evidently feeling that the post had come to him undeservedly, turned it down. He went to America and came back with material for the book “Democracy in America.” A fellow traveller recalled that for him the worst day was a lost day.
But the same Tocqueville gratefully named two friends who supported his thought and spirit, and a wife who guarded his peace of mind. Smiles stresses that this is not a contradiction. The poet Wordsworth said that reliance on others and reliance on oneself must go together.
So a young tree grows: a stake holds it in the storm, but it must reach upwards by itself. Help that replaces effort weakens. Help that supports it makes it stronger. You can tell one from the other with one question: what in this matter can only you do?
About the author
Samuel Smiles (1812-1904), a Scottish doctor by training, journalist and reformer. He wrote about people who got on by their own labour, including the multi-volume “Lives of the Engineers.”
All books by this author: Samuel Smiles
Terms from the book
- Newton
- Wright
- Shakespeare
- bill of exchange
- Scott
- Tocqueville
- Wordsworth
- Joseph
- Fox
- cholera: A severe bowel infection, whose epidemics killed thousands of people in England in the nineteenth century. Temporary hospitals were opened for the sick.
- Buffon: Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon (1707-1788), a French naturalist and author of the multi-volume “Natural History.” He is credited with the words “genius is patience.”
- Palissy: Bernard Palissy (around 1510 to around 1590), a French potter, glass painter and naturalist. For about sixteen years he searched for the secret of white enamel himself.
- Saintes: A small town in western France where Palissy lived and carried out his experiments.
- enamel: A glassy coating applied to clay pottery and fired in a kiln. It makes the item smooth, shiny and impervious to water.
- Watt: James Watt (1736-1819), a Scottish inventor who created an improved steam engine. He said that engineers lacked a history of failures more than anything else.
- Drew: Samuel Drew (1765-1833), a Cornish cobbler who became a preacher and the author of philosophical books.
- Cornwall: A county at the south-western tip of England, in the eighteenth century a region of tin mines and fishing villages.
- Sharples: James Sharples, an English blacksmith born in 1825, who taught himself painting and engraving. His engraving “The Smithy” became well known.
- Jervis: John Jervis, Earl of St Vincent (1735-1823), a British admiral. In his youth he lived in want for several years in order to pay off an unpaid bill of exchange.
- Haydon: Benjamin Haydon (1786-1846), an English painter who suffered from debts all his life. He dated his own decline from his first loan.
- Horner: Francis Horner (1778-1817), a Scottish lawyer and member of the British parliament, known for honesty and influence rather than wealth or eloquence.
- Cockburn: Henry Cockburn (1779-1854), a Scottish judge and memoirist. Smiles quotes his words about Horner in full.
All terms
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