Samuel Smiles

Samuel Smiles (1812–1904) was a Scottish author and reformer, born in Haddington, the son of a shopkeeper. He qualified as a doctor at Edinburgh but gave up medicine to edit the radical Leeds Times, campaigned for parliamentary reform, and then spent twenty years as secretary of railway companies in Leeds and London. Self-Help, published in 1859, grew from lectures to young workmen and sold a quarter of a million copies in his lifetime; Character, Thrift and Duty followed. He also wrote lives of the engineers George Stephenson, Thomas Telford and Josiah Wedgwood, and a history of the Huguenots in England. He is the classic voice of Victorian self-improvement.