The Scotsman Samuel Smiles wrote more than twenty books between 1836 and 1894, but his most popular was without a doubt Self-Help. Published in 1859, Self-Help ultimately sold more than a quarter million copies during Smiles’ lifetime, an astounding number for the times. But Smiles was more than the author of Self-Help, he invented a concept of “self-help”, now a genre that commands entire sections in most American bookstores. In Self-Help and other popular books like Character, Smiles faithfully reflected the spirit of the Victorian age, but in a sense also helped deepen its spirit. Smiles clarified and amplified the edifice of Victorian virtue, usefully advancing the project of separating moral discipline from formal religious dogma. In the process, he became a wealthy, well-known and very much respected man, not only in Britain but throughout much of the world.

Victorian values, sometimes referred to derisively as bourgeois values, fell out of favor during much of the 20th century, at least among the upper crusts of most Western societies, and, in step with the times, Samuel Smiles fell out of favor with them. He was at first dismissed and derided, and then virtually forgotten. His view of life, however, though considered passé by the elite, has remained the basis of what may fairly be called “hearth virtue” in much of Europe, Britain and the United States—the virtue that parents and other family elders convey by model and aphorism to children in the intimacy of their own homes. Indeed, Smiles’ work defines a version of compassionate conservatism, which, whatever one thinks of George W. Bush, clearly has deep resonance within American society. Re-reading Self-Help today, along with Smiles’ paean to technological ingenuity, Lives of The Engineers (1862), one cannot help thinking what a boon such material would be to Republican speechwriters, if they only knew of its existence.

Samuel Smiles, 1880 [credit: Getty Images]

Smiles’ work offers more than a rhetorical gold mine, however. We’ve come a long way from Lytton Strachey’s 1918 book The Eminent Victorians to Gertrude Himmelfarb’s 1996 The De-moralization of Society: From Victorian Virtues to Modern Values. Strachey famously pilloried and satirized the Victorians by serially debunking the reputations of Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Thomas Arnold and General “Chinese” Gordon. He loathed the Victorian style of biography, of which Smiles was a major practitioner, as “funeral barbarism.” His irreverence was meant to destroy the image of Victorian virtue, and it fairly well succeeded. Nearly eighty years later, Himmelfarb, among others, regretted Strachey’s success. Values, she pointed out, are not the same as virtues, and...