Samuel Smiles

Samuel Smiles was a British author and government reformer, born on 23 December 1812 in Haddington, East Lothian, Scotland, and he lived until 16 April 1904. He came of age in a Britain stirred by arguments over voting rights, work, poverty, public health, and the proper reach of government. Smiles campaigned on a Chartist platform, yet over time he came to believe that progress would come more from changed habits and attitudes than from new laws alone.

He was one of eleven surviving children of Janet Wilson of Dalkeith and Samuel Smiles of Haddington. His family were strict Reformed Presbyterians, though Smiles himself did not practice. He left local school at 14 and apprenticed under Dr. Robert Lewins, an arrangement that allowed him to study medicine at the University of Edinburgh in 1829. At Edinburgh he deepened his interest in politics and became a strong supporter of Joseph Hume. After his father died in the 1832 cholera epidemic, his mother kept the small family general store going and supported Smiles and his nine younger siblings. Her ceaseless work, and her belief that the “Lord will provide,” strongly influenced his later thinking, even as he developed a tolerant outlook sometimes unlike that of his forebears.

Smiles entered public life through journalism and reform. In 1837 he wrote for the Edinburgh Weekly Chronicle and the Leeds Times in support of parliamentary reform, and in 1838 he became editor of the Leeds Times, serving until 1842. In May 1840 he became secretary to the Leeds Parliamentary Reform Association, which supported the six objectives of Chartism, including universal suffrage for men over 21, secret ballots, equal electoral districts, pay for MPs, and annual Parliaments. As editor, he advocated causes from women’s suffrage to free trade and parliamentary reform. By the late 1840s, however, he was uneasy about the advocacy of physical force by some Chartists and argued that “mere political reform will not cure the manifold evils which now afflict society.”

His working life then moved into the railways. In 1845 he left the Leeds Times to become secretary of the newly formed Leeds & Thirsk Railway, and after nine years he worked for the South Eastern Railway. In 1866 he became president of the National Provident Institution, leaving in 1871 after a debilitating stroke. He was also connected with the Globe Permanent Benefit Building Society as a founding director, involved for three years. In his private life, Smiles married Sarah Ann Holmes Dixon in Leeds on 7 December 1843; they had three daughters and two sons.

Self-Help, published in 1859, became Smiles’s central work. It promoted thrift, argued that poverty was often caused by irresponsible habits, and criticized both materialism and laissez-faire government. The book has been called “the bible of mid-Victorian liberalism” and had lasting effects on British political thought. Smiles continued these themes in other writings, including Workers Earnings, Savings, and Strikes in 1861 and Thrift in 1875. In Thrift he wrote that “riches do not constitute any claim to distinction” and that “only the vulgar” admire riches for their own sake. He also praised the Poor Law Amendment Act 1834 while sharply attacking laissez-faire in matters such as bad housing, foul water, adulterated food, and disease.

Smiles’s words still speak because they join reforming energy with a stern belief in personal conduct. He was not simply calling for success; he was asking how character is formed under pressure, in work, in failure, and in public life. That is why one line from him fits so naturally on a quotes website: “We learn wisdom from failure much more than from success.” It catches the plain force of his message: improvement is not only a matter of laws or fortune, but of what people learn to do after difficulty has exposed them.