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“... The problem the 20th century had with Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help was that the conjunction of ‘self’ and ‘help’ sounded too much like the opposite of the welfare state. Smiles’s creed, it was assumed, was Thatcherism of the crudest ‘on yer bike’ sort, all the more regrettable for being so far avant la lettre ...”

“... When Samuel Smiles was preparing to write his Lives of the Engineers in 1858, Robert Stephenson was doubtful about whether the subject would prove attractive to readers. He had already been surprised by the success of Smiles’s biography of George Stephenson, his father, which had appeared one year earlier ...”

“... in going back to school. Seventeen miles away was Beloit College. In his first year Self Help by Samuel Smiles, the Malcolm Gladwell of the 1850s, was the course book in biography – it left its mark on him and on his memoir. Hence my disappointment on Christmas morning. Christian turns out the clear, sturdy sentences of a lawyer who’s given himself ...”

“... and reader of books, mostly in English, among them Popular Mechanics, Gems of English Eloquence, Samuel Smiles, Marie Stopes, Dickens, Burns, Shakespeare and the Romantics, and, of course, that reciprocal compliment from the West, Sir Edwin Arnold’s poem, ‘The Light of Asia’. How these books, and the Victorian editions peddled from door to ...”

“... In that sense Perkin’s story is different from those of the often self-educated inventors who Samuel Smiles celebrated in the Lives of the Engineers. But Smiles would have understood and appreciated Perkin’s tenacity and competence, his skill as a chemical engineer and his abilities as a businessman, the ...”

“... a governor of nearly every blind asylum in England and a life governor of 43 such institutions’. Samuel Smiles, the apostle of self-help, would have been proud of him. Equally, Smiles would have commended Cheltenham’s great benefactor, Joseph Pitt, who as a lad used to hold gentlemen’s horses for a penny. After ...”

“... its appalling urban destitution, or its schizoid sexual morality, or just the improving works of Samuel Smiles? We may never know, but there is more than a suspicion that the distinctly unpolymathic chemist/lawyer/housewife was just embroidering on a few simplistic items of Grantham family folklore. No matter that the nation relearns morality from such ...”

“... classified as able-bodied in many parishes. The Scots had had a large share, through Adam Smith, Samuel Smiles and Thomas Chalmers, in the fashioning of a theory of economic individualism, and their working class was now paying for it. The special and appalling hardships of Paisley, which had forced on Peel’s government the decision to tackle the ...”

“... manuals of etiquette, supported by the precepts of Martin Tupper and the self-help exhortations of Samuel Smiles. One essential was to know the rules of good conversation. In their earlier years these strivers might well have learned the basics of the art from the recycled works of that universal publisher, Dr John Trusler (d. 1820): ‘Be not dark or ...”

“... Darwin, Jane Austen, David Ricardo, Thomas Malthus, Benjamin Disraeli, William Ewart Gladstone, Samuel Smiles, Herman Melville and Washington Irving were all published from Albemarle Street. J.M.W. Turner and David Roberts provided illustrations for Murray Books. Granted, it’s a major archive. But the firm’s traditional dislike of fiction and ...”

“... In The Beth Book Grand may have done harm at the time, for she conned women in the same way that Samuel Smiles conned men when in Self-Help he persuaded them that any man could, say, build the Scott Monument or discover vaccination. In blustering across ravines, neither Grand nor Smiles seemed to see that as long as ...”

“... the colonel, not so easy to imagine an enthusiastic affection for the proprietor of the mill’. Samuel Smiles, of self-help fame, much admired the military virtues: ‘Duty in its purest form is so constraining that one never thinks, in performing it, of one’s self at all ... The truest sense of enjoyment is found in the paths of duty ...”

“... scale when it was in fact a thrifty exercise in the bourgeois ethic of self-help as enjoined by Samuel Smiles. Little wonder that Wyatt cut such a dash at the Thatcherite court, with his unmatched instinct for squaring the social circle in which he moved. Ribbed over his life peerage by the Duke of Marlborough and Lord Vestey one day in the House of ...”

“... and assumptions, and she shows her ambivalence by talking the language of innovation. The ghost of Samuel Smiles prowls the corridors of No 10 Downing Street, arm in arm with the ghost of Sir Clive Sinclair. But, despite occasional half-hearted lunges in that direction, she has been unable – perhaps unwilling – to break the chains of the Tory culture ...”

“... Venus and Adonis (anyone’s), Leviathan (it sounded like Decameron) and Self-Help by Samuel Smiles’. He also devises a literary test for immigrants comprising the opening lines of Piers Plowman. ‘You’d be surprised,’ he observes, ‘how many Indo-Chinese don’t know the average May mornynge temperature of the British Isles or where ...”