Böcker av Samuel Smiles

Written along the lines of the author's Self-Help and Character, this book shows readers what can be accomplished in life and labor by honest force of will and steady perseverance. "The chapters on Over Brain-work and the Conditions of Health may be of use to those who work with their Brains too much and their Physical System too little. This part of the work has been to a certain extent the result of personal experience." Samuel Smiles (1812-1904) was a zealous advocate of material progress based on individual enterprise and free trade. From 1845 to 1866 he was engaged in railway administration, and in 1857 he published a life of the inventor and founder of the railways, George Stephenson. Best known for his didactic work Self-Help (1859), which, with its successors, Character (1871), Thrift (1875), and Duty (1880), enshrined the basic Victorian values associated with the "gospel of work."

This two-volume account of the life and friendships of the publisher John Murray (1778-1843), told largely through his voluminous correspondence, was published in 1891 by Samuel Smiles (1812-1904), whose Lives of the Engineers, Self-Help, and other works are also reissued in the Cambridge Library Collection. Murray was only fifteen when his father, the founder of the famous firm, died, but after a period of apprenticeship he took sole control of the business, becoming the friend as well as the publisher of a range of the most important writers of the first half of the nineteenth century, in both literature and science. Perhaps his most famous author was Lord Byron, whose memoir of his own life, considered unpublishable, was burned in the fireplace at Murray's office in Albemarle Street, London. Volume 1 commences with the beginnings of the firm in Scotland, and takes the story up to 1818.

This two-volume account of the life and friendships of the publisher John Murray (1778-1843), told largely through his voluminous correspondence, was published in 1891 by Samuel Smiles (1812-1904). Volume 1 commences with the beginnings of the firm in Scotland, and takes the story up to 1818.

One of the most popular and prolific writers during the Victorian age, Samuel Smiles (1812-1904) emphasised individual responsibility in the pursuit of personal and social improvement. Among other titles, his acclaimed Lives of the Engineers (1861-2) and insightful Autobiography (1905) are also reissued in the Cambridge Library Collection. He is best known, however, for the present work. First published in 1859, it sold 20,000 copies in its first year, more than a quarter of a million by 1905, and was widely translated. Using hundreds of biographical examples, ranging from George Stephenson to Josiah Wedgwood, Smiles champions the virtues of hard work, perseverance and character in achieving success. While these values appealed to a large readership in the book's heyday, later critics saw the work as promoting a form of selfish materialism. However interpreted, this remains a crucial text for those fascinated by the Victorian drive for self-improvement.

This biography of civil engineer Thomas Telford (1757-1834) was published in 1867 by Samuel Smiles, author of Self-Help. Deriving from Smiles' three-volume Lives of the Engineers, it brings together accounts of road travel by earlier writers, and of Telford's own career as a builder of roads, bridges and canals.

One of the most popular Victorian writers, Samuel Smiles (1812-1904) made his name with Self-Help (1859) and his Lives of the Engineers (1861-2). Left incomplete at his death but published in 1905, his straightforward and unpretentious autobiography will interest readers fascinated by the Victorian drive for self-improvement.

In this 1867 book, Samuel Smiles examines the part played in British life by Protestants who left France to escape religious persecution or were expelled after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. Smiles describes the history of the Huguenots and discusses some of their famous descendants.

Following the success of his Life of George Stephenson in 1857, the author and social reformer Samuel Smiles (1812-1904) published this three-volume work between 1861 and 1862. Spanning from the Roman to Victorian period, it provides fascinating biographies of Britain's most notable engineers, including detailed accounts of their pioneering work.

A political and social reformer, Samuel Smiles (1812-1904) was also a noted biographer in the Victorian period, paying particular attention to engineers. His first biography was of George Stephenson (1781-1848), whom he met at the opening of the North Midland Railway in 1840. After Stephenson died, Smiles wrote a memoir of him for Eliza Cook's Journal. With the permission of Stephenson's son, Robert, this evolved into the first full biography of the great engineer, published in 1857 and reissued here in its revised third edition. This detailed and lively account of Stephenson's life, which proved very popular, charts his education and youth, his crucial contribution to the development of Britain's railways, and his relationships with many notables of the Victorian world. It remains of interest to the general reader as well as historians of engineering, transport and business.

A bestseller in 1859, Self-Help became one of Victorian Britain's most important statements on the allied virtues of hard work, thrift, and perseverance. Smiles's book is the precursor of today's motivational and self-improvement literature and encapsulated the aspirational Victorian desire for social advancement.