Self-Help

Samuel Smiles' 1859 book is genuinely the founding text of the self-improvement genre, packed with Victorian biographical sketches of industrious men from science, engineering, and the arts. The prose is readable and the moral energy is earnest, but modern historians have compellingly argued that its framework — attributing poverty to personal habits — masks structural inequality, and the ideological blind spots are significant by today's standards. Worth reading as a historical document and for its motivational energy, but today's readers should approach its worldview critically.