Self-Help: With Illustrations of Conduct and Perseverance

This book is the origins of Samuel Smiles' most famous book. Self-Help elevated him to celebrity status almost overnight, he became a leading pundit and much-consulted guru. Robert Tressell, in his novel The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, said Self-Help was a book "suitable for perusal by persons suffering from almost complete obliteration of the mental faculties". The founder of Toyota, Toyoda was influenced and a copy Self-Help is at the museum that exists on Toyoda's birth site. Robert Blatchford, a socialist activist, said it was "one of the most delightful and invigorating books it has been my happy fortune to meet with" and argued it should be taught in schools. Jonathan Rose has argued that labour leaders who commented on Self-Help praised it and it was not until after the Great War that criticisms of Smiles in worker's memoirs appeared.The Labour Party MPs William Johnson and Thomas Summerbell admired Smiles' work and the Communist miners leader, A. J. Cook, "started out with Self-Help".