Description
Book SynopsisWhat the Victorian history of self-help reveals about the myth of individualism. Stories of hardworking characters who lift themselves from rags to riches abound in the Victorian era. From the popularity of such stories, it is clear that the Victorians valorized personal ambition in ways that previous generations had not. In Material Ambitions, Rebecca Richardson explores this phenomenon in light of the under-studied reception history of Samuel Smiles's 1859 publication, Self-Help: With Illustrations of Character, Conduct, and Perseverance. A compilation of vignettes about captains of industry, artists, and inventors who persevered through failure and worked tirelessly to achieve success in their respective fields, Self-Help links individual ambition to the growth of the nation. Contextualizing Smiles's work in a tradition of Renaissance self-fashioning, eighteenth-century advice books, and inspirational biography, Richardson argues that the burgeoning self-help genre of the Victoria
Trade ReviewRebecca Richardson shows that even those writers who appear to celebrate self-help invite more nuanced readings. They explored the ways in which aspiration encourages not only ambition but competition, and often exploitation – inequities, as declared by Richardson in a brief polemical coda, that persist today.
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Times Literary SupplementTable of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction: Self-Help and the Story of the Ambitious Individual
1. Forming the Ambitious Individual in Samuel Smiles's Self-Help
2. Expanding the Story of Ambition, Work, and Health in a Limited World: Harriet Martineau's Economic and Illness Writing
3. Enabling the Self-Help Narrative in Dinah Craik's John Halifax, Gentleman
4. "At What Point This Ambition Transgresses the Boundary of Virtue": From Thackeray's Barry Lyndon to Vanity Fair
5. Individuating Ambitions in a Competitive System: Trollope's Autobiography and The Three Clerks
6. Placing and Displacing Ambition: Miles Franklin's My Brilliant Career and My Career Goes Bung
Coda
Notes
Bibliography
Index
