Starvard.
Starvard University · Character and Self-Help
In 1859 a Scottish doctor turned writer published a book of true stories about people who kept going, and it quietly invented self-help. In this course you meet his inventors, potters, workers, and gentlemen, learn what perseverance can really do, and finish by starting a small project of your own.
Hello, my name is Finn, and I'm going to help you understand this course.
Here it is, explained like you are 10:
Samuel Smiles was a writer who collected true stories of people who refused to give up: inventors who worked for thirty years, a potter who burned his own furniture to finish an experiment, and working men who taught each other in a borrowed room. His big idea is simple. Character grows by steady effort, helping yourself grows stronger when you help others too, and small daily work beats waiting for luck.
Smiles did not invent his lessons in a study. About a hundred young working men in a northern town had formed evening classes for mutual improvement, meeting first in a cottage room and then in a hired room that had been a cholera hospital. They asked him to come and talk to them, and the talks he gave, full of stories of what other people had done, grew over the years into Self-Help in 1859. His later book Character, in 1871, asked what all that effort is for, and answered: to become a person other people can trust.
This course teaches both books together, and it keeps them honest. Smiles tells success stories, so we say plainly what his own century proves: hard work is a real lever, but poverty, illness, discrimination, and plain bad luck are not character flaws, and plenty of diligent people stayed poor. Smiles knew part of this himself. He praised mutual help, evening classes, and people lifting each other, not only lone effort, and Lesson 7 helps you use perseverance wisely, with help, on a project that fits your real life.
The whole course in brief
What you will be able to do after this course
The seven lessons
Lesson 1
Every genre has a first book, and self-help has Samuel Smiles. Self-Help, published in 1859, gathered hundreds of short true lives into one argument: ordinary people, in ordinary stations, can raise themselves by industry, patience, and character. Smiles opens with a proverb he calls well tried: “Heaven helps those who help themselves.” A few lines later he gives the idea its root form: “The spirit of self-help is the root of all genuine growth in the individual.” The book was reprinted in America, translated into several languages, and made its author famous.
The book began, fittingly, as people helping each other. Some young working men in a northern town formed evening classes for mutual improvement. They met first in a cottage room, then in the cottage garden, and when winter came they hired a large dingy room that had been used as a temporary cholera hospital, a place other tenants avoided. Those who knew a little taught those who knew less. When about a hundred of them wanted lectures, they invited Smiles, a Scottish writer who had trained as a surgeon and edited a newspaper in Leeds, to come and talk to them a bit. He told them stories of what other men had done, and pointed to their own diligent self-culture as the thing their futures would mainly depend on.
Smiles kept adding to his notes for years, in leisure evenings after business, and the talks became the book. He was quick to correct one misunderstanding of his title. Self-Help, he wrote in his preface, is not a eulogy of selfishness. Its examples include inventors and engineers, but also educators, philanthropists, missionaries, and martyrs, and he states the wider duty plainly: “the duty of helping one’s self in the highest sense involves the helping of one’s neighbours.” Helping yourself and helping your neighbour are, for Smiles, the same habit seen from two sides.
Read him with one honest caution, which this course will keep repeating warmly. Smiles mostly tells stories of people who succeeded, because he wrote to encourage the young, and he admits in his preface that failure rarely gets its own storyteller. That makes the book inspiring, but it is not the whole picture of his century, and Lesson 7 will weigh the limits carefully. First, meet the people he could not stop writing about: the ones who would not quit.
Lesson 2
Smiles fills his second chapter with inventors, and his point is not that they were dazzling. It is that they stayed.James Watt worked on the condensing engine for some thirty years before he brought it to perfection. George Stephenson, who began as a working lad in a colliery, worked at his locomotive for some fifteen years before his decisive victory at the Rainhill trials. When Stephenson advised young men, Smiles tells us, he summed up everything he knew in a few words: “Do as I have done.” The rest of the sentence, with its famous command to persevere, is the story of his life.
The most extreme story in the book belongs to Bernard Palissy, a French potter of the 1500s who saw one beautifully enamelled cup and gave years of his life to finding the secret of its white glaze. Experiment after experiment failed. In his greatest trial he sat by his furnace for six long days and nights, feeding the fire and watching for the enamel to melt, and it would not melt. He borrowed, made fresh pots, and tried once more. When the fuel ran short in that final firing, he pulled up the garden palings and burned them, then broke up his household tables and shelving and hurled them into the furnace too, while his frightened family ran into the town crying that he had gone mad.
That last burst worked. The brown jars came out covered with a white glaze, and Palissy had his secret. Smiles tells it as triumph, and it is one. It is also fair to notice the price, and who paid it: a wife and children who went hungry and terrified while the furnace ate their furniture. A worthy goal can be pursued in a way that costs the people nearest you too much. Keep both halves of the story.
Josiah Wedgwood, the English potter of the next chapters, shows the steadier pattern. He experimented patiently with clays and glazes, aimed at the highest excellence, and declared he would give over manufacturing any article rather than degrade it. He made the first royal table service of English manufacture for Queen Charlotte, copied the famous Barberini vase at a loss simply to prove English skill could do it, and helped drive a canal through the Potteries. When he began, his district gave poor and casual work to a few. By 1785 he could tell Parliament that about 20,000 people earned their bread directly from the pottery trade. That is perseverance grown up: not one desperate firing, but years of excellent work that lifts a whole district with it.
Lesson 3
Smiles devotes a whole chapter to application and perseverance, and he starts by lowering the temperature. The greatest results in life, he says, are usually attained by simple means and ordinary qualities: common sense, attention, application, and perseverance. Genius may help, but the commoner qualities are found the most useful, and even genius of the highest sort does not disdain them. His star witness is Isaac Newton. Asked how he had worked out his extraordinary discoveries, Newton answered modestly: “By always thinking unto them.” Elsewhere he described the method itself: “I keep the subject continually before me, and wait till the first dawnings open slowly by little and little into a full and clear light.”
That is application defined: one subject, kept before the mind, while light dawns slowly. Newton said it to Dr. Bentley in plainer words: “If I have done the public any service, it is due to nothing but industry and patient thought.” Smiles pairs him with the French naturalist Buffon, who decided that genius itself was mostly this quality, since, as Smiles reports his saying, “Genius is patience.” Buffon had to prove it on himself. Constitutionally fond of his bed, he paid his servant Joseph a crown for every morning Joseph got him up before six, endured a basin of cold water dashed under the bedclothes, and at length conquered the habit. Buffon said he owed Joseph three or four volumes of his Natural History.
Application becomes skill by a simple law: “We must repeat and again repeat; facility will come with labour.” The young Robert Peel was set up at table by his father to practise speaking, and made to repeat as much of the Sunday sermon as he could remember. By steady perseverance the sermon was at length repeated almost verbatim, and the boy trained in a parish church became the statesman famous for answering every argument in Parliament. Nothing about the gift was magic: it was repetition, patiently kept up.
Patience is the other half, and Smiles knows it is the harder half. Progress of the best kind is comparatively slow, and we must be satisfied to advance in life as we walk, step by step. He quotes de Maistre's saying that “to know how to wait is the great secret of success,” and adds the Eastern proverb that time and patience change the mulberry leaf to satin. We must sow before we can reap, and the fruit best worth waiting for often ripens the slowest. So the practical rule of this lesson is double: work on your subject every day, in small repeated touches, and refuse to call the waiting wasted. The dawnings, Newton promised, open by little and little, but they do open.
Lesson 4
Application keeps you at the desk. Energy gets you through the door. In his chapter on energy and courage, Smiles defines the quality as resolute determination in the pursuit of worthy objects, and calls it the foundation of all true greatness of character. Energy, he says, enables a man to force his way through irksome drudgery and dry details, and carries him onward and upward in every station of life. It accomplishes more than genius, he argues, with not one half the disappointment and peril, because success in most pursuits needs not merely the power to achieve, but the will to labour energetically and perseveringly. Purpose comes first, talent second.
His model of energy at work is Fowell Buxton, the reformer, who placed his confidence in ordinary means and extraordinary application, and attributed his success to being a whole man to one thing at a time. That phrase is the practical heart of the lesson. Energy in Smiles is not bustle, and it is not doing twelve things loudly. It is concentration: the good purpose once formed, carried out with alacrity and without swerving, while drudgery is cheerfully endured as wholesome discipline. Hugh Miller, the self-taught geologist who began as a stonemason, said his only real school was the one where toil and hardship are the severe but noble teachers.
Courage, for Smiles, is energy facing fear, danger, or a long unpopular task. His chapter ranges from soldiers and explorers to missionaries, and then, tellingly, to campaigners at home. Granville Sharp spent years of patient legal effort on the cause of enslaved people in England. Thomas Clarkson gathered evidence against the slave trade town by town. Buxton himself carried the abolition cause in Parliament after Wilberforce. John Howard travelled from prison to prison exposing their horrors so reform would follow. None of these campaigns was a single brave afternoon. Each was courage stretched over years, applied to records, journeys, speeches, and defeats, until the country moved.
Notice where Smiles aims all this force: duty, rescue, reform, and work that serves other people. Energy aimed only at self-advancement is a lesser thing, and energy aimed at harm is villainy with good stamina. He also honours a quieter courage: the person combating suffering by patience, triumphing in integrity, and still walking on courage when feet are bleeding and limbs failing. Energy and courage, rightly aimed, are how application survives a hard world.
Lesson 5
Smiles gives business a full chapter and a compliment some literary readers still resist: consummate people of business, he says, are almost as rare as great poets. The school of business is not narrow. Running any important undertaking well takes aptitude, prompt action in emergencies, organising the work of many people, tact, and knowledge of human nature. His verdict, borrowed from Mr. Helps, is short enough to remember: business makes people, because it tests them daily in the open, where results cannot be faked for long.
He also knocks down the old fallacy that genius and business cannot live in one person. Shakespeare prospered as a theatre manager and retired on a competency. Milton served as Secretary to the Council of State. Newton proved an efficient Master of the Mint. Chaucer ran customs, Spinoza polished lenses, and Linnaeus made shoes while he studied. Smiles's principle underneath the list deserves quoting exactly: “it is not the calling that degrades the man, but the man that degrades the calling.” All honest work, of hand or mind, is honourable, and the person who feels too grand for grocery, bookkeeping, or any useful trade has, in his telling, misunderstood dignity entirely.
What are the business virtues? Smiles's list is practical: accuracy first, then method, promptitude, punctuality, firmness, and tact, powered by a fierce economy of time. Wellington and Napoleon both appear as men of business because both attended relentlessly to detail. His chapter on money adds: live within your means, fear debt, save a little however little you earn, and remember that money rightly used is independence, while money made the chief end corrupts the maker. Cobden told working men the world divides into those who have saved and those who have spent; Bright told them there is no royal road up except industry, frugality, temperance, and honesty.
One honest note on the lesson title. Smiles called his chapter Men of Business, and nearly all his named examples are men, because the counting houses, professions, and public offices of 1859 were largely closed to women, not because the virtues he lists belong to one sex. Women of his century ran shops, farms, schools, publishing houses, and family firms, often without the title or the credit, and the women reading this course run businesses of every kind today. Accuracy, method, punctuality, thrift, and honesty were never male qualities. Take the chapter, as Smiles's own principle invites, for every person who works: the calling does not make the worker honourable or base. The worker does that.
Lesson 6
Twelve years after Self-Help, Smiles published Character in 1871, and asked the deeper question: what is all this effort for? His answer opens the book: “Character is one of the greatest motive powers in the world.” A few pages later he draws the contrast this whole course has been building toward: “Although genius always commands admiration, character most secures respect.” Genius, he says, is the product of brain power and character of heart power, and in the long run it is the heart that rules in life. People admire the clever. They follow, and trust, people of character.
The last chapter of Self-Help makes the same claim in its grandest sentence: “THE crown and glory of life is Character.” Character, there, is the noblest possession a person can have, a rank in itself that dignifies every station, exercising a greater power than wealth. Its essence is not polish or pedigree: it is truthfulness, integrity, and goodness, proved over time. Francis Horner, his prize example, died at thirty eight with more public influence than almost any private man in Britain, though he had neither rank, wealth, office of note, splendid talents, nor eloquence. He had, in Lord Cockburn's telling, merely sense, industry, good principles, and a good heart. Franklin said the same of himself: his influence came not from his halting speaking, but from his known integrity.
So who is the true gentleman in Smiles? Not the man with the coat of arms. He is truthful in word and deed, courteous because he respects people, brave and gentle at once, incapable of a bribe, and careful with power, since Smiles calls the use of power the true test of the gentleman. He is what he seems. His manners are not a costume but the outward growth of an inward habit: what we repeat, we become, so character is built the way facility was built in Lesson 3, by practice until it holds under pressure. A poor person in purse, he writes, may be rich in spirit, and some of his finest gentlemen are boatmen, soldiers, and working men.
Smiles wrote of gentlemen because his age spoke that way, and this course extends his own standard to the gentlewoman, as the lesson title does. Nothing in his definition is male: not truthfulness, not integrity, not courage with gentleness, not the careful use of power. In Character he adds that each person can act their part honestly and honourably, be true, just, honest, and faithful even in small things, and do their duty in the sphere where life has placed them. That is the crown and glory, open to anyone, in any station, starting with small things today.
Lesson 7
This course ends the way Smiles began, with something small and real. Choose your own perseverance project: one worthy aim that fits your actual life, a skill practised daily, a business put in order, a qualification, a piece of writing, a neighbour faithfully helped. Make it finishable in about a month of steady touches. Write the aim in one sentence, decide the smallest daily action that moves it, and keep a notebook, as Smiles kept his jottings, recording each day's touch and each honest obstacle.
Then borrow the machinery of the lessons. From Lesson 3, repeat and again repeat, because facility comes with labour, and plan for slow ripening, because the best progress advances step by step. From Lesson 4, be a whole person to this one thing at a time instead of scattering energy across five projects. From Lesson 5, run it like good business: a set time, a simple record, no promises you cannot keep. From Lesson 6, guard the point: a project that makes you less truthful or less kind has failed at the only test Smiles finally cares about.
Now the honest limits, stated warmly and plainly, because a course on Smiles owes you the whole truth. Perseverance is one real lever among several, not the only force in a life. Structural poverty, illness, discrimination, and plain bad luck are not character flaws. In Smiles's own century, plenty of diligent, thrifty, courageous people stayed poor, because wages, laws, sickness, and closed doors are real, and no amount of early rising opens a door that is locked from the other side. If your project runs into a barrier like that, name it honestly. Do not blame your character for a locked door. Change the route, shrink the aim, rest when you are ill, and treat a hard outcome as information, not as a verdict on your worth.
And do not persevere alone, because Smiles, for all his title, never really asked anyone to. His book grew out of mutual improvement classes, where those who knew a little taught those who knew less. He praised mutual help and the collective institutions working people built together, their classes, societies, and shared libraries, as warmly as he praised any lone inventor. So recruit your version: a friend who checks your notebook weekly, a class, a partner for the Palissy moments when the fuel runs low, though we draw the line well before the furniture. Help someone else's project too. That is self-help in its highest sense, and it is the note the whole wave of courses can end on: keep going, together.
Sources
This course is taught from two books by Samuel Smiles, both free for anyone to read in full at Project Gutenberg. Self-Help is the source named in the course outline, and Character, named with it in the course title, supplies the heart of Lesson 6.
Graduation
You began in a hired cholera room with a hundred young men teaching each other, watched Watt and Stephenson and Wedgwood stay at their work for years, learned Newton's secret of keeping one subject before you, and met the true gentleman and gentlewoman, whose crown is character itself. You also weighed the limits honestly, and you have a perseverance project of your own to start this week. Congratulations, and keep going, together.
Keep learning
This course is part of Starvard University, striving for greatness.
A note on accuracy: Much of what you read at Starvard was created with help from AI agents, working alongside people. We check what we can, but we cannot guarantee that everything here is true, current, or complete. If something really matters, your health, your money, a grade, a job, please verify it with a trusted source before you rely on it.