Making the Modern World - The Heroic Age

Some early volumes of Smiles’s Industrial Biographies.

Samuel Smiles is still well known today as a writer and moralist. His biographies of engineers such as George and Robert Stephenson, Matthew Boulton and James Watt sit alongside a series of books promoting the virtues of self-help, perseverance and thrift.

Preserving everyday objects used by the ‘great men’ was part of the process of veneration. These possessions of George Stephenson were carefully kept after his death and were passed on to the Science Museum in 1873.

Smiles lived a long and full life. He was born in 1812 and qualified as a doctor in 1832 at Edinburgh University. He could not make a living out of it however, and in a career change was appointed editor of the Leeds Times in 1838. In a further change of direction, he became Secretary of the Leeds and Thirsk Railway in 1845. His first engineering biography, The life of George Stephenson, railway enineer, was published in 1857. It was a considerable success and enabled Smiles to become a full-time writer. In 1875 he recalled why he wrote about Stephenson.

I wrote The life of George Stephenson simply because I immensely admired the man, his perseverance, his noblemindedness, his great railway works. I found from Robert Stephenson that no other person was likely to write his father’s life, and I determined, so far as I could, to supply the defect.

Robert Stephenson commissioned this painting, attributed to John Lucas, in 1857. The close likeness between Robert (right) and his father George Stephenson (seated, holding miner’s lamp) suggest that it is an allegorical representation of the Stephenson family.

Smiles’ engineering biographies present a colourful and selective view of their subjects, rather than being ‘warts and all’ accounts. Although deleted or corrected in later editions of his books, some of his more fanciful anecdotes have survived with some obstinacy. Thus George Stephenson is still thought by many to have been the builder of the locomotive Rocket, although in fact it was almost wholly the design of his son Robert.

Isambard Kingdom Brunel was perhaps the most charismatic of the engineers of the heroic age.

Smiles chose to portray those whose characters exhibited the virtues he admired. Others who did not fit the template were excluded or given only a brief treatment. Because his books sold so well, they have influenced successive generations with a particular ‘Smilesian’ viewpoint on the history of the Industrial Revolution. Important figures that Smiles wrote about are well known; equally important figures that he did not give the full-length treatment to, such as Joseph Locke, have remained neglected until recent times. It is often said that Smiles ignored I. K. Brunel because he was as unlike a ‘Smilesian’ hero as it is possible to be. Whether or not this is the case, Smiles did write at some length about the Brunels, father and son, although he did so in a periodical, the Quarterly Review (1862), rather than in volumes of industrial biography.

The Heroic Age

Samuel Smiles and legends

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