“THE NATION is only the aggregate of individual conditions, and civilization itself is but a question of personal improvement,” argued Samuel Smiles in his 1859 Self-Help, the work that codified the supremacy of aspiration over occupation as a marker of identity for thousands of readers on the ill-defined boundary of the lower-middle and upper-working classes (16; ch. 1).1 Smiles’s importance, then and now, lies not in his invention of “self-improvement” as a defining feature of this group, but rather in his skill at publicly expressing the complex set of ideals and values that had already been worked out in, and expressed by, small groups of improvers for at least two generations.
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