What 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
Victorian era offered a narrative structure that linked individual
success with collective success in a one-to-one relationship. Advocating
for a broader cultural account of the ambitious hero narrative,
Richardson argues that reading these biographies and self-help texts
alongside fictional accounts of driven people complicates the morality
tale that writers like Smiles took pains to invoke. In chapters
featuring the works of Harriet Martineau, Dinah Craik, Thackeray,
Trollope, and Miles Franklin, Richardson demonstrates that Victorian
fiction dramatized ambition by suggesting where it runs up against the
limits of an individual's energy and ability, where it turns into
competition, or where it risks upsetting a socio-ecological system of
finite resources. The upward mobility plots of John Halifax, Gentleman
or Vanity Fair suggest the dangers of zero-sum thinking, particularly
evidenced by contemporary preoccupations with Malthusian and Darwinian
discourses.
Intertwining the methodologies of disability studies and ecocriticism,
Material Ambitions persuasively unmasks the longstanding myth that
ambitious individualism can overcome disadvantageous systematic and
structural conditions.
