The self-help book began in the land of the stiff upper lip

The year 1859 was a big one for British publishing. Charles Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species” was published, as was John Stuart Mill’s “On Liberty”. So too was a now largely forgotten book by an author named Samuel Smiles. It was boring, badly written and critically panned: one writer called books of its sort “the silliest ever known”. Naturally, readers loved it. It outsold Darwin, popularised a new term and in the process changed publishing for ever. It was called “Self-Help” and its aim was simple: to teach readers that “with Will one can do anything”. One could certainly sell more books: last year in Britain, according to figures from Nielsen BookData, 3% of all books sold were self-help.

For as long as there have been selves, they have needed help—and books have offered it. The Bible has been called the world’s first self-help book; Marcus Aurelius’s “Meditations” still pops up on self-help tables in bookshops. Advice such as Ephesians 4:32 (“Be kind to one another”) and Marcus’s 5.16 (“the soul becomes dyed with the colour of its thoughts”) could sit happily in any modern manual. Other bits of counsel less so: Leviticus 18:7 (“Do not dishonour your father by having sexual relations with your mother”) may be good advice but feels less like a fridge magnet.

By the 17th century specific books had appeared offering advice on such important topics as “Beards of a Frightful Length” and “BLOWING THE NOSE”. Some of self-help’s typical motifs were visible well before the term itself took root. Just as James Clear’s modern bestseller, “Atomic Habits”, explains how the “Four Laws of Behaviour Change” can help with daily habits to “Stay Motivated in Life and Work” and avoid negative thoughts, so an 18th-century Puritan manual encouraged readers in the habit of dwelling daily on their imminent deaths. Imagine, it wrote, “thy Breath failing, thy Throat rattling, thy Hands with a cold Sweat upon them”. Which doubtless helped with Staying Motivated, if not with negative thoughts.

Self-help proper started to flourish in the Industrial Revolution. In the medieval era, people might have measured their worth through their position in their family or village. As urban populations swelled, they found themselves in “more of a marketplace” of self, where people were “shopping for friends, business partners and mates”, says Joseph Henrich, a professor of evolutionary biology at Harvard University. In this “individualistic world, you [had] to cultivate a unique self in order to make yourself more attractive to other people”. That meant not just improving yourself but also finding time to do so. People in this period became “obsessed with…using time efficiently”.

Smiles’s “Self-Help” is typical. It offers the part-liberating, part-crushing message that, with toil, “any man can do what any other man has done”. To prove this it offers 400-odd pages of dislikeably disciplined people who sleep for four hours a night, work for 16 hours a day, opt for improving toil over “the perverted life” and succeed enviably. The reader learns how Galileo, after 50 years of work, invented his pendulum; how James Watt came up with the steam engine after a mere ten; and how Robert Peel, after falling in love with his landlord’s seven-year-old daughter, said he would marry her, waited a decade and then did. (Grooming a minor apparently did not count as “the perverted life”.)

As the genre has grown, so have its claims. One reason that self-help is so sneered at, says Oliver Burkeman, author of “Four Thousand Weeks”, a time-management book, is that there is a lot of “incredibly dodgy” stuff out there, ranging from ill-thought-through ideas to “full-blown charlatanism”. Some titles, such as “Stay Alive All Your Life”, offer advice on things that are rarely considered a problem. Others, such as “Think and Grow Rich” and “I Had Appendicitis and Cured it Myself”, invite a little suspicion.

Whether or not all self-help claims are true, these books do reveal what people worry about. The genre is anxiety, alphabetised and quantified. Look under the letter “A” in a list of 19th- and 20th-century American self-help volumes and you will see 77 titles on “Adolescence”, 17 on “Ageing” and 13 on “Alcoholism”. “L” has books on “Loneliness” (6), “Love” (63) and—unexpectedly and hopefully unrelatedly—“Livestock”. At times the list reads like a comedy, at others like a tragedy. After “The Ability to Love” and “Adventures in Nakedness” comes the glummer “Advice to the Lonely, Frustrated and Confused”.

The books “respond to the fears and anxieties” of their time, says Jessica Lamb-Shapiro, author of “Promise Land”, a book on the genre. After the Depression, for example, books on moneymaking flourished, though whether they helped their readers to flourish is less clear. If you believe Marcus Aurelius, that hardly matters. Wealth, ambition and achievement are, he wrote, all worthless: we are here for but the briefest moment before entering the “abyss of eternity”. There may be better ways to spend it than reading self-help books. ■