personal experience rather than public glory. By contrast, the Victorian author Samual Smiles wrote Self-Help as a catalogue of the worthy lives of engineers , industrialists and explores . "The valuable examples which they furnish of the power of self-help, if patient purpose, resolute working and steadfast integrity, issuing in the formulation of truly noble and many character, exhibit,"wrote Smiles."what it is in the power of each to accomplish for himself"His biographies of James Walt, Richard Arkwright and Josiah Wedgwood were held up as beacons to guide the working man through his difficult life.
This was all a bit bourgeois for Thomas Carlyle, who focused his biographies on the truly heroic lives of Martin Luther, Oliver Cromwell and Napoleon Bonaparte. These epochal figures represented lives hard to imitate, but to be acknowledged as possessing higher authority than mere mortals.
Communist Manifesto. For them, history
