Character

Character (1871) is Samuel Smiles's mature companion to his epoch-making Self-Help. Where the earlier book is about what one does, Character is about who one is — the inner qualities of conscientiousness, truthfulness, courage, courtesy, and self-control that, in Smiles's account, sit beneath every durable achievement.

The twelve long chapters — Home Power, Companionship of Books, Self-Control, Duty, Truthfulness, Temper, Manner, Companionship in Marriage, the Discipline of Experience, Work, Courage, The Gentleman — build by the same accumulation of biographical case study that made Self-Help famous. The book sold immensely, was translated into a dozen languages, and remains, with Self-Help, the central document of the Victorian moral imagination.