“Be what you would seem to be”: Samuel Smiles, Thomas Edward, and the Making of a Working-Class Scientific Hero

Abstract

Argument

This paper examines the effort that was involved in sustaining the nineteenth-century middle-class ideological fabrication of the image of the working-class scientific autodidact. The construction and reception of Samuel Smiles’ biography of the Scottish cobbler and naturalist Thomas Edward provides a way to investigate this process in detail and to show how Smiles’ conception of the scientific persona related to the “politics of character” in mid-Victorian Britain. Edward’s own response to the biography offers an unusual opportunity to analyze the making of a Victorian scientific hero, who, in the process of being fitted to Smiles’ notion of a scientific persona, came to feel that he had been robbed of his life.