Download Free Lives Of Individuals Who Raised Themselves From Poverty To Eminence Or Fortune Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online Lives Of Individuals Who Raised Themselves From Poverty To Eminence Or Fortune and write the review.

In this volume, scholars from these two very different traditions are brought together. Never before has a single volume contained such a distinguished and diverse group of historians of technology.
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.
At one major publishing house, there is a running joke that the second book published on the Gutenberg press was about the death of the publishing business. While this joke is an obvious exaggeration, there is a certain amount of truth that with each advance in technology, with each printing innovation or invention, a similar death dynamic occurred. This was most noticeable during the tumultuous years of the eighteenth century when a veritable flood of printing techniques, business practices, reading formats, and sources for reading material was introduced. The cultural reaction to each new technological change, while not exactly the same in all respects, exhibited a series of characteristics that closely mirrored each other. In each case, readers reacted in various ways against the innovation and supported the traditional publishing industry and, in their reaction, created, modified, and maintained a sense of their own identity.
First published in 2004. The nineteenth century witnessed a flowering of the culture of self-improvement that was reflected in a plethora of institutes, societies and journals that sprang up across Britain with the goal of spreading knowledge and learning to a wide spectrum of society. The prophets of self-improvement believed that not only was self-improvement a laudable goal in its own right, but more importantly, it would contribute towards a general improvement in society. In an age in which direct participation in the political processes was restricted to a minority, education and self-improvement could act as an alternative force by creating a sophisticated and knowledgeable population. In other words, self-improvement was also seen as a way of creating active and responsible citizens. Focusing on the city of Birmingham, and drawing on both local and national sources, Self Help and Civic Culture explores the changing nature of self improvement and citizenship in Victorian Britain. By approaching the concept of citizenship from a new perspective, provincial identity and its relationship to wider ideas of 'Englishness' and 'Britishness', a distinct ideal of citizenship is elucidated that adds further nuance to current scholarship. By drawing together various issues of citizenship, self-improvement, class and political power, this work brings a new perspective to the on-going attempts to determine who could claim the full rights, duties, privileges and responsibilities of the larger social body, thus illuminating the relationship between culture and power in nineteenth century England.