Asa Briggs, the twentieth-century social critic and historian who has devoted the most attention to Samuel Smiles, sums up Smiles's general significance best: "Every society has its propagandists who try to persuade their fellow-citizens to develop a special kind of social character which will best serve the needs of the day. In mid-Victorian England one of the most important propagandists was Samuel Smiles, described by the editor of the Autobiography as 'the authorized and pious chronicler of the men who founded the industrial greatness of England.'... Where Carlyle meditated on the abbot Samson, Smiles told his stories--true stories of men like Josiah Wedgwood, William Lee, James Brindley, and George Stephenson. He saw that the everyday work of applied science had its romance, and he found his heroes among the engineers, the inventors, and the enterprisers." In addition to his contributions to industrial biography, he is remembered for...