As a new exhibition opens profiling 19th-century self-help heroes, Allan Burnett examines a Scottish invention now championed by Oprah and Obama

THE self-help book is a much-misunderstood genre. Even the very phrase "self-help book" tends to suggest a vacuous motivational paperback with a dubious title like You Too Can Be A Winner In 10 Easy Steps written by a messianic, airbrushed guru with a string of pseudo-academic letters after his or her name. The typical reader, scouring the book vainly for the answer to all their problems, is a gullible loser, a Homer Simpson, David Brent or Mr Bean.

But it's not just saddoes who read self-help books, and they're not all vacuous. Some are extremely handy and a few are indispensable. They aim to teach us how to bake bread, get in shape, bring up baby, avoid inadvertently poisoning the dog, solve our anger management issues, find meaning in existence and choose clothes that don't make us look a fool.

Bookshop shelves groan under the stuff. Online, self-help scrolls off in every direction, whether it be on how to survive on two quid a day, or make your own biodiesel from chip fat. A common trait of all true self-help literature is that it is based on real-life experience, either that of the author or of people they have studied; and with that experience the author wants to empower you, the reader, to Do It Yourself.

The huge impact of the self-help phenomenon - some would even call it a religion - raises a few questions. Who came up with the idea of self-help? What is the secret of a good self-help book? And is it really possible to learn how to be good at something, especially something you have always been rubbish at, just by reading about it?

These questions lie at the heart of a new exhibition at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery (SNPG), running from now until December, called Heroes: Nineteenth-Century Self-Help Role Models.

As that title suggests, self-help is rooted in the Victorian age. More specifically, in 1859. That year saw the publication of the book that started it all. It was written by a shopkeeper's son - one of 11 children - from Haddington, East Lothian. His name was Samuel Smiles.

Smiles, whose image is central to the exhibition, showed that, first and foremost, the secret of a successful self-help book rests on choosing the right title. In his case, Self-Help.

Self-Help: With Illustrations Of Character, Conduct And Perseverance, to give it its full billing, was printed by Edinburgh-born publisher John Murray. On the same day, Murray also published another book, On The Origin Of Species by Charles Darwin. A comparison of the two books is instructive. By the time of Darwin's death in 1882, On The Origin Of Species had sold 18,000 copies, a success that paved the way for it to become one of the most significant books ever. As for Self-Help, 20,000 copies were sold within a year of publication. By the end of the century, Self-Help had sold more than 250,000 copies.

Internationally, Smiles's book sold millions. It was translated into more than 40 languages, and the Chinese, Japanese and Korean editions remain in print today. Along the way, it inspired countless other authors to write self-help books of their own, and so gave birth to a whole genre.

The secret of Self-Help's staggering success is explained by David McClay, senior curator of the John Murray archive at the National Library of Scotland, which is working with the SNPG to stage the exhibition. "Self-Help is made up of biographical sketches, anecdotes and quotes from a range of people who, for Smiles," says McClay, "had the necessary qualities of character to inspire working men."

These inspirational people were not ancient gods, kings or queens - although Robert the Bruce does get a mention. The heroes on whom Smiles focused were the living, breathing paragons of the industrial age, those whose success would have the greatest appeal to the educated working-class men - for Smiles' book was aimed chiefly at them - struggling to make sense of their own alienated lives in the new factories, furnaces and bureaucracies of Victorian Britain; lives that were very different from the traditional rural experiences of their childhood.

Smiles wanted to show that anybody, of no matter what background or circumstances, could make it in life. It might sound like a trite sentiment today, but back then it was a radical message with enormous power. "Great men of science, literature, and art - apostles of great thoughts and lords of great heart - have belonged to no exclusive class nor rank in life," Smiles wrote. "They have come alike from colleges, workshops and farmhouses - from the huts of poor men and the mansions of the rich."

The inspirational biographies in Self-Help include many men of humble background - the word "humble" is used at least 100 times - who built themselves success. They feature lesser-known people like James Sharples, an uneducated blacksmith who turned his hand to portrait painting and engraving, and, after much hard work, became rather good.

They also feature many who are still famous today, including a number of Smiles's fellow Scots. Among these is Dr David Livingstone, who came from "the weaver class" yet went on to become a great missionary explorer.

Others in Smiles's book, while not necessarily being Scottish or of humble background, met significant challenges. The Duke of Wellington had a natural temper that made him "irritable in the extreme", yet over time learned how to be patient and thereby a successful war leader. Benjamin Disraeli was a laughably poor public speaker when he started out, yet persevered to become a great political orator. Sir Walter Scott overcame lameness and a reputation as the school dunce to pen great works of literature; while Ulysses Grant, who grew up in a log cabin where his mother was so unimpressed she nicknamed him Useless, pulled his socks up to become the commander-in-chief of the United States army and, after the publication of Self-Help, the US president.

"The principal quality and virtue Smiles wanted to promote was perseverance," says McClay. "It was the determination to overcome adversity and obstacles. His message was that success in life did not depend on genius or intellect."

Instead, as Smiles put it, success depended on "the energetic use of simple means and ordinary qualities, with which nearly all human individuals have been endowed."

The current exhibition illustrates several of Smiles's self-help heroes in work by artists such as Bertel Thorvaldsen, Thomas Faed, Sir David Wilkie and Sir Henry Raeburn. The exhibition also features a new portrait of Smiles by Calum Colvin. It also presents dozens of rare texts relating to Smiles' self-help heroes, many of which have never been displayed before, such as David Livingstone's original manuscript for his Narrative Of An Expedition To The Zambesi And Its Tributaries.

As for Smiles's work itself, this can be read for free in the Project Gutenburg online book archive. The text suggests at least one answer to another big question: if Self-Help was so successful, how come its author is not very well known today? Why does everybody remember Darwin, but not Smiles?

One obvious reason, as McClay admits, is that Self-Help is not a well-written book. After a while its didactic style begins not so much to persuade as bludgeon the reader, relentlessly piling up examples of the great and the good who rose from the lowly houses of the butcher, baker and candlestick-maker.

Nor did Smiles alone invent the idea of self-help. As McClay points out: "Smiles wasn't the first or only author to write inspirational or instructional books. But he was one of the most successful, and Self-Help deserves to be regarded as the book that really defined the genre."

Smiles has also frequently been criticised for glossing over the flaws in his heroes. In the case of Hugh Miller, who emerged from a Cromarty stone quarry to become an influential geologist, and embodied Smiles's Victorian values of temperance, thrift and hard work, that flaw was a profound sense of unhappiness that ended in suicide. Walter Scott, meanwhile, was so firmly harnessed to his work ethic that he gave up leisure time completely and helped himself into an early grave.

Another flaw in Smiles's book, albeit typical of its time, is its failure to see women as much more than supporting actors in the self-help stories of various men. The new exhibition has sought to rectify this by featuring a number of self-made women of the Victorian era, such as Jane Baillie Carlyle, a hard-working scholar and the wife of the writer Thomas Carlyle, and the Scottish mathematician and astro-nomer Mary Somerville.

Perhaps the most damaging criticism of Smiles came from those who saw him as a reactionary conservative who, far from being the champion of the common man and woman, was, in fact, their worst enemy. Smiles's philosophy was presented as being at odds with social justice, condemning to a miserable existence those too poor or too sick to get a foot on the ladder of prosperity. These critics had their own alternative to Self-Help, published just a decade earlier: The Communist Manifesto.

Smiles's work and that of Marx and Engels were born of an era when the cheek-by-jowel industrial city was bringing the contrasting fortunes of the lower and upper ranks of society into sharp focus, with violent consequences. Social revolution was in the air. In Smiles's book, the spectre stalking Europe is not communism, but the inspirational "great man".

Smiles did not believe, as Marx did, that uniting the workers to bring down the elite was either useful or desirable. For Smiles, to focus solely on political reform for the collective good was to miss an important point about human nature: a better world could only be created by better individuals.

"The nation is only an aggregate of individual conditions," Smiles wrote, "and civilisation itself is but a question of the personal improvement of the men, women and children of whom society is composed."

This manifesto statement, while anathema to the political left, was embraced by the right. Its most eloquent or chilling expression, depending on your view, came from Margaret Thatcher. Her 1980s mantra "there is no such thing as society, only individuals" is straight from the pages of Self-Help, as is her self-propelled rise from grocer's daughter to prime minister.

If the new exhibition calls for a reassessment of Smiles's reputation, it also calls for a fundamental rethink of our political values - especially for those of us who were brought up with the common left-leaning Scottish assumption that self-help and individualism are dirty words.

In this regard, the comparison with Marx and Smiles offers further food for thought. As his biographer Francis Wheen has revealed, Marx didn't practise what he preached. In between theorising about workers' revolution and the end of private property, he married an aristocrat and scrounged a fortune from Engels's businessman father, all to increase his own bourgeois prestige.

Smiles was different. He was not a great intellect or a gifted writer, but he was a practical person who lived according to his ideals. At 59, by then a wealthy man, he suffered a debilitating stroke that left him unable to read or write. Whereas Marx had used various ailments, such as the boils on his backside, as excuses for taking years to turn in a manuscript, Smiles almost immediately set about overcoming his illness. He learned again how to read and write, and was still writing when he died, at the grand old age of 92, in 1904.

Smiles's story is perhaps a timely reminder to us Scots, so often accused of being subsidy junkies who rely too heavily on the state to solve our problems, that this country has a long and distinguished tradition of successful self-made men and women. Another reminder comes in the form of a new book, inspired by Smiles's famous work and published to coincide with the exhibition. Self-Help For The 21st Century is the work of Malcolm Good, a banker and art dealer who has scoured the land looking for present-day Scots whom he believes that Smiles, were he alive today, would hold up as examples.

Among Good's heroes interviewed in the book are racing driver Sir Jackie Stewart, the Independent MSP Margo MacDonald and the tycoon Sir Tom Farmer, founder of the Kwik-Fit chain. Good wrote the book because, as he says: "Reading Self-Help fired my imagination and intrigued me enough to ask: what would be a modern interpretation of Self- Help?"

The classic self-help example in Good's book is Farmer. After a failed eye test killed off his childhood ambition to follow his brother into the merchant navy, he joined a tyre distributor as a store boy. The rest, as Good's book details, is history. In 2005, Farmer was awarded the Carnegie Medal for Philanthropy, named after perhaps the greatest of all self-help heroes, the 19th-century Scots-American industrialist Andrew Carnegie.

Carnegie, who is also pictured in the exhibition, became synonymous with the idea of self-help and its close relative, the American dream, thanks to his background as the archetypal poor immigrant who made a fortune by taming the wild west with his transport and communications business. During the height of Carnegie's fame in the US, a small farmer's son called Dale Carnagey astutely changed his name to Carnegie before publishing perhaps the most famous self-help book, How To Win Friends And Influence People, in 1936. It includes chapters with headings like Six Ways To Make People Like You, and, as such, arguably has even more to answer for than Self-Help. How To Win Friends has, to date, sold more than 15 million copies.

Like Dale Carnegie's book, Self- Help is still selling 150 years later. Were Smiles alive today, it would not be difficult to imagine him on the couch of Oprah Winfrey, discussing how admirable it is that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have not allowed the perceived barriers of race or gender to prevent them from rising to become contenders for the US presidency. Like Obama, Oprah has made several pronouncements on what has become the quintessentially American ethos of self-help. "I don't think of myself as a poor, deprived ghetto girl who made good," she once said. "I think of myself as somebody who from an early age knew I was responsible for myself, and I had to make good."

The questions raised by Smiles's book have, of course, become staples of lifestyle talkshows and magazines everywhere. Is success really something you can learn? Can it be bought? Or does it ultimately rest on the strength or weakness of your natural talent? There are countless books out there insisting you can be whatever you want to be. But others would point to the comparatively wealthy, privileged backgrounds of politicians like the Clintons, the Bushes or David Cameron as evidence that what you really need to succeed in life is well-heeled parents. As for Smiles, he ultimately believed that: "If you have genius, industry will improve it; if you have none, industry will supply its place." In other words, it doesn't matter what endowments you have, just get off your bum and make something of your life.