THE MYTH OF THE

SELF-MADE MAN

During the nineteenth century, it was widely believed — this in itself

is an interesting cultural and social phenomenon - that industrialists
were mostly self-made men. Born 'in humble circumstances ' (this is
a standard expression), i.e. from modest or even poor families, they
had started life as wage-earners, often working with their own
hands; but, thanks to hard work, thrift, mechanical ingenuity and
character, they had been able to set up their own business, to develop
it and eventually to become wealthy and powerful. The paternity of
these views is often imputed to Samuel Smiles, in his best-seller Self-
Help^ published in 1859,1 and reference is frequently made to 'the
Smilesean myth'.
Actually, this myth is much older. Without going back to the folk
symbol of Dick Whittington and to some seventeenth-century
writings,2 in the eighteenth century, as Walter Minchinton has
observed, 'the popular archetype' of the merchant 'was that of the
self-made man who by his own efforts acquired a sufficient com-
petence to set up as a merchant and died fantastically rich'.3 Such
views were current, for instance, in Manchester, where a local writer
stated in 1756: 'I hardly know one single instance of a large Fortune
gain'd in Town, but the Man who laid the Foundation of it, was of
very inferior Substance.' In 1785, it was written of Mancunian
manufacturers: 'By much the major part, and even the most wealthy
among them commenced their careers in business with but slender
capitals . . . Patience, industry and perseverance was their principal
stock.'4 In Birmingham, by 1760, Samuel Garbett and John Basker-
ville were looked on as self-made heroes who were much admired by
37

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 38 The First Industrialists

visitors to the town. In 1809, the local historian William Hutton

wrote that, in 1783, out of 209 Birmingham men who were worth
over £5000, 103 'began the world with nothing but their own
prudence' and 35 more with an insignificant capital.5
Almost as soon as industrialists had emerged, the myth embraced
them, possibly because their contemporaries, used to a slower tempo
of change, were struck by the speed with which some factory masters
made their fortunes.6 And it was supported by men who were
important industrialists in their own right and whose views could not
but impress public opinion. In 1799, Matthew Boulton told a Com-
mons Committee: 'All the great manufacturers I have ever known
have begun the world with very little capital.'7 A generation later, in
1828, John Kennedy, the great Manchester cotton-spinner, told a
French visitor that he had
never seen a firm established with a large capital which has ever succeeded.
The only men who have made fortunes have been those who started with
nothing. They lived only for their businesses, and brought up in habits of
strict economy, people like this are the only ones who possess the resources
for tiding themselves over periods of crisis. The principal Manchester man-
ufacturers are men of this kind.8
It is easy to find the same views in statements or writings of the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In 1795, John Aiken wrote
that 'the neighbourhood of Bolton has been distinguished for pro-
ducing men of great talents in mechanical ingenuity, who have gener-
ally been wholly uneducated', the most famous being Richard
Arkwright.9 In 1798, a survey of the remote county of Roxburgh-
shire mentioned that the manufacturers of Galashiels had been 'poor
people who began business without any capital' and rose 'by their
own energy and enterprise'.10 In 1799, Thomas Williams, the
'Copper King', was accused by Pitt and Lord Hawkesbury of being
a monopolist who held the government to ransom; the Whig MP
George Tierney defended him, in the House of Commons, as one of
'those, who from small beginnings had . . . amassed a large fortune'.
This is interesting, because Williams, before becoming a mining
adventurer, had been a successful country solicitor, with extensive
connections among the best families of Anglesey; unless Tierney was
misinformed on this point, his statement suggests that 'small begin-
nings' did not have for him the same meaning as it would today.11

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 The Myth of the Self-Made Man 39

The travel diaries of foreign visitors to Britain during the Regency,

which W.O. Henderson has edited, prove that these visitors were
told — in perfectly good faith — many stories about great cotton-
spinners who had started as operatives, and that many people had
therefore imbibed the self-made-man mythology. In September
1814, the Swiss Hans Escher heard about a Glasgow locksmith who
had become owner of four mills and wrote that 'a great many similar
instances might be cited'; he concluded: 'Most of the rich manufac-
turers in Manchester, Glasgow and other factory towns have
founded their own fortunes.'12
However, the myth seems to have become particularly prevalent
in the 1830s.13 Some of the evidence given to the Select Committee
on manufactures, commerce and shipping in 1833 is most interesting
in this respect. George Smith had started life as a handloom weaver
and in 1812 had gone to Manchester as 'confidential servant' of
James Massey and Sons: 'my circumstances', he stated, 'have kept
improving ever since ... I held a situation at an increasing salary, and
eventually I have become a partner.' Thereupon an MP asked him:
'Then you are an instance of a person raising himself by his own
exertions from a low to a high situation?' 'Yes, I am', replied Smith,
who added that there were 'many instances' of such progress. Then
he was asked whether it was true that 'the greater part' of
Manchester manufacturers had raised themselves from a low situ-
ation and that a large majority of the town's richest men were for-
merly workmen, questions which are interesting, as they show that
such an idea was current. Smith answered 'part' to the first question,
and to the second: 'I can remember some men that were once work-
men who are now very rich, but I cannot state which proportion.'14
For his part, T.C. Salt, a lamp-maker from Birmingham, stated:
'All the great manufacturers in Birmingham were invariably orig-
inally small manufacturers.' Samuel Jackson, from Sheffield, noted:
'In fact, our first manufacturers have themselves been workmen.' A
large Huddersfield woollen manufacturer, John Brooke, claimed: 'If
I were an apprentice to a woollen manufacturer, and when I became
of age I had a small capital, I should embark in the business with
every prospect of success.'15
True enough, John Marshall, the great flax-spinner, reminded the
Committee that 'the large capitalist has a greater chance of success in

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 40 The First Industrialists

all mechanical operations'.16 John Milner, a Sheffield cutler, who

had long been a journeyman, admitted that other workmen had
become employers but stated that such cases were 'very rare', and
happened only if a worker 'has had other means than his regular
wages ... if he has the good fortune to have money left to him, or any
other fortunate circumstances that may have ameliorated his con-
dition. There are individuals who are enterprising and who are fortu-
nate in their enterprises.'17 And Henry Houldsworth, a large
Glasgow cotton-spinner, said that, at least under present circum-
stances, an 'industrious man', such as a foreman in a factory, would
not be able to find the capital he would need to start a business.18
That same year, 1833, a young surgeon, P. Gaskell, published The
Manufacturing Population of England, better known under the title
of the revised edition of 1836, Artisans and Machinery.19 He gave a
detailed account of the myth, which strongly influenced the early his-
torians of the Industrial Revolution.20 Like J. Kennedy, he main-
tained that 'few of the men who entered the [cotton] trade rich were
successful', while 'the men who prospered were raised by their own
efforts - commencing in a very humble way, generally from exer-
cising some handicraft, as clock-making, hatting, etc. and pushing
their advance by a series of unceasing exertions'. He added that
'many of the first successful manufacturers, both in town and
country, were men who had their origin in the rank of mere oper-
atives, or who sprang from the extinct class of yeomen', or even
'from the ranks of the labourers or from a grade just removed above
these'. With typical contempt, he noted that R. Arkwright 'who may
be styled the founder of our present manufactories was a country
barber'; his followers were 'of no higher origins', with an 'extremely
scanty sprinkling of men of more refined habits'; they were coarse,
'sensual in their enjoyments - partaking of the rude revelry of their
dependents . . . but yet, paradoxical as it may sound, industrious
men, and active and far-sighted tradesmen'.21
It is interesting that the diffusion of the myth of the self-made
industrialist was partly the work of opponents of the factory system
and of the new class of industrialists: the aristocracy and its sup-
porters, on one hand, and the radicals, such as William Cobbett, on
the other, displayed on this occasion the same social snobbery and
'horror of parvenuism'.22 Indeed, the political polemics of the period

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 The Myth of the Self-Made Man 41

1815-46 tended, for obvious reasons, to exaggerate the low social

origin of industrialists,23 which was shocking to their opponents,
gratifying to their supporters. In 1818, a 'journeyman cotton
spinner', obviously radical, had written of mill owners that 'with
very few exceptions, they are a set of men who have sprung from the
cotton shop without education or address, except so much as they
have acquired by their intercourse with the little world of merchants
at the exchange at Manchester'.24 In 1834, the Tory Richard Oastler
wrote of 'a few wealthy Millowners (ci-devant pedlars, tinkers and
tailors), who by means of cheating and lying had managed to scrape
some thousands of pounds together'.25 When William Dodd, 'the
factory cripple', published in 1842 his famous letters to Lord Ashley,
which 'illustrate', or rather brand with infamy, the factory system, he
noted, again and again, that most industrialists in the towns he
visited were self-made men. In Leeds:
nearly all the mill-owners (who are the richest class of men here, some of
them possessing upwards of a million sterling) had risen from a very humble
origin. As a proof that such is the case, I was told that, out of a population of
upwards of 150,000 individuals, not half a dozen names could be found of
men who have not been brought up to some trade or profession.
In Bolton, Dodd heard many
amusing anecdotes . . . of the origin of most of the wealthy firms which we
find in the list of manufacturers; men who now possess half a million and in
some cases a million and upwards sterling. Some of them might have been
seen walking about the streets of Bolton, Manchester, and other places, from
twenty to thirty years ago, with scarcely a shoe to their foot, a coat to their
backs, or trousers that would hide their limbs; without the means of obtain-
ing a dinner for the day, or a lodging for the night. I have taken some little
trouble to analyse the firms of Bolton . . . and the result proves, that of forty-
five individuals known in the firms, twenty-five were originally very poor,
twelve brought money more or less into the trade, and the remaining are
doubtful, but my friends were inclined to think them poor.

From Wigan, Dodd added: 'On looking into the origins of manu-
facturing firms in this town, I find that the masters have almost to a
man, begun with nothing, and risen by little and little, till many of
them have got to be very wealthy.' And in his last letter he concluded,
again with an attempt at quantification which is praiseworthy but of
doubtful validity:

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 42 The First Industrialists

I find, on looking over the list of firms which I have been able to analyse, and
which I have reason to believe is a fair specimen of the whole, that eight out
of every ten have begun business with little or nothing . . . although some of
them are now supposed to possess from half a million to two millions
sterling.26
Harold Perkin has written that the myth of the self-made man was
'one of the most powerful instruments of propaganda ever developed
by any class to justify itself and reduce others to its own ideal', which
assumed 'that both poverty and inequality were adequately com-
pensated by increased opportunities for improving one's standard of
living by social climbing'.27 Actually, the myth was not simply a
figment of the middle class's desire to satisfy both its moral self-
righteousness and its class interests: it was also much used by intel-
lectual and political Luddites to fight the middle class. However, it
appears, of course, in the writings of supporters of the factory
system: in 1835, Dr Ure stressed the many 'gratifying examples of
skilful workmen becoming opulent proprietors', through the stages
of 'overlooker, manager and partner in new mills'.28 A year earlier,
in his History of Leeds, E. Parsons had written: 'A very preponderat-
ing portion of the rich manufacturers and traders of the district, con-
sist of men who, much to their own honour, have risen by their own
exertions and diligence from the most humble circumstances to ease
and opulence.'29 And a number of industrialists boasted of their
family's humble background and professed, long before Smiles, the
self-help doctrine.
Samuel I Whitbread set himself up as a self-made man, and his
son, the Whig politician, maintained that every Englishman ought to
have the opportunity to raise himself through hard work and merit,
as his father had done.30 Shortly before his death in 1797, Jedediah
Strutt composed his own epitaph: 'Here lies J S — who, without
Fortune, Family or friends rais'd to himself a fortune, family and
Name in the World.'31
In 1842, Henry Ashworth, a famous cotton-spinner, wrote that
many great industrialists had been ordinary weavers thirty years
earlier; industry had been developed by the 'common mass' of the
people', 'possessing little or no outward property, but being richly
endowed with these valuable qualities, persevering industry, intelli-
gence and enterprise'.32 In 1847, during an entertainment given to

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 The Myth of the Self-Made Man 43

the people of Merthyr and Dowlais, William II Crawshay recalled

the career of his grandfather, Richard Crawshay, who had been a
farmer's son, and he added: 'I hope the rising generation will see that
by industry, ingenuity, and perseverance, wealth and rank in life . . .
are attainable by everybody who started with humbler prospects
than my grandfather.' 33 In 1861, Peter Fairbairn, the self-made
machine-builder of Leeds, stated: 'Some may think that they have no
chance . . . but this I do not believe . . . I can more readily believe that
they have not sought opportunity, nor availed themselves of it when
fortune has threwn it in their way.' 34 In such cases the myth of the
self-made man was undoubtedly used as an opium for the people,
though the sincerity of the men who extolled it is not to be doubted.
Indeed, there were industrialists' families which, quite late in the
nineteenth century, considered that they belonged to 'the People' and
had more in common with the working class than with the aris-
tocracy.35
Conversely, some industrialists tried to conceal origins which they
thought too humble. In 1843, a cotton lord was defined as 'a man
who will not upon any account whatever allow his grand-father to
become the subject of discussion; for no consideration on earth will
he trace his genealogy further back than his noble self'.36 And John
Morley observed with some bitterness in 1868:
The man who began life as a beggar and a Chartist softens down into a
radical when he has got credit enough for a weaving shed; a factory of his
own mollifies him into what is called a strong Liberal; and by the time he
owns a mansion and a piece of land he has a feeling of blue blood tingling in
his veins, and thinks of a pedigree and a motto in old French.37
In his autobiography, which Samuel Smiles edited, James
Nasmyth, the machine-builder, discussed at length his ancestry, to
prove that his family was ancient and famous - dating back to the
thirteenth century; but it had been ruined for taking part in a
rebellion against Charles II. Nonetheless, his great-grandfather and
his grandfather had been architects and builders; as for his father,
Nasmyth stressed his talent and success as a painter and that he
belonged to 'the best middle-class people of Edinburgh'; he added
that his mother also came from an ancient, though penniless, family,
and that her brother succeeded to a baronetcy. 38 William Fairbairn
claimed descent from a humble but respectable family of small lairds;

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 44 The First Industrialists

his father was the son of a gardener, but he was literate and would
have done better in life if he had not been impressed during the
American War.39 Even Robert Owen suggested that he might have
landed ancestors, as he had heard his father say 'that he lost an estate
of the value of five hundred pounds a year in a lawsuit'.40
In fact, it was fashionable in the nineteenth century to have a
yeoman ancestry,41 and any parvenu whose forebears had had some
title to some scrap of land did not hesitate to claim that they had
belonged to the 'proud yeomanry' of England. In the West Riding, as
late as the early twentieth century, there was a division among manu-
facturing families, between those of 'gentlemen manufacturers',
which had ancestors in the gentry and yeomanry, and those which
descended from clothiers and other craftsmen.42
It was also as self-made men that industrialists appeared most fre-
quently in English literature;43 and again, this was rarely presented
as a flattering trait. Neil McKendrick has rightly written of the 'liter-
ary Luddism' which prevails in English nineteenth-century novels,
which are hostile to business, to the businessman and to industrial-
ization, and which look back with nostalgia to pre-industrial
England.44
Yet, there are exceptions to the two rules which have just been
formulated. Such is Mr Cayenne, in The Annals of the Parish by John
Gait (1821); he is a loyalist refugee (the former owner of a plantation
in Virginia), who sets up as a country squire in Scotland in 1785 and
establishes a cotton mill, with the help of a great London merchant
house. Gait calls him one of the parish's 'greatest benefactors', as the
mill was 'a blessing to the country', which it made 'stirring with a
new life'.45 Quite different, but likewise not of proletarian extraction
are the two owners of cotton mills who figure in Benjamin Disraeli's
novels, Coningsby (1844) and Sybil (1845). The former book is not
clear about the origins of Millbank pere, but he was the 'youthful
friend' of the heir to a large fortune made in trade in Liverpool, and
the two men married two sisters; although he is said to be of 'humble
blood', one can postulate a middle-class background.46 In Sybil,
Disraeli portrays a model employer, Mr Trafford, whose inspector of
works is Walter Gerard, the heroine's father. Trafford was the
younger son of an old gentry family, but not satisfied with his
'entailed poverty', he entered industry, though with little capital, so

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 The Myth of the Self-Made Man 45

that his operations were 'at first extremely limited'. However, 'with
gentle blood in his veins, and old English feelings, he imbibed, at an
early period of his career, a correct conception of the relations which
should subsist between the employer and the employed'. His energy
and his 'social views' interested a distant and childless relative, who
left him a considerable sum. He was thus able to carry out plans over
which he had brooded, i.e. to build a very large and modern cotton
mill, plus a model factory village.47 Reference may also be made to
Robert Moore, the hero of Charlotte Bronte's Shirley (1849). Trade
was his 'hereditary calling': on his mother's side, the Gerards of
Antwerp had been merchants for two centuries, but their already-
declining house was totally ruined by 'the shock of the French
Revolution'; its fall brought down the English firm of Moore, with
which it was closely connected, and one of whose partners, resident
in Antwerp, had married Hortense Gerard and was Robert's father.
In 1811, when the novel begins, Robert Moore, whose family had
thus been ruined, has been for two years leasing and operating a cloth
mill, 'in an out-of-the-way nook of an out-of-the-way district' in
Yorkshire; he is a 'poor man', endowed only with energy, industry
and talent, and the depression of 1811-12 brings him repeatedly to
the verge of bankruptcy. However, he survives, marries his beloved
and becomes the master of 'a mighty mill', with 'a chimney,
ambitious as the tower of Babel'.48
Millbank, Trafford and Moore did not have 'low' social origins
and did not conform therefore to the common idea of the self-made
man; nonetheless, each of them could have said, like Millbank: 'I am
. . . the maker of my fortunes.'49
Anyway, they are not repulsive, like the industrialists of Mrs
Trollope (Sir Matthew Dowling, proprietor of many cotton mills, is
described as 'hard-hearted, vicious, unprincipled, illiterate,
vulgar')50 and of Charles Dickens. Hard Times (1854) 'would prob-
ably win the competition for the novel which has most influenced
attitudes to early industry';51 it undoubtedly strengthened the image
of the 'ogre of the factory', and it made both odious and ridiculous
those who boasted about their humble origins. Mr Bounderby 'was
a rich man: banker, merchant, manufacturer, and what not . . . A
man who could never sufficiently vaunt himself a self-made man. A
man who was always proclaiming . . . his old ignorance and his old

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 46 The First Industrialists

poverty. A man who was the Bully of humility'. He pretends to have

been 'born in a ditch', of an obviously unmarried mother, who
'bolted' and abandoned him to the care of a drunken grandmother,
'the wickedest and the worst old woman that ever lived'. 'As soon as
I was big enough to run away I ran away. Then I became a young
vagabond . . . everybody of all ages knocked me about and starved
me . . . I pulled through it, though nobody threw me out a rope.
Vagabond, errand-boy, vagabond, labourer, porter, clerk, chief
manager, small partner, Josiah Bounderby of Coketown. Those are
the antecedents and the culmination.' 'I am a bit of dirty riff-raff, and
a genuine scrap of tag, rag, and bobtail... I know what I am, and the
exact depth of the gutter I have lifted myself out of.' Bounderby's
deception is exposed at the end of the novel, when his mother, a dear
old soul, emerges: his parents were humble but respectable, and they
loved him; his widowed mother kept a village shop and 'could pinch
a bit that he might write and cypher beautiful' and be apprenticed to
a kind master.52 Nonetheless, Bounderby was a self-made man!
The violence of Dickens's attack against coarse and hard self-
made men is proof of the prevalence of the myth. So too is this
remark, which is very likely the product of his brief visits to Lanca-
shire: 'This . . . was among the fictions of Coketown. Any capitalist
there, who had made sixty thousand pounds out of six pence pro-
fessed to wonder why the sixth thousand nearest Hands didn't each
make sixty thousand pounds out of six pence.'53
The most interesting novelist, from the point of view considered
here, is Elizabeth Gaskell.54 In Mary Barton (1848), the heroine's
father, who is a Chartist weaver, says of the masters of Manchester:
'There's many on 'em has had nought to begin wi'; there's Carsons,
and Duncombes, and Mengies, and many another, as corned into
Manchester with clothes to their backs, and that were all, and now
they're worth their tens of thousands.' When Henry Carson, a
master's son, contemplates marrying Mary Barton, the author asks
this question: 'What was birth to a Manchester manufacturer, many
of whom glory, and justly too, in being the architects of their own
fortunes?' Later, when Old Mr Carson, who is presented as a self-
made man, visits — to pardon him —John Barton, who murdered his
son, Mrs Gaskell writes that 'in the days of his childhood and youth,
[he] had been accustomed to poverty; but it was honest, decent

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 The Myth of the Self-Made Man 47

poverty; not the grinding squalid misery he had remarked in every

part of John Barton's home'.55
In North and South (1855), the hero, John Thornton, is also a self-
made man, because his father, a businessman, speculated, failed,
committed suicide and left his family penniless. 'I was taken from
school, and had to become a man (as well as I could) in a few days.'
John finds a small job — as a draper's assistant — and lives literally
'upon water-porridge for years'; he is finally able to pay off his
father's creditors, become partner to one of them, and then quickly
make a fortune as a cotton factory master.56 He has good reasons to
tell Margaret Hale: 'It is one of the great beauties of our system, that
a working-man may raise himself into the power and position of a
master by his own exertion and behaviour.'57 So Mrs Gaskell was an
adept of the self-made man myth, but she knew the facts of life in
Manchester, and a close look at her writings suggests that, to her,
industrialists had a modest, but not proletarian, background.
One final novel is worth mentioning:58 John Halifax, Gentleman,
by Mrs Craik (1856, but the action takes place between 1794 and
1834). The hero is the son of 'a scholar and a gentleman', but he has
lost his father, and at fourteen he is wandering penniless in the
country. He is given a job by a tanner and miller, Abel Fletcher, who
had himself started as a working man. From collecting skins, John is
promoted to Fletcher's right-hand man and partner. He becomes
interested in machinery and, thanks to the dowry which his bride
brings him, he is able to rent a textile mill; his business succeeds and
he becomes very rich, but he dies prematurely. The lesson is clear: an
industrialist can be a gentleman, a quality which depends not upon
the accident of birth but upon morals.59
All this suggests that standard expressions such as 'born in
humble circumstances' and 'self-made man', had, in the nineteenth
century, a broader meaning than the one which twentieth-century
writers have been tempted to give them and which implies exclus-
ively working-class origins. They were used with such a broad mean-
ing especially by members of the upper class and by persons with
pretensions to gentility, to whom there was not much difference
between people who suffered from the 'taint of trade', be they
owners of large mills or mere 'hands' in them. It may be a mistake to
make too much in this respect of a passage in John Halifax, Gentle-

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 48 The First Industrialists

man, but it seems significant: Lady Caroline Brithwood, who is an

Earl's daughter, says of the hero: 'He belongs to the people... I mean
the lower orders, the bourgeoisie.'60 There were, of course, people —
mostly enemies of industrialization and of the industrial middle
class, like Peter Gaskell or William Dodd - who believed, or affected
to believe, for polemical reasons, that most industrialists had sprung
from the dregs of the populace. There were also — and some have
been quoted — observers who did not believe that a working man had
much chance of raising himself 'from rags to riches'. However,
generally speaking, at a time when the most typical and the most
prestigious form of wealth, i.e. landed wealth, was finite and
inherited, a self-made man was any individual who was the 'architect
of his own fortunes',61 who had built a fortune instead of inheriting
it, and he did not necessarily have a working-class background.
Nevertheless, the myth of the self-made man and the ideology of
self-help were deep-rooted in British public opinion before Samuel
Smiles's famous book, although his talent gave them diffusion and
durability; the sales of Self-Help well exceeded those of the great
nineteenth-century novels - 20 000 copies in the first year of publi-
cation and over a quarter of a million by 1905.62 On the other hand,
Self-Help is one of those books which are more mentioned than
actually read, and Smiles's thought is more complex than many
people suppose. The book is an ethical treatise, or 'a series of care-
fully chosen homilies', and not a guide to how to get rich. It is not
written in praise of businessmen, who are not especially prominent
among the examples of self-help which are given, and which include
writers, scientists, artists, philanthropists and missionaries; the 1866
edition added a chapter entitled 'French generals and marshals risen
from the Ranks', and in the preface Smiles denies having written 'a
eulogy of selfishness'.63 However, when he comes to the 'great con-
trivances and inventions', Smiles insists that 'for the greater part of
them we have been indebted to men of the humblest rank', such as
Richard Arkwright.64 Still, it is rather in his later book, Industrial
Biography (1863), that Smiles puts forward at length the idea that
the leaders of the Industrial Revolution had been self-made men: 'For
the most part', he writes, 'the early Lancashire manufacturers started
very nearly equal in point of worldly circumstances, men originally
of the smallest means often coming to the front - workmen, weavers,

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 The Myth of the Self-Made Man 49

mechanics, pedlars, farmers, or labourers — in course of time rearing

immense manufacturing concerns by sheer force of industry, energy,
and personal ability.'65
One can conclude by quoting a few lines written in 1868 by James
Bryce, Oxford professor, barrister and liberal politician:
Men almost, sometimes wholly illiterate, have risen to prodigious wealth
and indulge in a profuse luxury which strangely contrasts with the primitive
simplicity of their own manners. A millionaire has cousins and even brothers
among the operatives, and is socially on a level with his own workpeople to
whose class he belonged a year or two before. Of course, it is the ambition
of everyone to tread in his steps. The man who has saved a little money,
sometimes a pushing mechanic, throws it into machinery, hiring * space and
power'... or raising a weaving shop of his own. If the venture succeeds, he
extends his operations and makes a fortune; if he fails, he emigrates or goes
back to the big mill to earn his weekly wage.66
And later, three large volumes, published between 1884 and 1886,
Fortunes made in Business, were to give final form to the myth of the
self-made man, by narrating the lives of a large number of industrial-
ists, who, generally, had raised themselves by their 'own exertions
from a low to a high situation'.67

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