Finding an Audience: The Political Platform, the Lecture Platform, and the Rhetoric of Self-Help

Abstract

Examines the influence of the experience of public speaking on the literary career of Samuel Smiles, archetypal Victorian proponent of the gospel of self-help. Argues that even though Smiles published extensively and had experience as a newspaper editor, different forms of platform experience were crucial to the development and articulation of his ideas throughout his life. Explains how close readings of Smiles’ voices on the platform, from the editor’s chair, in correspondence, and in composition, demonstrate ways rhetorical experience and practice blurred apparently firm generic boundaries; like others, Smiles was both suspicious of the platform and unable to extricate himself from its many influences.