One of the most popular Victorian writers, Samuel Smiles (1812 1904) made his name in 1859 with the original self-improvement manual Self-Help. His highly successful multi-volume Lives of the Engineers (also reissued in this series) contained biographies of men who had, like him, achieved greatness not through privilege but through hard work. Left incomplete at his death, edited by the social theorist Thomas Mackay (1849 1912) and first published in 1905, his autobiography opens with a vivid description of the Scottish garrison town of his birth during the Napoleonic wars. In his later years...

As a civil engineer, Sir John Fowler (1817 98) devoted his life to the railways. His best-known achievements include the first railway bridge across the Thames in London, Manchester Central Station, the development of the London Underground and, (with Sir Benjamin Baker) the Forth Bridge arguably the most remarkable feat of engineering of the nineteenth century. Given access to friends and family papers, the author and social theorist Thomas Mackay (1849 1912) portrays a man who was fascinated by engineering as a child, and who continued to work up until his death. As a portrait of one of the...