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Today lifestyle gurus are often thought of as an adjunct of social media. This is a mistake. The phenomenon of virtue signalling and using positive thinking to achieve self-fulfilment and make a meaningful contribution to society pre-dates digital technology. What is commonly regarded as the first self-help book in English, Self-help with Illustrations of Character and Conduct (1859), was written by Samuel Smiles. The book was concerned with cultivating various human qualities in personal life and business and perseverance to the duty of ‘becoming a better person’. Smiles advised that people should learn from the Christian good example in history and society of people who would act as role models in the rational duty of self-improvement. In his later book, Character (1908), he comments on what readers of his own day could profitably learn from men and women of the past with respect to topics like ‘Companionship’, ‘Work’, ‘Courage’, ‘Self-Control’, ‘Duty’, ‘Truthfulness’ and ‘Temper’. These virtues are presented as lifestyle resources calculated to pay a dividend in – to borrow a phrase that he repeatedly returns to in the book – ‘the school life’. For Smiles, it is the will of God for each individual to work out the end of one’s being to the best of one’s power (Smiles 1908). However, charting a course without a proper life-compass to life runs the risk of shipping water. The principles of self-help are intended to be an exhaustive guide to the most effective methods for solving life’s problems and maximising one’s potential. It defines life, not merely as a passage, but as a project.

Smiles’ work was part of the industrialisation of self-help. This was a process that respected the wisdom of the past. The prime mover, however, was the principle that motivation comes from within, by rote learning and application of what can be rationally extracted from significant others in history, culture and society. Other influential writers were swept up in the same moment. For example, the American feminist and household management guru, Catharine Beecher’s influential book, A Treatise on Domestic Economy (1841), advised ‘women to perfect themselves as Christian wives and mothers, adhering to quite traditional New England values, so as to master the economic logic of modern time’ (Allen 2005: 68). Effective time management and the cult of perfectionism was the nucleus of her household management system. What she took from science and professional management in the marketplace was selectively mediated through the local folk values, imbricated with Christian teaching, with which she was raised. The regime of self-help that she advocated was class based and asserted fixed, rigid principles of perfection. For example, she regarded domestic virtue to lie in the punctually regulated standardisation of behaviour in the home. Family members were urged to rise together at the same hour, eat together at the same hour and take to their rest at the same hour. This was presented not only as the right choice for modern individual families but the best course for the future of society. In Beecher, the middle-class notion that self-improvement is the key to social progress is accentuated. Time management is expounded as a tool to master the economic and moral ambiguities of the market (Allen 2005: 74). It is worth noting that this is the inverse of the arguments made by subsequent generations of historians concerning the project of modern industrial development. For example, in a justly celebrated study, Edward Thompson (1967) maintained that the introduction of the mechanical clock into factories in England inscribed upon workers not only the notion of time–work discipline, but the logic of using time optimally that followed from the operation of the quantifiable price mechanism in the market. Thompson presented time management in the workplace as the foundation of order in the market place. Conversely, Beecher’s Treatise insists that it is in the home that the lessons of doing things at the proper time and in the proper place are most deeply learned.

The lessons absorbed at the hearth about how to be, and how to live with others, are the keystones of moral perfectionism. Equivalent respect for the virtues of time management is to be found in Isabella Beeton’s, Book of Household Management (1861). For example, in her advice to the ‘Mistress of the Household’, she writes:

Early rising is one of the most essential qualities which enter into good Household Management, as it is not only the parent of health, but of innumerable other advantages. Indeed, when a mistress is an early riser, it is almost certain that her house will be orderly and well managed. On the contrary, if she remains in bed till a late hour, then the domestics who, as we have before observed, invariably partake somewhat of their mistress’s character, will surely become sluggards. (Beeton 1861: 2)

The authority in Beeton’s system of moral perfectionism plainly rests in the hands of ‘the mistress’. She assumes a clear divide between the physical and moral cleanliness of the middle-class household and the implied disorder of peasant and proletarian family conditions in the external world. Again, the intertwining of self-improvement with social progress is evident. The foundations of her system rest upon three principles of good management, which both Smiles and Beecher would have enthusiastically concurred:

1 Setting a good example and giving clear instructions to household staff as to their duties and what is expected of their moral bearing and behaviour;

2 Controlling household finances (treating the home as a ‘cost centre’);

3 Applying cleanliness, punctuality and order and time management consistently in the domestic sphere. (Wensley 2004: 67)

Beeton presents the strictly regulated consumption of meals and the management of the domestic sphere as a measure of rank. The course of progress that she sets faith by is middle class in every significant co-ordinate. Her bourgeois values and practice were set as role models against both the implied ostentatious waste of the aristocracy and the distemper of conditions on the lower ranks. ‘A place for everything, and everything in its place’ was her celebrated, endlessly adaptable, maxim (Beeton 1861: 42). The habits of household management naturally translate into the customs of bodily management and self-presentation (Beetham 2008: 393–5). As with Beecher, this is mediated through a mixture of folklore and instrumentally selected elements drawn from science, management and public life. Hence, cleanliness in the kitchen, and in one’s person, is a precondition for presenting oneself in the most favourable light in society; order and time management are the tools for success in the external world. The motivation of keeping an efficient, household that is a source of pride and admiration, is to learn and apply the characteristics required to be an effective, successful, progressive agent in general life. The immediate focus of Beecher’s work, as with Beeton’s manual of life, is self-revelation and self-transformation. However, this is also understood to be the first step in the greater goal of social progress. Already, the bourgeois philosophy of getting the most out of yourself in order to get the most out of the world is present, albeit in embryonic form. Beecher and Beeton follow on the heels of Utilitarianism in proposing that the aristocracy and the lower ranks have much to learn from them, and little to teach.

At this time it is easy to see how, and why, these interventions were so readily analysed in a framework of class struggle. The ideas of Marx and Engels emerged and developed as a sort of counter life to the monological side of bourgeois progress. For them, class struggle was the determinant of human history. They proposed that the struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat should end in the transcendence of class by virtue of the attainment of communism. In contrast to common perceptions today, they understood the communist society to be one that guarantees and nurtures the full and free development of the individual. However, as it turned out, the class model proved to be of limited value. It was persuasive when applied to the rising power of the bourgeoisie in the nineteenth century. Thus, Smiles, Beecher and Beeton all fit snugly into a framework that explains the methods of self-help as tools in the mission of social mobility and class domination. The model is less helpful, however, when applied to the means of persuasion and ends of lifestyle gurus today. The goals of acceptance, approval, social impact and self-validation are not strictly speaking means of controlling people. Today’s lifestyle gurus do not peddle the line that lifestyle makeovers will result in a fully and finally realised individual or, still less, that they will produce a superior society (McGee 2005; Raisborough 2011). Instead, they typically operate upon a just-in-time principle that techniques of marshalling acceptance, approval, social impact and self-validation are only as good as the challenges presented by the present moment. Hence, the resort to ‘update packages’ and subscriptions as part of their lifestyle programme. Integral to today’s form of lifestyle management is the idea that the ‘journey’ of self-discovery is continuous and without end. The pace of social change makes life a permanent race with no final finishing line. Lifestyle management and improvement is in perpetual motion. One is only as good as one’s last makeover.