The ‘emulators’ of Samuel Smiles: Self-Help literature in Italy during the 19th Century

Based on a wide and deep analysis of the vast and articulate journalism of a self-helpist line appearing in the peninsula following the publication in the Italian language of Samuel Smiles’s famous essay Self-Help (1865), the article focuses on significant differences that can be seen, from the point of view of the socio-economic and political orientations and of the cultural and formative models transmitted, among this journalism, which in Italy soon assumed the most correct definition of «proletarian» journalism, and the original «selfhelpist» ideology of an anglo-saxon origin advocated by the Smiles essay.