SOURCE: Hanham, Harry and Michael Shortland. Introduction to Hugh Miller's Memoir: From Stonemason to Geologist, edited by Michael Shortland, pp. 1-86. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1995.

In the following excerpt, Hanham and Shortland discuss Miller's autobiography and its relationship to the emerging field of self-help literature.

Autobiographical Careers

Miller and Principal Baird

Miller had been experimenting with prose before the Poems appeared. The task he had set himself was to reconcile the easy colloquial style of his own juvenile stories with the classical style of the eighteenth century, which he considered the only acceptable style for a writer of serious prose. By 1829 he had already written a number of experimental stories and articles, some of which were later published in the Inverness Courier.¹ But it was several years before his prose style settled down. Told in October 1834 that old Baron Hume the jurist had commended the excellence of his...