The Little Grey Books
The Forgotten Pelman School of Memory and What It Can Teach Us about Our Urge for Self-Improvement
How do we learn to be ourselves in a world in which we are constantly pushed to be better? Where did our apparently relentless pursuit of perfection come from? How did it make us modern, and where might it take us?
We think of Personal Development as a very contemporary need and genre, currently one of the booming sections of the bookshop. But its history is long, if under-examined. And that history tells us, if examined with care, far more about the dreams, aspirations and anxieties of ordinary people than almost any other cultural phenomenon. It is a history of the present.
The Pelman Institute is pretty much forgotten now. In its heyday, it was the single most important and influential 'school' for self-improvement worldwide, offering correspondence courses in confidence, conviction and clarity to its hundreds of thousands of paying students. Its messaging was rousing:
‘Beneath the Self of which you are conscious, there is a slumbering unsuspecting Self, the depths of whose power you have never plumbed. That Self is the man or woman you ought to be. It is the Self of power and pride; the Self that will do and dare all for worthy ideals; the Self that will lift you from the masses of mediocrity to the heights of your dearest daydreams.'
Pelmanism conquered the world across eight decades from the end of the nineteenth century to well after the Second World War. This book draws from over one hundred archives in twelve countries on five continents. Matt Houlbrook has himself assembled by far the most significant extant collection of Pelmanist materials.
It is Pelmanism’s status as an uncanny period piece – familiar yet strange to us today – that makes it such a rich case study through which to understand how the relationship between capital, culture, and selfhood has changed over the past century.
This will be a subtle, revelatory, gripping book about ordinary people across time and place, which should enthral readers of Sam Knight's The Premonitions Bureau, Merve Emre's The Personality Test, William Davies' The Happiness Industry, and Saidiya Hartman's Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments.
