In 1910 a small book appeared in America promising that wealth obeyed laws as dependable as those of chemistry. Its author, Wallace Delois Wattles, died the following February and might have vanished from the record entirely had the book not stubbornly refused to go out of print.
Wattles was born in 1860 and remains a genuinely obscure figure. The biographical record is thin, and a good deal of what circulates about him online is embroidery. What is certain is that he belonged to the New Thought movement, the late nineteenth-century American current holding that thought is a creative force acting on material reality, and that he wrote several books in that tradition before his death in 1911.
His influence has vastly outrun his fame. The vocabulary of visualisation, gratitude and creative rather than competitive thinking that runs through a century of self-help and prosperity writing traces back to pages like these, and The Science of Getting Rich was the acknowledged inspiration for Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret, which introduced Wattles to millions who had never heard his name.
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