Autobiography of John Stuart Mill

First published: 1873, as Autobiography

Type of work: Autobiography

The Work:

The Autobiography is a unique and fascinating book, one of a handful likely to be read as long as nineteenth century Britain is remembered. It bears witness to the intellectual ferment that was part of the industrial and democratic revolutions of the time. Wider suffrage led to state-supported education in Britain and debate about its proper content. These circumstances supplied Mill’s chief motives for recording his life. He wished to recount his own intellectual development and mission in a period of cultural transition and to describe his remarkable education.

Mill, better than anyone, articulated the outlook of nineteenth century liberalism, and so, more than any other intellectual, shaped thinking about politics and society in English-speaking countries in the twentieth century. His interests included political philosophy, ethics, economics, psychology, logic, the scientific method, religion, liberty, the prejudice suffered by women. His ordered, lucid prose helped guarantee that his books would long be read. Generous by nature and fair-minded in considering the views of others, he was, as British Prime Minister William Gladstone declared, a “saint of rationalism.”

The book recounts in detail a truly remarkable instance of home schooling, through which Mill acquired by his middle teens knowledge and analytical skills far superior to those of most university graduates—to say nothing of a phenomenal capacity for work. Mill missed a real childhood, however, suffering emotional disabilities that led to a severe psychological crisis and lifelong insecurity. The Autobiography reveals and conceals the emotional dimension of a committed rationalist.

Mill’s education was provided by his father, James Mill, a gifted Scotsman of modest birth who had been sponsored at university by a squire, John Stuart. Trained in the classics and living by his pen in London, James commenced his eldest son’s education at the age of three with Greek. Beginning with Aesop’s Fables (fourth century, b.c.e.), Mill later read the historian Herodotus, the philosopher Plato, and numerous other works. Mill was tutored several hours each morning, then worked at his father’s table, asking for definitions when necessary. He also read modern histories of Greece and Rome, typically—as he remembered it—on his own initiative, discussing them from his notes on long daily walks with his father. James gave explanations his son was required to restate in his own words; this introduced him to the analysis of institutions and the biases of historians. He also studied math and wrote poetry.

Mill began Latin at eight, also teaching it to his sister. He studied Greek and Latin poets, the historian Thucydides, and the philosopher Aristotle, and he commenced geometry, algebra, and calculus. His “private reading” was still mainly historical, and at eleven he wrote a long history of Roman government (his father did not intervene in any way). By this time he was reading Greek philosophers “with perfect ease,” learning not just another language, but how to think critically. He was asked to explain and draw inferences. At about age ten he read aloud the entire manuscript of his father’s ten-volume History of British India (1818), helping correct the proofs. At twelve he commenced logic with Aristotle and later writers. The heavily classical training raised no religious doubts: “I never threw off religion because I never had any.”

Two friends of his father were important in his education. He learned economics from his father’s exposition, on walks, of David Ricardo’s thought. Mill took daily notes, which his father used when writing a book on political economy. Mill later made marginal summaries on the manuscript so the order of ideas could better be assessed. Philosopher Jeremy Bentham was James’s mentor. Bentham took a strong interest in Mill, and, via James, shaped his philosophical outlook.

By age fourteen most of Mill’s formal education was complete. He had no idea he was exceptional. When he learned otherwise, he judged his abilities average at best and credited his father. He spent a year, 1820-1821, in France with Bentham’s brother’s family. There he acquired excellent French, learned dancing and piano, and displayed little aptitude for fencing and riding. He learned to love mountain scenery and botany, studied at the University of Montpellier, and later described this breath of “free continental air” as the happiest year in his childhood.

James’s History of British India secured him a high bureaucratic position in the East India Company, which governed the colony of India. Mill studied law and German and became the chief teacher of his eight siblings until he was forty-five. At eighteen he also began working for his father and continued to do so for thirty-five years, seeking to achieve, as drafter of correspondence to India’s administrators, beneficial government.

Mill, diligent and committed to ideas and reform, found time for another life in the world of ideas. While still a teenager he had edited Bentham’s five-volume Rationale of Judicial Evidence (1825), a daunting task which required reconciling three complete manuscripts. He continued to write, publishing more than fifty letters, reviews, and articles before reaching age twenty. He formed groups, including the Utilitarians (short-lived, but the group’s name would come to denote a branch of philosophy), a self-study group, and a debating society. Though not eloquent, he impressed others with his precision and relentless logic. He was likened by a friend to a “great steam engine.”

In his early twenties a mental crisis came that he judged a reaction to his intellectually rich but emotionally starved upbringing. Mill came to say that fear, not love, characterized the relationship between James and his older children. Mill sank into depression after realizing that even if he achieved all of his reform goals he would not be happy. Distraught, he concluded that the analytical emphasis of his father’s teaching had stifled his emotional development. He seemed to take pleasure in nothing, not even long-cherished books. The pathos of a French playwright’s description of his father’s death brought tears and released Mill’s pent-up feelings. The poetry of William Wordsworth, evoking pleasure in nature’s beauty, was another source of emotional renewal.

The depression, which he thought fruitless to discuss with his father, led Mill to new friends and new ideas, all of which were part of the cultural reaction against the eighteenth century. Some, such as poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, historian Thomas Carlyle, and their German mentors, emphasized feeling and intuition. Others, such as Auguste Comte, propounded something quite new to Mill: the notion that cultural history necessarily follows a particular pattern, from theological to metaphysical to positive (scientific) thinking.

One friendship was to prove especially significant for the emotionally fragile Mill—one with a beautiful, intelligent, intense young woman, Harriet Taylor (1807-1858). They met in 1830; he was twenty-five, she twenty-three. She was also a married mother of two, soon to be three, and divorce was not then accepted. What ensued was an ardent but platonic relationship beset by gossip, a shrinking circle of friends, and prolonged public embarrassment for all concerned. The pair saw each other frequently, even traveling together. This lasted two decades, until Mr. Taylor died and they could wed in 1851. Mill saw Harriet as his coworker and emotional lodestone. The Autobiography’s dumbfoundingly extravagant praise of her superiority in character, feeling, intellect, and judgment reveals by implication that he was dominated by her emotionally. She chilled his relations with his family. Mill, who lived at home until forty-five, the last fifteen years of which time he was the head of his dead father’s household, makes no mention of his mother in the Autobiography. Equally strange was Harriet’s failure to protest in the slightest his ludicrously exaggerated praise of her. One must look beyond the Autobiography, or read between the lines, to understand their relationship.

The unusual nature of Mill’s private and emotional life, however, did not deflect him from his sense of mission, his commitment to enlightening the public and giving voice to liberal elements in Parliament. The Autobiography recounts his work in detail. A System of Logic (1843), his first major work, defends empiricism against intuitionism, which he saw as a bulwark for reactionary political and religious thinking. Principles of Political Economy (1848) defends free market production but holds that no economic laws determine how wealth is distributed; by concerted action workers can alter their share of the wealth labor creates. This view, expressed in the third edition of the book, contributed much to the rise of socialism in England. On Liberty (1859), a joint work with Harriet, defends free thought and the sovereignty of the individual, and proclaims the social value of letting people develop in diverse ways. It emphasizes—as had historian Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (1835-1840), a book Mill esteemed highly—the danger of intolerant public opinion in a democracy. Mill hoped that On Liberty would be his most enduring work. The Subjection of Women (1869) combats the disenfranchisement of women.

Mill’s liberalism is also evident in his numerous articles, many of which were later published as a book: Dissertations and Discussions (1859). His support for self-rule in Canada sped its achievement there. During the American Civil War he held that Union victory was vital to progress throughout the world and hoped it would destroy slavery, the “accursed thing” that violated America’s constitution. He spoke for the exploited, be they landless Irish peasants or brutalized former slaves in Jamaica. His commitment to putting liberal ideas before the public is revealed not only by his many articles but also by his work as editor of the London and Westminster Review and his financial support of that and other journals.

In 1858, Parliament decided, over his able protest, to abolish the East India Company and rule directly. Mill received a generous position. He and Harriet planned a lengthy trip in southern Europe, but she suddenly died of consumption in Avignon, France. Much of his remaining fifteen years was spent living there, within sight of her grave. He continued to work productively, writing many of his books during the years in Avignon. Evidence of his apparent emotional need for a strong personality to fill the place first occupied by his father, then Harriet, is the fact that he elevated his stepdaughter Helen, who lived with him until his death in Avignon, to a similar position.

In the mid-1860’s, Mill was asked to represent Westminster in Parliament. Though declaring that he would not campaign, he was victorious. His actions there were consistent with his principles. He sought land reform and the restoration of habeas corpus in Ireland, judicial action against those who violated the rights of Jamaicans, an end to election bribery, proportional representation for minorities, and enfranchisement of women. This last, surprisingly, was supported by eighty other members of Parliament, marking the effective beginning of the women’s suffrage movement in England.

Bibliography

Barros, Carolyn A. Autobiography: Narrative of Transformation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998. Analyzes autobiographies by Mill and several other prominent Victorians, describing how these authors relate tales of major transformations in their lives; Mill’s autobiography recounts a significant change in his philosophy.

Mazlish, Bruce. James and John Stuart Mill, Father and Son in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Basic Books, 1975. The material on James Mill adds much to one’s understanding of his more famous son. The book has a strong “social science/psycho-history” perspective that is predicated on the validity of Freudian theory.

Mill, John Stuart. The Early Draft of John Stuart Mill’s Autobiography. Edited by Jack Stillinger. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1961. Reveals differences between early drafts and the published versions of the Autobiography.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor: Their Correspondence and Subsequent Marriage. Edited by F. A. von Hayek. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1951. A study of an important relationship in Mill’s adult years. Drastically alters the glowing image of Harriet Taylor created by the Autobiography.

Packe, Michael. The Life of John Stuart Mill. New York: Macmillan, 1954. The standard biography. Comprehensive, intelligent, and elegantly written, setting many aspects of Mill’s career in historical context.

Reeves, Richard. John Stuart Mill: Victorian Firebrand. London: Atlantic Books, 2007. An authoritative and well-received biography that recounts Mill’s life, philosophy, and pursuit of truth and liberty for all.