J.S. Mill Revisited This page intentionally left blank J.S. Mill Revisited Biographical and Political Explorations Bruce L. Kinzer J.S. MILL REVISITED Copyright © Bruce L. Kinzer, 2007. Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2007 978-1-4039-8068-7 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published in 2007 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-53874-4 ISBN 978-0-230-60709-5 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9780230607095 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kinzer, Bruce L., 1948– J.S. Mill revisited : biographical and political explorations / Bruce L. Kinzer. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 978-1-349-53874-4 1. Mill, John Stuart, 1806–1873. 2. Political scientists—Great Britain—Biography. 3. Philosophers—England—Biography. I. Title. JC223.M66K56 2007 320.092—dc22 [B] 2007009018 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First Edition: October 2007 10987654321 For Deborah, Anna, Amanda, Jon, Kian, and Lara This page intentionally left blank CONTENTS Acknowledgments viii Introduction 1 One The Father, the Son, and the Manly Spirit 8 Two Gathering Truths, 1826–30 43 Three Mill and Harriet Taylor: The Early Years 77 Four Mystifying the Mystic: Mill and Carlyle in the 1830s 112 Five Mill and the Secret Ballot 146 Six Mill and the Problem of Party 164 Seven Mill and the Experience of Political Engagement 179 Notes 205 Index 232 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Earlier versions of three of the chapters in this book appeared in print under the following titles and in the following places: “J.S. Mill and the Secret Ballot,” Historical Reflections/Reflexions Historiques 5 (1978): 19–39; “J.S. Mill and the Problem of Party,” Journal of British Studies 21 (1981): 106–22; “John Stuart Mill and the Experience of Political Engagement,” in A Cultivated Mind: Essays on J.S. Mill Presented to John M. Robson, edited by Michael Laine (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), 182–214. I am grateful to the editors, journals, and pub- lishers concerned for permission to reprint these items in a revised form. I am also grateful to the University of Toronto Press for allowing me to quote liberally from the great Toronto edition of The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill (1963–91). Mill scholars everywhere owe an enormous debt to John M. Robson, the general editor of the Collected Works, and none can possibly owe more than I. The chapter on Mill and Carlyle could not have been written without use of the superb Duke University Press edition of The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle (general editor, Charles Richard Sanders). For permission to quote extensively from this edition, I wish to thank Duke University Press. I am also grateful to Indiana University Press for permission to quote at some length from The Complete Works of Harriet Taylor Mill, edited by Jo Ellen Jacobs (1998). I want to express my appreciation to the National Art Library, Victoria and Albert Museum, for allowing me to quote from the diary of Henry Cole, material reproduced with the kind permission of the Trustees of the Victoria and Albert Museum. One person especially, my friend Jeff Lipkes, had a close association with the four biographical chapters in this book. He read each with great care and offered much penetrating criticism (along with words of comfort). I am grateful for the use to which he applied his acute intellect and impressive knowledge of Mill, and more grateful for his friendship. Acknowledgments ix Martin Sheppard also read early versions of these chapters, and provided excellent editorial advice. I asked my wife, Deborah Kinzer, to read a draft introduction to this book, and her astute comments produced changes in tone that I can now see were sorely needed. William McCulloh and Patricia McCulloh kindly agreed to read the piece on Mill and Carlyle, and their observations gave rise to a number of improvements. I thank them. As I do my dear friend Ann Robson, who made available to me valuable material on Mill’s activity compiled by members of the Mill Project in days past. Most of the writing done for the biographical chapters was carried out during the 2004–05 academic year, when I was on leave. The generous sympathy of my colleagues in Kenyon’s Department of History, together with the gracious support of the Provost of the College, made this leave possible. A version of the first chapter in this book was presented to the Kenyon Seminar, whose members furnished both welcome encouragement and stimulating critical commentary. For mistakes in this book, of fact or judgment, I am alone responsible. As for the crowded character of the dedication page, the persons named are immeasurably precious to me, and an opportunity of this kind may not come again. Introduction This book consists of two groups of chapters. The first of these, biographical in character and of recent composition, offers a reconsider- ation of J.S. Mill’s formative period. The second, whose provenance dates back some years, examines topics and themes bearing upon Mill’s political thought and activity. Intellectual authority mattered to Mill principally because of the moral and political ends it could be made to serve. The latter set of chapters, in sundry ways, explores the relation between some of these ends and Mill’s conception of himself as a public intellectual. The biographical chapters investigate challenges he faced in trying to sort out what he thought of himself and what he wished to become. In part they take the form they do because of what I have become, and the challenges I have faced in trying to sort out what I think of J.S. Mill. I have visited with Mill’s politics for a long time, and have deliber- ately kept to a minimum excursions that involved tackling aspects of Mill’s life and works that did not relate directly to problems associated with his political thought and activity. Trained as a political historian, I had a fervent interest in Victorian political history. My turn to Mill scholarship was fortuitous and happened only after I finished my graduate work at the University of Toronto. I audited a course on Victorian prose taught by John M. Robson, general editor of Mill’s Collected Works. In luck’s grip, I soon found myself in the enviable position of postdoctoral fellow on the Mill Project. With a wealth of stimulating material at hand, and the hearty and generous encourage- ment of the editor of the Collected Works, I began to look at circumscribed spheres of Mill’s political engagement. The probing continued for the next quarter century. I perforce learned a fair amount about Mill that did not impinge in a straightforward way on the political issues I grappled with. If anything, B.L. Kinzer, J.S. Mill Revisited © Bruce L. Kinzer 2007 2 J.S. Mill Revisited this learning made me even more wary of confronting problems of a biographical nature that held a controversial place in Mill studies: the psychological impact of James Mill on his eldest son; the causes and nature of J.S. Mill’s “mental crisis”; the dynamics of the Mill-Harriet Taylor relationship. Although I appreciated that any rounded under- standing of Mill depended on coming to grips with these problems, I was generally content to concentrate on narrow political matters that I thought had been insufficiently explored in the existing literature. In doing so, I recognized that I could thereby elucidate only a particular side of Mill, but it was a side that keenly interested me. A few years ago an opportunity arose to step away from the safe niche I had nestled into. Encouraged to embark upon a biographical investiga- tion of Mill’s early decades, with a view to sizing up his development and character, I reckoned it was time to take a risk. I had reached the twilight of my career without having weighed in on Mill’s formative years. The time had come to revisit this period of Mill’s life in a systematic and purposeful way, so that I might work out what I thought of the young person who ultimately became the preeminent thinker of his generation. My approach involved an effort to shield myself from the large body of excellent secondary literature on Mill. I knew full well that I had, over the years, amassed an incalculable debt to the many Mill scholars who had enriched my understanding of his life and thought. I now consid- ered it necessary, if ungrateful, to put their work aside. While I knew I could never bring a completely open mind to my revisiting of Mill’s early years, I wanted to keep the preconceptions to a minimum. Had I begun this undertaking with decided convictions of my own about what I wanted to say, I would not have felt a need to maintain a certain distance from the formidable gathering of Mill scholarship that has taken shape over the last half century.