John Stuart Mill: Victorian Firebrand by Richard Reeves
Atlantic Books £30, pp620
Thomas Hardy once came across John Stuart Mill canvassing for votes at an open-air election meeting in Covent Garden. 'He stood bare-headed, and his vast pale brow, so thin-skinned as to show the blue veins, sloped back like a stretching upland, and conveyed to the observer a curious sense of perilous exposure ...'
It wasn't only Hardy who found Mill as remote, stony and exposed as a Dorset hillside. He chilled even his best friends. Thomas Carlyle called him ice-bound, inhuman, a mechanistic 'logic-chopping engine'. Caroline Fox, who was probably as fond of Mill when young as anybody could be, said that even he must shiver sometimes at the terrible cold, calm clarity of his mind.
Mill was pushing 60 when he took his seat as MP for Westminster, and got what his biographer calls the political equivalent of a rock-star reception. By his own account, the only serious intervention he made in the House of Commons was to table a tiny legislative amendment that would have revolutionised the western world - if it had been passed. Mill's modest proposal was that the word 'person' be substituted for 'man' in the Reform Act of 1867.
Votes for women, like racial equality, colonial representation and most other propositions that looked self-evident to Mill, seemed the purest fantasy to his contemporaries. He said he learned to gauge how right he was about any given topic by the fury and derision it provoked. He advised young radicals to think big and aim far ('Do not pare down your undertaking to what you hope to see successful in the next few years, or in the years of your own life'). He was living proof of his own maxim that 'the crotchet of one generation becomes the truth of the next, and the truism of the one after'.
Some of Mill's crotchets - environmentalism, for instance, or proportional representation - have not yet become truisms to this day. His major works from A System of Logic (which made his name in his thirties) to On Liberty and The Subjection of Women look collectively, in retrospect, like a 20th-century blueprint. Mill, who welcomed communism in so far as it meant equality, the abolition of privilege and state ownership of land, foresaw more than half a century before the Russian revolution that the system's intrinsic tyranny ('the absolute dependence of each on all, and surveillance of each by all') could end only in moral stagnation and material collapse.
His prophetic vision was nothing if not pragmatic. Its almost total lack of emotional bias, moral preconception or normal human prejudice came from an education expressly designed by his father and his legal guardian, Jeremy Bentham, to produce a mind of encyclopaedic learning and pure analytic power trained to operate with maximum agility, suppleness and stamina. The child's schedule allowed no friends, games, toys or time to play. He simply studied all day at the same table as his two adult mentors. By the age of 11 the younger Mill was rising at 5am to work on the proofs of his father's History of British India. At 19, he edited in his spare time a chaotic heap of Bentham's papers to produce five classic volumes on British legal theory.
'He was his father's project,' writes Richard Reeves, who ably demonstrates that, intellectually speaking and from posterity's point of view, the project was an unqualified success. People who watched it take shape at the time felt more dubious. 'If anything could make intellectual culture odious and terrible, it is the example of that overstrained infant,' wrote Harriet Grote, appalled by a programme that ignored or actively repressed both physical and emotional development. Mill himself came to agree with her, citing fear as the driving principle of his lost boyhood.
Reeves endorses their view without making any particular attempt to investigate what it must have meant in practice. One of the surprising gaps in this gripping and authoritative biography is that it has so little to say about Mill's mother, or what part, if any, she played in his upbringing, let alone its impact on his eight younger, apparently more or less expendable siblings. Another curious omission is Mill's professional career. He started out as a teenager on £30 a year in his father's office at the East India Company, rising rapidly to inherit the top job together with an annual salary of £2,000 (at least £125,000 today), and retiring at 52 on a pension almost as big.
What he did with the money is a mystery, and so is what he did to earn it. Mill spent three decades administering the Indian subcontinent for the British, and doing it - as he argued forcibly when the company was wound up - rather more effectively than the government's parallel attempts to retain control of North America. But virtually all we learn about this mammoth enterprise is that Mill never gave it more than three hours a day, and often took his trousers off so as to speed up the work.
There was an innocent, unworldly, always faintly alarming infantile streak in Mill that runs perhaps most strongly through his relationship with Harriet Taylor , the married woman who was by all accounts the only human being he ever truly loved. Judicious and sardonic as his subject, Reeves offers no verdict as to whether or not the two slept together in the 20 years before her husband's death enabled them to marry, or indeed whether Mill's beloved was actually as unpleasant as many of his admirers have maintained. His own effusive tributes to the majesty of her intellect and the infallibility of her judgment seem decidedly less persuasive than Charlotte Bronte's crisp summing-up, based on a feminist article by Mrs Taylor: 'I thought it was the work of a powerful-minded, clear-headed woman, who had a hard, jealous heart, muscles of iron, and nerves of bent leather; of a woman who longed for power and had never felt affection.'
They sound a scary couple but, in fact, the quality that shines from almost every page of this bicentenary biography is not just Mill's lack of bitterness but the extraordinary generosity that was in his case a faculty of intelligence. Liberty, individuality and imagination were the essence of his thought, and now that Mill's liberalism seems to have finally run its course, Reeves spells out its implications with exemplary lucidity, thoroughness and brio.