Despite writing a shelf-full of books, including his own autobiography, the great Victorian intellectual John Stuart Mill remains a man of mystery to scholars. However, a new side of Mill has now come to light, hidden in the margins of his library.
It turns out that Mill was an inveterate annotator, scribbling comments, observations and in some cases graffiti throughout his library. More than 140 years after his death, those notes are being collected and published for the first time.
Albert Pionke, a professor of Victorian culture at the University of Alabama, has been leading the effort to identify and record Mill’s marginalia since 2014, a painstaking effort that is not even halfway through.
Each book in the 1,700-book collection held at Somerville College, Oxford, has to be examined page by page, photographed and in many cases restored. The 200 books scrutinised so far have yielded 10,000 individual marks and Pionke estimates the final total will reach more than 40,000.
The project, funded by the University of Alabama and supported by Somerville, is launching a website carrying digital copies of the marks and a searchable archive of the marginalia collected, allowing scholars to quickly find references.
The notes also shed a new light on Mill himself, one far removed from the chilly Victorian best known to later generations for the harsh education imposed by his father, James Mill, who crammed him with Greek and Latin from the age of three.
Interspersed throughout the books are flashes of emotion and anger as Mill engages with a text, leaving comments such as “Nonsense!” The American author Ralph Waldo Emerson comes in for harsh treatment, with his writing cuttingly described as “Trash” and “Stupid. Very stupid.”
“It shows that Mill was more like the rest of us than he sometimes seems at a distance,” Pionke said.
“He changed his mind about things, he felt strongly, he expressed himself ungenerously, and at times with more emotional heat than the cool, intellectual logic you get from all his published works. So I think of this as returning the human to the incredibly cerebral John Stuart Mill.”
Mill’s collection was given to Somerville College in 1905, more than 30 years after his death. It was an important gift for the women’s college, whose library only had a few thousand books at a time when women were unable to use Oxford’s main libraries such as the Bodleian.
Mill’s books remained on the shelves until 1969, when they were finally removed into a special collection after being ravaged by age and undergraduates. Now housed in a small room of their own, the worst-affected are being carefully restored by the Oxford Conservation Consortium.
Nikki Tomkins, one of the conservators, says the collection includes treasures such as a signed copy of a book by Charles Darwin, inscribed to Mill “with respect” by the author.
“These are historical documents, they’re not just here to look pretty on shelves,” said Tomkins. “Researchers have to be able to come and look at them without leaving a trail of paper behind them.”
Pionke says the marginalia will be a “virtual goldmine” for Mill scholars, including those studying his political philosophy, and historians looking at his work as a political reformer alongside his wife Harriet Taylor – who Mill credited as a significant contributor to much of his work.
Unfortunately for historians, Mill destroyed many of the letters he exchanged with Taylor as well as many of his own, while much of his own correspondence was lost or destroyed over the decades following his death in 1873.
“The marginalia fills in a lot of gaps in Mill’s story about himself. Mill’s autobiography is famously opaque about a lot of detail about Mill’s life,” Pionke said.
For evidence of Mill’s “famously rigorous” education, Pionke offers the example of an obscure logic textbook used by Mill as a young child.
“That book is the most heavily marked book that I have seen in the collection – there are 1,500 examples of marginalia in that book and about 600 of them are inscrutable numbers, written in tiny margins,” Pionke said.
“It looks like Mill was writing himself an index to this book – because every afternoon he said he would take walks with his father in the garden, and his father would ask him long and searching questions about what he learned.
“He was obviously anxious to keep up, so I think this index was his 12-year-old schoolboy’s attempt to marshall all of the information, so that when Mill walked with his father he would be able to know what he was talking about.”