John Stuart Mill
Autobiography
I. Childhood and Early Education
It seems proper that I should prefix to the following
biographical sketch, some mention of the reasons which have made
me think it desirable that I should leave behind me such a
memorial of so uneventful a life as mine. I do not for a moment
imagine that any part of what I have to relate can be interesting
to the public as a narrative, or as being connected with myself.
But I have thought that in an age in which education, and its
improvement, are the subject of more, if not of profounder study
than at any former period of English history, it may be useful
that there should be some record of an education which was
unusual and remarkable, and which, whatever else it may have
done, has proved how much more than is commonly supposed may be
taught, and well taught, in those early years which, in the
common modes of what is called instruction, are little better
than wasted. It has also seemed to me that in an age of
transition in opinions, there may be somewhat both of interest
and of benefit in noting the successive phases of any mind which
was always pressing forward, equally ready to learn and to
unlearn either from its own thoughts or from those of others. But
a motive which weighs more with me than either of these, is a
desire to make acknowledgment of the debts which my intellectual
and moral development owes to other persons; some of them of
recognized eminence, others less known than they deserve to be,
and the one to whom most of all is due, one whom the world had no
opportunity of knowing. The reader whom these things do not
interest, has only himself to blame if he reads farther, and I do
not desire any other indulgence from him than that of bearing in
mind, that for him these pages were not written.
I was born in London, on the 20th of May, 1806, and was the
eldest son of James Mill, the author of the History of British
India. My father, the son of a petty tradesman and (I believe)
small farmer, at Northwater Bridge, in the county of Angus, was,
when a boy, recommended by his abilities to the notice of Sir
John Stuart, of Fettercairn, one of the Barons of the Exchequer
in Scotland, and was, in consequence, sent to the University of
Edinburgh at the expense of a fund established by Lady Jane
Stuart (the wife of Sir John Stuart) and some other ladies for
educating young men for the Scottish Church. He there went
through the usual course of study, and was licensed as a
Preacher, but never followed the profession; having satisfied
himself that he could not believe the doctrines of that or any
other Church. For a few years he was a private tutor in various
families in Scotland, among others that of the Marquis of
Tweeddale; but ended by taking up his residence in London, and
devoting himself to authorship. Nor had he any other means of
support until 1819, when he obtained an appointment in the India
House.
In this period of my father's life there are two things which
it is impossible not to be struck with: one of them unfortunately
a very common circumstance, the other a most uncommon one. The
first is, that in his position, with no resource but the
precarious one of writing in periodicals, he married and had a
large family; conduct than which nothing could be more opposed,
both as a matter of good sense and of duty, to the opinions
which, at least at a later period of life, he strenuously upheld.
The other circumstance is the extraordinary energy which was
required to lead the life he led, with the disadvantages under
which he laboured from the first, and with those which he brought
upon himself by his marriage. It would have been no small thing,
had he done no more than to support himself and his family during
so many years by writing, without ever being in debt, or in any
pecuniary difficulty; holding, as he did, opinions, both in
politics and in religion, which were more odious to all persons
of influence, and to the common run of prosperous Englishmen in
that generation than either before or since; and being not only a
man whom nothing would have induced to write against his
convictions, but one who invariably threw into everything he
wrote, as much of his convictions as he thought the circumstances
would in any way permit: being, it must also be said, one who
never did anything negligently; never undertook any task,
literary or other, on which he did not conscientiously bestow all
the labour necessary for performing it adequately. But he, with
these burthens on him, planned, commenced, and completed, the
History of India; and this in the course of about ten years, a
shorter time than has been occupied (even by writers who had no
other employment) in the production of almost any other
historical work of equal bulk, and of anything approaching to the
same amount of reading and research. And to this is to be added,
that during the whole period, a considerable part of almost every
day was employed in the instruction of his children: in the case
of one of whom, myself, he exerted an amount of labour, care, and
perseverance rarely, if ever, employed for a similar purpose, in
endeavouring to give, according to his own conception, the
highest order of intellectual education.
A man who, in his own practice, so vigorously acted up to the
principle of losing no time, was likely to adhere to the same
rule in the instruction of his pupil. I have no remembrance of
the time when I began to learn Greek. I have been told that it
was when I was three years old. My earliest recollection on the
subject, is that of committing to memory what my father termed
Vocables, being lists of common Greek words, with their
signification in English, which he wrote out for me on cards. Of
grammar, until some years later, I learnt no more than the
inflexions of the nouns and verbs, but, after a course of
vocables, proceeded at once to translation; and I faintly
remember going through AEsop's Fables, the first Greek book which
I read. The Anabasis, which I remember better, was the second. I
learnt no Latin until my eighth year. At that time I had read,
under my father's tuition, a number of Greek prose authors, among
whom I remember the whole of Herodotus, and of Xenophon's
Cyropaedia and Memorials of Socrates; some of the lives of the
philosophers by Diogenes Laertius; part of Lucian, and Isocrates'
ad Demonicum and ad Nicoclem. I also read, in 1813, the first six
dialogues (in the common arrangement) of Plato, from the
Euthyphron to the Theaetetus inclusive: which last dialogue, I
venture to think, would have been better omitted, as it was
totally impossible I should understand it. But my father, in all
his teaching, demanded of me not only the utmost that I could do,
but much that I could by no possibility have done. What he was
himself willing to undergo for the sake of my instruction, may be
judged from the fact, that I went through the whole process of
preparing my Greek lessons in the same room and at the same table
at which he was writing: and as in those days Greek and English
lexicons were not, and I could make no more use of a Greek and
Latin lexicon than could be made without having yet begun to
learn Latin, I was forced to have recourse to him for the meaning
of every word which I did not know. This incessant interruption,
he, one of the most impatient of men, submitted to, and wrote
under that interruption several volumes of his History and all
else that he had to write during those years.
The only thing besides Greek, that I learnt as a lesson in
this part of my childhood, was arithmetic: this also my father
taught me: it was the task of the evenings, and I well remember
its disagreeableness. But the lessons were only a part of the
daily instruction I received. Much of it consisted in the books I
read by myself, and my father's discourses to me, chiefly during
our walks. From 1810 to the end of 1813 we were living in
Newington Green, then an almost rustic neighbourhood. My father's
health required considerable and constant exercise, and he walked
habitually before breakfast, generally in the green lanes towards
Hornsey. In these walks I always accompanied him, and with my
earliest recollections of green fields and wild flowers, is
mingled that of the account I gave him daily of what I had read
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