The ‘Greatest English Philosopher of the 19th Century’ lived for a time in Newington Green - by Richard Crawford
John Stuart Mill, Utilitarian, political philosopher and advocate of women’s rights, lived for three years with his father, James Mill, in Newington Green. They arrived in 1810, when John Stuart was four years of age and left three years later, in 1813. John Stuart’s father had strong views about education. He believed that children should start learning languages early. He taught his son Greek from the age of three by showing him ‘flash cards’ with a Greek word on them, next to which the English equivalent was written. His son was a precocious learner who was soon able to translate Aesop’s fables from the Greek. By all accounts, James Mill would sit with his son whilst he worked on his Greek translations and would answer his frequent requests to tell him the meaning of a new word. Despite the constant interruptions, his father managed to write scholarly articles on political topics and produce a definitive History of India which was published in 1818.
During his time in Newington Green, the young John Stuart Mill was an avid reader, preferring history books to other genres of literature. His early choice of reading is listed in his Autobiography. It included Robertson's History of America, Hume’s History of England, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Watson's Phillip the second and third, Hooke's history of Rome, Rollin's Ancient history, Langhorne's translation of Plutarch, Burnet's history of his own times, the Annual Register beginning 1788, Millar's Historical review of the English government, Mossheim's Ecclesiastical history, McCree's life of John Knox and Sewell's and Rutty's Histories of the Quakers. For lighter reading he turned to travel writing such as Beaver's African memoranda, Collin's First Settlers of New South Wales, Anson's voyage and Hawksworth's Voyages around the World. A few books of imaginative fiction also found their way into his hands including Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, The Arabian Nights, Cazotte's Arabian tales, Cervante’s Don Quixote, Miss Edgeworth's Popular Tales and Brooke's Fool of Quality. (John Stuart Mill. 2018 first pub 1873. p8-9)
This scholarly little boy would tell his father what he had read the day before on their daily walks up Green Lanes to Hornsey. John Stuart Mill recalls these walks as ‘rural’ - full of “green fields and wild flowers” (Mill, J.S. (2018; first pub 1873) p8). His route would have taken him along the side what is now Clissold Park but was then part of the Abney estate. (The park still has a good showing of wild flowers, especially in the Spring, thanks to the relaxed mowing regime practiced by the park keepers). In a letter written by the six year old John Stuart Mill, he asked the political philosopher Jeremy Bentham if he could borrow a history book from his personal collection:
““[could you] get for me the 3.d and 4.th volumes of Hooke’s Roman history … I am recapitulating the 1.st and 2.d volumes, having finished them all except a few pages of the 2.d. I will be glad if you will let him have the 3.d and 4.th volumes”. ”
The tone is so adult that it is hard to remember that this was written by a six year old child.
James Mill’s was a disciple of Jeremy Bentham, a philosopher who propounded a secular ethical doctrine called ‘Utitarianism’. Utilitarians believed that actions should be judged solely according to their potential to increase or decrease the welfare of people living in a society. As John Stuart Mill put it;
““the exclusive test of right and wrong [is] the tendency of actions to produce pleasure or pain [in others]”.”
This doctrine provided non-religious people with an ethical principle that did not rely on divine instruction. James Mill passed on to his son his indifference to all religious doctrines including those of the Anglican Church and the dissenting movements of his day, such as Unitarianism. Unsurprisingly, the young John Stuart Mill grew up to be a supporter of Utilitarianism, and, as he spent the early part of his childhood in Newington Green, he must also have come across members of the Unitarian congregation.
John Stuart Mill’s adult links with Unitarianism came through his future wife’s family. When he met Harriet Taylor as a young man of 25, she was married to John Taylor who came from a Unitarian family. Taylor was a businessman who also managing the finances of South Place Chapel, a Unitarian community situated near Finsbury Circus in London, led by a strong-willed minister named William Johnson Fox (Hayek. F.A. 1951:24). John Taylor’s grandfather happened to live in the house next door to James Mill's in Newington Green. He had sometimes invited young John to play in his garden, although seems to have had no influence on John Stuart Mill’s religious beliefs. By all accounts he was “a fine specimen of the old Scotch Puritan; stern, severe, and powerful, but very kind to children”, (Mill, J.S. 2018; first pub 1873:105).
Unitarians and Utilitarians
Unitarians and Utilitarians formed “an important social community” (Capaldi, N. 2004:13) in the early 19th century, particularly at the South Place Chapel in Finsbury where William Fox was the minister. Fox, who was in charge of a Unitarian periodical called the Monthly Repository, was also a frequent contributor to radical Liberal journal, Westminster Review that had been founded in 1824 by Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill’s father. Members of Unitarian-Utilitarian circles shared an interest in protecting individual freedoms and supported reforms of parliament that would bring about wider representation. Mill came to know William Fox well and also became close to James Martineau, brother of Harriett Martineau, who was a leading Unitarian theologian (Capaldi, N. 2004:180). According to Capaldi, he shared many Unitarian beliefs:
“Mill accepted in some sense the existence of a deity, denied the divinity of Jesus, opposed ritualism, despised biblical fundamentalism, ... shared their belief in freedom of the will, and embraced the notion of a non- omnipresent God with whom we were allies in the struggle against evil …
[he also] shared the advanced ideas about women and the other social issues that he had found in the Unitarian sect where he had met Harriet Taylor. ”
Harriet Martneau, the Unitarian writer, had been a guest at the dinner party at which Mill met his future wife, Harriet Taylor. Many of Martineau’s intellectual interests aligned with Mill’s. She, like Mill, wrote about gender inequality. Her first written work was entitled: On Female Education. It was published in 1821, forty years before The Subjection of Women, which Mill co-authored with his stepdaughter, Helen Taylor, appeared in 1861. In this essay, Mill advocated marriage based on equality, echoing a dominant theme in Mary Wollstonecraft’s ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Women’ (1792). He claimed that his essay was “the result of innumerable conversations he had had with his wife” (Fawcett, E. G. (1912) pxvii), under whose influence he had discovered that “the truths of feeling were as important as the truths of fact” (Capaldi, N 2004:84). The older John Stuart Mill no longer saw pleasure and pain as the only factors to take into consideration when it came to making moral judgements. People also had rights that had to be respected and protected.
Capaldi, Nicholas. (2004) John Stuart Mill. A biography. Cambridge. CUP.
Fawcett, E. G. (1912). Introduction to On Liberty, Representative Government, the Subjection of Women. London. Oxford University Press.
Hayek, F. A. (1951) John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor: Their Correspondence and Subsequent Marriage. Chicago Illinois, The University of Chicago Press
Mill, J.S. (2018; first pub 1873) Autobiography. Oxford. OUP.
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