J.S. Mill and London

Abstract

In “The Spirit of the Age,” written in 1831, J.S. Mill observed that a man “may learn in a morning’s walk through London more of the history of England during the nineteenth century, than all the professed histories in existence will tell him concerning the other eighteen.” Schooled at home by his father, Mill never matriculated at college or university. He gave speeches not in the Cambridge or Oxford Unions, but in the London Debating Society or (much later) at Westminster election meetings and in parliamentary debates. For thirty-five years he was employed at India House, the Leadenhall Street headquarters of the East India Company. When not living in Westminster, Kensington, or Blackheath, he resided in Avignon (for nearly half of each year between the death of Harriet Taylor Mill in 1858 and his own death in 1873). Mill almost certainly felt more at home in parts of France than he did in any place in England outside the capital. He was quintessentially a metropolitan intellectual. This article considers some of the manifold ways Mill’s London identity influenced his thought and activity.