John Stuart Mill in the Context of His Own Marginalia

Abstract

It is extremely unusual in the case of a writer as well known and thoroughly documented as Victorian Britain’s leading philosophical empiricist and liberal theorist, John Stuart Mill, to discover a substantial amount of new, unpublished work. However, that is precisely what is contained in the textual margins, endpapers, flyleaves, and title pages of Mill’s private library, once housed at his residence in Blackheath, London and now conserved in the John Stuart Mill Collection at Somerville College, Oxford. The now-just-under 1700 books and 50 unbound offprints and pamphlets contain tens of thousands of original handwritten marks and annotations that provide a diverse, unique, and largely under-examined context for future research. In this essay, we explore the multiple biographical, historical, logical, and material contexts for Mill’s childhood education provided by the marginalia in his personal library. Without minimizing either the practical or the theoretical difficulties that attend any attempt such as this to extract meaningful knowledge from haphazard archival information, we shall perform a deep dive into a single well-marked book, Franco Burgersdijk’s Institutionum Logicarum (1637), in order to balance Mill’s rather smoothly understated memory of his learning against the extraordinary effort, anxiety, and occasional exasperation recorded by his precocious younger self.