John Stuart Mill and the Harriet Taylor Myth

Bibliographic Data

ID3231815
AuthorsT W Hutchison, H O Pappe
Year1961
Volume14
Issue1
Pages155
Publication date1961-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe Economic History Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0013-0117 • E-ISSN: 1468-0289
PublisherJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/2591375
OpenAlexW1990024780
LanguageEN
Citations received5
References cited12

THE HARRIET TAYLOR MYTHThe antiseptic Mill tradition has come round full circle.The purely intellectual life of the 'Saint of Rationalism' has been turned into the story of a romantic lover.Before the Mill docu ments, finally released from the watchful custody of Helen and Mary Taylor, became available for scholarly scrutiny, both followers and adversaries exhausted their interest in Mill by scanning his stature as a thinker.This seemed to be in keeping with Mill's own version in the Autobiography.This work was written as the history, in an age of transition in opinions, of the successive phases of a dynamic mind, equally ready to learn and to unlearn either from his own thoughts or from those of others; as an acknowledgment of the debts which his intel lectual and moral development owed to others.The emotions and the passions were hardly invoked, except in the context of Mill's mental crisis and of 'the most valuable friendship' of his life.The crisis in his mental history was essentially the decisive step in the maturing and unfolding of Mill's person ality-a process too healthy to deserve more than superficial psychological interest.On the other hand, Mill's exalted refer ences to Harriet Taylor, his friend for two decades and (after her first husband's death) his wife for seven years, were too forbidding to invite any suspicious prying into so elevated a union.'The figure invested with such a blaze of light', Leslie Stephen commented, 'has neither distinct form nor colouring.'1Harriet Taylor was left in the limbo to which she had been relegated by Mill's contemporaries.However, far wider claims have been made by Mill's new biographers such as Hayek, Packe, and Mrs Borchard

Archaeology · Mill · Mythology · Sociology · Classics · History · Political Theory and Influence