by Simon Schama
Some of the urgency and passion that Mill (whose prose, as he endearingly knew, seldom smoulders with either) evinces here was due precisely to his dismay at Harriet’s part in all this, being reduced to that of Supporting Wife. The ideal helpmeet as sketched in John Ruskin’s Sesame and Lilies (1865) was permitted to cultivate only the kind of knowledge already acquired by her husband, and was expected to act as permanently indentured proof-reader, inkwell-filler and – when the reviews came in – up-cheerer. That, insisted Mill, had not been the case with him and Harriet at all. Theirs had been a meeting of minds long before a mating of bodies. Mill may have been stronger in the technical science of ideas, especially economic theories, but Taylor had understood and passed on two sorts of knowledge in which he was decidedly the weaker party – grand metaphysical ideas as well as practical human applications (the spiritual and the social). All that he, Mill, was left with was the ‘intermediate’ realm, which in his Autobiography he implied, disingenuously, any old pedant could master as best he could. The psychological subtext of this elaborately formal apologia was in fact powerful, even sensational. For what John Stuart Mill really meant was that when he had met Harriet, he found someone who emancipated him – from thralldom to his father.
It was 1830; he was 24. She was a year younger, married, with three children to John Taylor, a City trader in medical drugs, whose Scottish family was well known to the originally Scottish Mills. Harriet had already published poems, book reviews and essays. Mill was working as a clerk in the Examiners’ Office of the East India Company, drafting dispatches to be sent out to the company’s legal and fiscal councillors. His father, who also worked for the Company, had found him the job. But then James Mill had done everything he possibly could to make John Stuart, the eldest of nine children, in his own image. Mill senior had committed himself, as thoroughly as he knew how, to furthering the utilitarian creed of his friend and mentor Jeremy Bentham, which was to increase the ‘greatest happiness of the greatest number’ of mankind. Beginning with the presumption that man was a bundle of sense-receptors, responding to either pleasure or pain, the enlightened legislator would aim to maximize the former and minimize the latter. For the first time the ills, material and moral, that plagued humanity were to be systematically and scientifically analysed: their magnitude measured, the causes diagnosed and the remedies prescribed. A report would be issued and recommendations made for legislation; a salaried inspectorate would be recruited to see to its execution and enforcement. Hitherto, empires had been run by power. The British Empire would be run by knowledge. James Mill had become a candidate for the position in the Examiners’ Office after publishing an immense, not to say unreadably exhaustive, The History of British India (1817).
John Stuart Mill was just 11 when his father’s magnum opus was laid before the world. But his training to be one of the propagators of felicity had begun much earlier. Since a child’s mind was a sheet of smooth, soft wax, perfectly empty but perfectly receptive, the impress of instruction could not be made too early. Three was just about the right age, James decided, to begin teaching his son Greek. Initiation was Aesop’s Fables (in the original), swiftly followed by Plato, Herodotus (all of it) and Xenophon. Arithmetic was a lot less fun, but by eight there was always Latin, Nathaniel Hooke’s The Roman History from the Building of Rome to the Commonwealth (1738–71) and John Millar’s An Historical View of the English Government from the Settlement of the Saxons to the Accession of the House of Stewart (1787) for light relief. The Mills lived in the favourite suburb of radical Improvers and feminists, Dr Price’s Stoke Newington Green. And it was while striding around the Green and on longer walks into what was still countryside that Mill senior drilled his 10-year-old in differential calculus, Roman agrarian laws and the analysis of Greek rhetoric. When his father was appointed to his post with the East India Company, it was John Stuart’s turn to teach his younger siblings. In his spare time between reading the proofs of his father’s The History of British India and being put through political economy and logic, he managed to smuggle in a little literature – mostly Shakespeare. At 14 he was allowed a trip to the Château Pompignon near Toulouse; but when he returned, his father’s relentlessly intensive instruction continued.
James Mill had been breathtakingly successful in turning John Stuart into a thinking machine crammed full of every conceivable kind of knowledge, his powers of calculation and computation perfectly calibrated. But he had also made a creature already cowed by the burden of his assigned mission to Know Everything That Mattered; fearful of his unyieldingly stern father; racked by a terror of his own inadequacy. But at least, he supposed, he had been given the foundation of wisdom and the vocation of virtue. That supposition was profoundly shaken by a series of attacks made in the middle and late 1820s on Jeremy Bentham and James Mill by some of the brightest and sharpest essayists writing in the Reviews, not least Thomas Carlyle and (in a different spirit) the young Thomas Babington Macaulay. Carlyle attacked utilitarianism for assuming that human beings and the cultures into which they were gathered were akin to machines that might be retooled as and when they showed signs of malfunction. Only the victims of a higher naivety could remain impervious to the manifest truth that it was spirit, not base matter, that made the difference between the happiness and the misery of societies. Macaulay attacked utilitarianism for its refusal to concede that there might be a direct conflict between the imposition of scientifically optimized reforms and the protection of liberty.
The rest of Mill’s life was to be spent working out exactly those conflicts – between freedom and amelioration, but also between the competing claims of logic and feeling. So when his father’s Unitarian minister, William Johnson Fox, brought Mr and Mrs Taylor to the Mills’ house, and Mill drank in the huge eyes, the swan neck and the confident, eloquent speech, he knew instinctively that he had found an altogether new kind of instruction. Within a short time he learned that Harriet, who had been married very young, was now bitterly unhappy. Her husband had committed no cruelty. By the standards of the day he might even have been judged a good spouse. It was simply that, measured by the exalted sense of what a properly companionate marriage might be, she saw the depths of their incompatibility; his imperviousness to everything she most cherished: art, poetry, philosophy. Tied to him, she would be no more than a dutiful helpmeet. John Stuart Mill, on the other hand, plainly admired her for precisely the qualities of spirit and independent thought that had made her feel her marriage was a prison. Within a few more weeks they were writing to each other as ‘dearest’. In the summer of 1833 Mill wrote, ‘O my own love, whatever it may or may not be to you, you need never regret for a moment what has already brought such increase of happiness and can in no possible way increase evil…. I am taking as much care of your robin [her bird] as if it were your own sweet self.’
Although, over the next 20 years of a tortured romance, Harriet Taylor and John Stuart Mill would spend as much time as they could in each other’s company and achieve an extraordinary intimacy, it seems certain that Mill was telling the truth in his Autobiography when he insisted that no boundaries of physical propriety had ever been breached. Sexual consummation would only happen once they were married. But their predicament certainly made the two of them turn their attention to the obstacles in the way of divorce in Victorian Britain.
Given that, legally (as another of the Langham Place feminists, Frances Power Cobbe, put it), married women were in the same category as ‘criminals, idiots and minors’, they were disqualified from suing for divorce, although they themselves could be divorced by their husbands for adultery. A Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Bill was passed in parliament in 1857, but it was not what it seemed. Enacted specifically to pre-empt a measure that would have given married women property rights, this piece of legislation perpetuated, rather than corrected, the inequities between the sexes. Husbands could divorce their wives for adultery, but wives could only return the favour if that adultery took the form of rape, sodomy
, bestiality or some indeterminate act of cruelty. And, needless to say, so long as injured wives still had no title to their own property or income, the heavy costs involved in bringing a suit all but precluded it ever being brought. The notion that a divorce action might be brought (as Harriet would have done) for mere incompatibility remained the most fantastic prospect.
By the time the Divorce Act was passed, Harriet and John Stuart Mill had been married for six years. During most of the 20 years that preceded it Harriet had lived apart from Taylor, who, after Mill and his wife had gone off to Paris together for six months, was sufficiently humiliated to ask for a separation. But the peculiar arrangement somehow persisted. Mill would call on the Taylors (reunited for a while) for dinner, whereupon the husband would obligingly make himself scarce at his club. John and Harriet seemed armoured by the certainty of their love against the discomfort and distaste they provoked even in people whom they had thought of as friends, like the Carlyles. When one night John Stuart abruptly drove up in the company of Mrs Taylor, Carlyle professed himself relieved to discover that a distraught Mill was confessing that a maidservant at his house had burned the entire first draft of Carlyle’s French Revolution. Bad as that was, Carlyle thought, it was actually better than the expected announcement – that Taylor and Mill had run off together! (Jane Welsh Carlyle, who never liked Harriet, persisted in suspecting that somehow she had been responsible for the destruction of the manuscript.)
All these vexations were endured for the sake of an ideal union founded on mutual respect and love. The clarity and steadfastness of the conviction led the couple to submit the conventions of Victorian marriage to unsparing criticism, much of which was incorporated in The Subjection of Women, published by Mill in 1869. The entire institution, they argued, was gift-wrapped in a tissue of falsehood and hypocrisy. Young girls were indoctrinated with the fallacy that ‘marriage was the true profession of women’, and that it would be an abode of perfect contentment thereafter. By a conspiracy of silence and expediency, the sacrificial victims of the arrangement were kept in ignorance, not just of the physical but also of the social reality of what really lay in store for them as wives. Marriage among the propertied classes was overwhelmingly a business transaction, rationally calculated to accumulate wealth, status and power. Bargains of mutual profit were made between the contracting parties. A family of high rank but depleted fortune would be allied to one that was its complementary opposite. The driving force, always, was hard interest, not soft sentiment. While marriage was ostensibly ordained for the containment of lust, the practical circumstances in which many unions were entered into more or less guaranteed the opposite, once the partners who had been brought together by the spurious claims of romance became inevitably disillusioned. The women then found themselves corrupted and ensnared in a diabolical bargain. They kept their fashionable clothes, their fine carriage, their servants, their children and their social position (and even, if they were very discreet, their lovers); their husbands got to keep their mistresses. It was, Mill and Harriet supposed, a sort of cohabitation, but ‘if this be all that human life has for women, it is little enough, and any woman who feels herself capable of great happiness and whose aspirations have not been artificially checked will claim to be set free from this, to seek more’.
It was only John Taylor’s death, in 1849, that set Harriet free. The couple married two years later at Melcombe Regis register office, a month before the opening of the Great Exhibition, ostracized by Mill’s family and many of their old friends. Before they tied the knot, Mill insisted on signing a formal renunciation of the conventional legal rights of the Victorian husband. It is, perhaps, the most high-minded pre-nuptial declaration ever made:
Being about, if I am so happy, as to obtain her consent, to enter into the marriage relations with the only woman I have ever known with whom I would have entered into that state, and the whole marriage relation as constituted by law being such as she and I entirely disapprove … I, having no means of legally disinvesting myself of those odious powers (as I most assuredly would do if an engagement to that effect could be made legally binding on me) feel it my duty to put on record a formal protest against the existing law of marriage. … And in the event of marriage between Mrs Taylor and me I declare it to be my will and intention and the condition of any engagement between us that she retains in all respects whatever, the same absolute freedom of action and freedom of disposal of herself and of all that does or may at any time belong to her, as if no marriage had taken place and I absolutely disclaim and repudiate all pretension to have acquired any rights whatsoever by virtue of such a marriage.
Their domestic happiness was short-lived. Both of them were suffering from what developed into fatal tuberculosis. As Harriet’s more advanced condition grew worse, they separated for months at a time while she tried to slow the progression of the disease by stays at Swiss sanatoria, or in the warmer, drier air of Provence. Conscious that he himself had a limited time, Mill busied himself with what he called ‘the sacred duty’ of transcribing Harriet’s thoughts on the equality of the sexes. The doctors, who were not altogether candid with them about the galloping deterioration of Harriet’s condition in particular, insisted on separate rest cures, even though the separation was agony for Mill. Trapped inside a railway carriage in France, his route back to Harriet and England blocked by impassable snow, Mill brooded poignantly on their shared plight, and on the sense of warmth and security ‘given by the consciousness of being loved [and] by being near the one by whom one is … loved the best. … I have experience at present of both these things for I feel as if no really dangerous illness could actually happen to me when I have her to care for me … yet I feel by coming away from her I have parted with a kind of talisman and was more open to the attacks of the enemy than when I was with her.’
Harriet died in November 1858 at Avignon, en route to the Mediterranean. Mill bought a house close to her grave and lived there for much of the rest of his life, while he finished the treatise On Liberty that immortalized him as the strongest pillar of Victorian liberal thought, and that he dedicated to his wife. Although he faithfully reproduced Harriet’s opinions, he did not wholeheartedly agree with all of them. Whilst he made no bones about the right of women to seek and gain ‘useful’ work outside the home, he was not at all convinced that doing so would necessarily make them happier. But if that were their choice, or their necessity – and the census of 1851 showed that fully half the six million adult women of Britain were in fact employed – then, it went without saying, Mill believed, that they should have equal pay for equal work. To those, like psychiatric researcher Dr Henry Maudsley, who argued that their ‘biology’ (a euphemism for the menstrual cycle) precluded them from working for as much as eight days a month, Mill responded bluntly: ‘What is now called the “nature of women” is an eminently artificial thing. … I believe that their disabilities are only clung to, to maintain their subordination in domestic life because the generality of the male sex cannot yet tolerate the idea of living with an equal.’
In 1865 Mill, now a nationally known figure, was approached by a group of Westminster electors and asked if he would stand for parliament. It was a critical moment. Prodded by its radical wing, the leadership of the Liberal party, Lord John Russell and William Gladstone, had decided to embrace a measure of parliamentary reform that, for all its circumspection and caution, would still end up extending the franchise to almost all householders. Mill’s voice would be powerful in support not so much in spite of, but because of, the fact that he was actually against universal suffrage and the secret ballot. The crucial qualification, as far as he was concerned, was education (indeed he actually wanted votes weighted to reflect the amount of education, rather than rateable property, possessed by the voter). He was well aware of the eccentricity of his views. ‘I was convinced that no numerous or influential portion of any electoral body really wished to be represented by a person of my opinions.’ As if that was not enough, he ref
used to stand as the candidate of any party, to campaign or canvass or spend a single penny on his own behalf.
And there was another issue that he thought would make his election even more improbable. Following an article published by Harriet in 1851 in the Englishwoman’s Journal, Mill insisted that if household suffrage were granted in the boroughs it must include women as well as men. For although married women could not own houses in their own right, there was nothing to stop single women or widows; and there were, almost certainly, tens of thousands of women who fell into that category. For that matter, ‘householder’ in 1866 included rate-paying tenants, and that would have multiplied the eligible female franchise even more.
Mill’s stepdaughter, Helen Taylor, with whom he shared much of his life after Harriet’s death, was determined to keep this flame lit. It was she who encouraged Barbara Leigh Smith (now legally Madame Bodichon, having married a French-Algerian sculptor – from whom, needless to say, she lived apart half the year) to approach Mill about presenting a petition to parliament. Some 1200 women had signed their names, asking for the franchise. Mill was constitutionally shy about stirring up noisy publicity on the streets, but he got the vocal support of the Langhamites whether he wanted it or not. One of their number, Emily Davies (later the founder of Girton College, Cambridge, the first Oxbridge college for women, set up in 1874, some 25 years after the first London colleges, Queen’s and Bedford), remembered that during the campaign ‘Madame Bodichon hired a carriage, occupied by herself, Isa Craig, Bessie Parkes and myself, with placards upon it, to drive about Westminster. We called it “giving Mr Mill our moral support” but there was some suspicion that we might rather be doing him harm as one of our friends told us he had heard him described as “the man who wants to have girls in Parliament”.’
