Parallel Lives

by Phyllis Rose

  Mr and Mrs Mill believed that their personal history proved something the world greatly needed proven: that rationality could be a more important bond between men and women than sensuality; that sex was less important in love than intellectual companionship, that sex could be done without altogether. When Mill began writing his autobiography, Harriet requested that he include a history of their relationship from 1830 until their marriage, focusing on the strong affection between them, the intimacy of their friendship and the absence of impropriety. ‘It seems to me an edifying picture for those wretches who cannot conceive friendship but in sex – nor believe that expediency and the consideration for the feelings of others can conquer sensuality.’31

  Mill obeyed her instructions with the scrupulousness he always devoted to her wishes and wrote,

  We disdained, as every person not a slave of his animal appetites must do, the abject notion that the strongest and tenderest friendship cannot exist between a man and a woman without a sensual relation, or that any impulses of that lower character cannot be put aside when regard for the feelings of others, or even when only prudence and personal dignity require it. Certain it is that our life, during those years, would have borne the strictest scrutiny, and though for the sake of others we not only made this sacrifice but the much greater one of not living together, we did not feel under an obligation of sacrificing that intimate friendship and frequent companionship which was the chief good of life and the principal object in it, to me and … I may also say to her.32

  The phrase ‘during those years’ might suggest that in later years Mr and Mrs Mill did not abstain from sex. The reference to abstinence as a ‘sacrifice’ argues even more persuasively against the chastity of their relationship after marriage. Yet most modern scholars have assumed that the Mills’ marriage was never consummated. These scholars cite a habit of abstinence which they think would have been deeply ingrained by the time the Mills married, in their late forties. They also cite Harriet’s back problems, stemming from a carriage accident in 1842, which left her an invalid, virtually unable to walk. Alexander Bain, the only one of Mill’s biographers who knew him personally, believed that ‘in the so-called sensual feelings, he was below average’, not a good representative of humanity. ‘He made light of the difficulties of controlling the sexual appetite.’ The only documentary glimpse we have into John Mill’s buried life suggests sensuality efficiently repressed. It is provided by a dream of 1857 in which Mill longs to find in one woman both friend and ‘Magdalene’, is rebuked for the thought by a woman who sounds very much like Harriet, and retreats into dowdy abstractions about the nature of the good.33 None of this is conclusive. I myself would like to think that the marriage was consummated. I would like to think it was lust fuelling Mill’s hyperbolic attachment to Platonica. But there is no evidence, one way or the other – no smoking pistol. What can be said with certainty is that sex was not the binding element in Harriet’s attachment to John and John would not have approved its playing any part in his attachment to her.

  In John Mill’s mind as in Harriet’s, sex was hopelessly associated with an unjust arrangement of power: it gave men pleasure at women’s expense. Like most Victorian feminists, Mill saw women as the victims of male sexuality and looked forward to an age of diminished sexual activity as an advance. He felt – again like most feminists – that he was addressing himself to an over-sexed and self-indulgent age. (When Josephine Butler led her great campaign against the double standard, her demand was not that women be given the same sexual freedom as men but that men conform to the standard of sexual purity applied to women.)34 Victorian feminism generally was opposed to birth control because it would remove one of women’s few defences against sex – the fear of pregnancy – and would make them vulnerable to male sexuality more of the time.

  For Mill the goal of equality between men and women and the goal of conquering sensuality were connected. But since his time, mainstream feminism has tended to valorise sexual fulfilment. Now, when so many of Mill’s ideas about women and marriage are accepted, it is hard to resist the impulse to present his relationship with Mrs Mill as prefiguring a contemporary feminist ideal of a heterosexual relationship in which ‘sex and intellect, family and work, are blended’.35 Alice Rossi, in presenting the Mills’ as an ideal marriage, frankly acknowledges that hers is an exercise in retrospective utopianism, an attempt to find in the past models that, as a feminist who values heterosexual relationships, she would like to find in the present. But the fit is not a good one. The Mills are not such a perfect blend. Moreover, they would not have approved this vision of themselves – any more than they approved George Mill’s.

  Ironically, as Mill tried to use his life to prove the truth of his theories (how sensuality could be transcended in a rational relationship between a man and a woman; the nature of a marriage of equals), his enemies used it to discredit him. In 1883, when a young Viennese woman expressed admiration for Mill’s ideas about marriage, her fiancé hastened to set her straight.

  This is altogether a topic on which one does not find Mill quite human. His autobiography is so prudish or so unearthy that one would never learn from it that humanity is divided between men and women, and that this difference is the most important one. His relationship to his own wife strikes one as inhuman, too. He marries her late in life, has no children from her, the question of love as we know it is never mentioned … In all his writings it never appears that the woman is different from the man, which is not to say she is something less, if anything the opposite. For example he finds an analogy for the oppression of women in that of the Negro. Any girl, even without a vote and legal rights, whose hand is kissed by a man willing to risk his all for her love, could have put him right on this.

  Freud (for it was he) concluded sternly, ‘The position of woman cannot be other than what it is: to be an adored sweetheart in youth, and a beloved wife in maturity.’36 As he was in the dominant nineteenth-century scientific tradition in his biological determinism about women, Freud was in the majority, too, in using Mill’s relationship with his wife – ‘inhuman’, ‘unearthy’ – as a way of attacking the credibility of his theories about women. Late-nineteenth-century critics of Mill hinted more or less snidely at the sexlessness of his life or the absence of masculinity in his nature. ‘For though he could not be argued down by reason even after he was dead,’ writes Mill’s biographer Michael St John Packe, ‘it could be asserted that he was more a woman than a man, and as a woman, need not be listened to.’37

  It seems appropriate that in trying to imagine the married life of those intensely mental creatures Mr and Mrs Mill, so gloriously wrapped up in their experiment of living reasonably, we are strongly drawn to trace conflicting ideas about them – ours, theirs, others’. And it appears to me that their idea of the point and shape of their life together was no less a fiction – and no more convincing a fiction – than George Mill’s or Freud’s or Alice Rossi’s or mine. They cling to each other in London drawing rooms devoted to enlightened discussion. They stroll through Parisian streets discussing the ethics of their behaviour. They exhibit supremely, deliciously, that exclusive preference for each other’s company to which we generally give the name love. They remain devoted to each other for twenty years, waiting for the chance to marry. Like the lovers in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, like lovers everywhere with a respect for the life of the mind, they dote on each other and congratulate themselves on their Reason.

  a marriage of equals

  They took a secluded house on a twenty-year lease in Blackheath Park, about eight miles outside London. Every day a little after nine Mill left for his office, walking the half mile from his house to the railway station and then the hefty distance from Charing Cross to Leadenhall Street, where he had worked, in India House, from the age of seventeen and would continue to work until the government of India was removed from the hands of the East India Company. Until he was fifty-two, his job, like his father’s before him, was to read dispatches
from the company’s agents in India and to draft replies, in effect instructing them, from halfway around the world, how to run a country he had never seen. He did it well. His services were appreciated by the company, and he was making £1,200 per year at the time of his marriage. He considered his job the perfect way for a writer like himself to make a living. Intellectual enough not to be drudgery, his office duties were a kind of relaxation after the demands of philosophic thinking and writing. Had he tried to make a living from his pen alone, he would have had to compromise his opinions or work himself to a frazzle. As it was, he sacrificed only his leisure to travel and freedom to live in the country. It was worth it.

  Governing India did not occupy his entire day, and what time he had left before returning home for six o’clock tea was spent on his own writing and correspondence or entertaining friends, like George Grote, who was writing his classic history of Greece, and Alexander Bain. Sometimes Grote and Bain would walk with Mill back to Charing Cross Station, but after his marriage, they never accompanied him farther. They were Mill’s friends, to be seen on his time, on his turf. Only friends of both the Mills were invited to Blackheath, and there were few such people – W. J. Fox, who had brought them together, and the Italian patriot Giuseppe Mazzini, in exile in London, who had entered their life by way of John Taylor. These and two foreign scholars – Theodor Gomperz from Austria and Pasquale Villari from Italy – were the only people genuinely welcomed at Blackheath in the seven years the Mills lived there, not in total seclusion, because Harriet’s son was there for all but the last two years and her daughter Helen lived with them the whole time.

  Mill’s friends, who had hoped that his marriage would mark his re-entry into social life, were disappointed. He lived in even greater retirement after his marriage than before. Neither he nor Harriet had any difficulty giving up the tepid pleasures of society, for they found each other absolutely fascinating. Both had been made lonely by exceptional intelligence, and they rejoiced in each other like two giants, two midgets or any two people who have feared their oddness would prevent them from ever knowing close companionship. They were a happy couple, discussing everything, sharing everything. Most important, they shared his work – or what posterity calls his work, despite Mill’s insistence that virtually everything published in his name was Harriet’s as much as his.

  Mill believed that when two people together probe every subject of interest, when they hold all thoughts and speculations in common, whatever writings may result are joint products. The one who has contributed the least to composition may have contributed the most to thought. It is of little consequence which of them holds the pen. In that sense, ‘not only during the years of our married life, but during many years of confidential friendship which preceded it, all my published writings are as much my wife’s work as mine’.38 The System of Logic, published in 1843 and the basis of Mill’s fame, owed little to Harriet except felicities of composition, but after that, everything we call John Mill’s was a joint production: Principles of Political Economy, On Liberty, The Autobiography, The Subjection of Women, the essays on religion. Some of these works were published only after Harriet was dead, but they had been discussed, drafted, planned, in some cases dictated by her, long before their actual publication.

  Harriet’s co-authorship of Mill’s work has proved a hard fact to swallow, and for many years after the claims of joint production were made in Mill’s autobiography, commentators laboured mightily to prove that Mill was mistaken and to provide reasons why he might have been mistaken about a subject (the authorship of his works) on which he ought to have been the expert. Alice Rossi has examined a century’s worth of resistance to the idea that Harriet could have collaborated with so clear, logical and forceful a mind as Mill’s and concludes that it is sexist: Harriet provokes hostility from Mill scholars because, being brilliant and aggressive, she does not conform to their standard of femininity. Moreover, various kinds of political bias have affected assessments of Harriet’s role in Mill’s career. Unitarians in the nineteenth century – Harriet’s friends – were enthusiastic about her influence on Mill, whereas the Utilitarians, who saw her as removing Mill from their orbit, tended to be harsh on her; later, Harold Laski downplayed the importance of Harriet’s role in Mill’s thinking because he did not want Mill’s socialism to appear the result of a mere woman’s influence. ‘Though it is couched in terms of detached scholarship one senses in Mill scholars an unwitting desire to reject Harriet Taylor as capable of contributing in any significant way to the vigor of Mill’s analysis of political and social issues unless it included some tinge of sentiment or political thought the scholar disapproved of, in which case this disliked element was seen as Harriet’s influence.’39 More recently, every serious scholar of Mill’s life and work has believed what Mill says about Harriet’s share in his intellectual life. ‘In so far as Mill’s influence, theoretic or applied, has been of advantage to the progress of the western world or indeed of humanity at large,’ says Packe, ‘the credit should rest upon his wife at least as much as himself.’40

  Consider, for example, the enormously influential Principles of Political Economy, begun in 1845 and ready for the press by the end of 1847, when Harriet was still married to John Taylor. Mrs Taylor read and commented on every paragraph. She thought that the first draft lacked a chapter on the future of the working class, and Mill accordingly wrote one to her specifications. She helped him, too, with the proofs, with arranging for the binding and in negotiating a contract with the publisher. When the time came for a second edition, Harriet wanted even more than the insertion of a new chapter. She wanted Mill to change his mind on a long-held, well-thought-out and important opinion – his belief in capitalism as the most desirable system of ownership.

  In the first edition, Mill had grounded his opposition to socialism and communism (little distinction was then made between the two) in the conviction that men worked best when they worked in their own interests and in the hopes of accumulating, by their own efforts, rewards. He feared that when subsistence was guaranteed, motivation to work would disappear. He argued that people who had never known freedom from anxiety about the means of subsistence are apt to overrate it as a source of pleasure. Under socialism, ‘labour would be devoid of its chief sweetener, the thought that every effort tells perceptibly on the labourer’s own interests or those of someone with whom he identifies himself’.41 Re-reading this paragraph, Harriet objected strongly and totally. Perhaps the revolutionary events of 1848 had helped to change her mind. Perhaps the Chartists had made her more optimistic about the ability of the working class to direct its own economic and political life. Whatever the reason, she now believed it was of the first importance to guarantee people a living and to remove their anxieties about subsistence.

  Mill was astonished. The paragraph she objected to had been inserted at her suggestion and in her very words. Moreover, he considered it the strongest part of the argument. If it were removed, the most cogent objection to socialism would disappear and he would have to turn around and embrace it. Nevertheless, he neither pressed Harriet for an explanation of her change of mind nor attempted to re-argue his earlier position. Placidly, he accepted the correction. ‘This is probably only the progress we have always been making, and by thinking sufficiently I should probably come to think the same – as is almost always the case, I believe always when we think long enough.’42 His complex portrait of some weaknesses of socialism was replaced by bland pieties in its favour: ‘There would be an end to all anxiety concerning the means of subsistence; and this would be much gained for human happiness.’43 And so there entered into the Political Economy a utopianism much more typical of Mrs Taylor than of Mill and an endorsement of socialism which had enormous impact through the decades, making a little bit of England what it is today because Harriet Taylor changed her mind in 1849.

  The man who had been trained to think for himself from the age of five informed Mrs Taylor that he would change any opinion if sh
e asked him to ‘even if there were no other reason than the certainty I feel that I never should continue of an opinion different from yours on a subject which you have fully considered’.44 He thought himself fit only to interpret, to set down what others believed, insisting again and again, in his private diary as well as his letters and autobiography, that Mrs Taylor was the source of any wisdom he had and he merely her mouthpiece. ‘What would be the use of my outliving you!’ he wrote to her. ‘I could write nothing worth keeping alive except with your prompting.’45 She was his audience and his source; he wrote from her and for her. On his own he seemed unable to decide whether one thing was more worth doing than another, so she set him topics. In the production of some of his most important works, he took the position of a schoolboy fulfilling an assignment. ‘I want my angel to tell me what should be the next essay written. I have done all I can for the subject she last gave me.’46 And,

  I finished the ‘Nature’ on Sunday as I expected. I am quite puzzled what to attempt next – I will just copy the list of subjects we made out in the confused order in which we put them down. Differences of character (nation, race, age, sex, temperament). Love. Education of tastes. Religion de l’avenir. Plato. Slander. Foundation of morals. Utility of religion. Socialism. Liberty. Doctrine that causation is will.47

  Practically all Mill’s later work may be seen in that shorthand list of ideas. Where he began did not much matter, so long as he began, and Harriet was happy enough to tell him what to do. She was the executive. She made decisions. Unhampered by the subtleties and nuances of thought which sometimes impeded Mill, unafraid of inconsistency, she cut crudely, perhaps, but emphatically and practically to important matters. In this case, she selected religion from the welter of possible subjects. ‘About the essays, dear, would not religion, the Utility of Religion, be one of the subjects you have most to say on?’ He could (she suggested) account for the nearly universal existence of some kind of religion; could show how religion and poetry fill the same wants, the need for consolation, the craving for higher objects; could suggest how all this must be superseded by a morality deriving its authority from the approval of people we respect rather than from hope of reward in an afterlife. It was fairly standard positivist stuff, but Mill responded ecstatically. ‘Your programme of an essay on religion is beautiful, but it requires you to fill it up – I can try, but a few paragraphs will bring me to the end of all I have got to say on the subject.’48 Nevertheless, he wrote the essay which was posthumously published as ‘The Utility of Religion’.