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Collection: The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill

Textual Introduction - John Stuart Mill, The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume XXII - Newspaper Writings December 1822 - July 1831 Part I [1822]

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The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume XXII - Newspaper Writings December 1822 - July 1831 Part I, ed. Ann P. Robson and John M. Robson, Introduction by Ann P. Robson and John M. Robson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986).

Part of: Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, in 33 vols.

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Liberty Fund, Inc. is a private, educational foundation established to encourage the study of the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals.


Textual Introduction

JOHN M. ROBSON

the articles in these volumes span more than fifty years, from Mill’s first published letter in 1822 when he was sixteen years old, until his last leading article in 1873, the year of his death. The subjects range from abstract economics (with which he began) and practical economics (with which he ended), through French and British politics, reviews of music and theatre, and Irish land reform, to domestic cruelty, with glances at a multitude of events and ideas important to the nineteenth century. They therefore provide a needed perspective on his life and thought, giving a record of his ideas and of the development of his argumentative skills, as well as revealing his attitude to public persuasion through the newspaper press, a medium of increasing importance in his lifetime.

Identification of most of these articles as Mill’s would be impossible had he not kept a list of his published writings.1 This list is markedly reliable, but it presents a few problems in identifying newspaper writings. For example, some of the very early entries lack dates, and a few have wrong dates or lack other elements. Inference and other bits of evidence, however, make it possible to make corrections and to identify with confidence all the items except two.

One of these two has defied identification: “An article on wages and profits, capital and prices, which appeared in the Edinburgh Times of Blank in MS. May 1825.” The problem is not the missing date; we have not been able to locate any issue of a paper of that name, though it appeared for at least a few weeks early in 1825.2

The other problem concerns Nos. 53 and 54. The entry in Mill’s list gives the title “The Quarterly Review and France,” with the date of No. 53 (24 Oct., 1830). In the Examiner No. 53 is actually entitled “The Quarterly Review versus France,” whereas an article in the next week’s issue (our No. 54) is entitled “France and the Quarterly Review.” One would be tempted to accept Mill’s date, ignore the slight difference in the title, and so to include No. 53 and exclude No. 54, were it not that in Mill’s own bound set of the Examiner (discussed below) he has made an inked correction in No. 54 (and there are elsewhere no such corrections in articles not by him). No. 54 begins with a reference back to No. 53, using the journalistic “we,” but such evidence of continued authorship is weak. On stylistic grounds, both are possibly Mill’s, though it might be held that No. 53 shows some signs of Albany Fonblanque’s lighter tone (he was then the editor of and principal writer for the Examiner). Faced with this conflicting evidence, and recognizing the possibility that the scribe who copied Mill’s list made an error of omission (there are many easily identifiable errors throughout), we have included both as probably Mill’s.

Most of Mill’s entries in his list identify single items, but occasionally, and particularly in the case of four series of his news reports on French political life, he groups articles in a general statement. For example, as the headnote to No. 55 indicates, the first such entry reads: “The summary of French affairs in the Examiner from 7th November 1830 to 17th April 1831, inclusive: comprising several long articles.” We have gone through the Examiner (as did MacMinn) to locate the items in these series, and have, in the absence of confirming or disconfirming evidence, accepted all the articles between the bracketing dates as Mill’s. In a few cases, we have had to conclude that there are errors in Mill’s entries: first, there is no account of French politics in the Examiner for 3 April, 1831 (the news report is concerned with other European matters, including one sentence signalling a French response to Belgian events). Second, the entry quoted in the headnote to No. 113 says that between 4 September, 1831, and 15 July, 1832, Mill wrote on all Sundays but one (1 July, 1832); however, there is no article on France in the number for 13 November, 1831. Finally, the articles for 11 and 18 November, 1832, which would be covered by the entry quoted in the headnote to No. 181, are not included because they are not marked by Mill as his in his set of the Examiner.

Confirmation of Mill’s list so far as the important early writings in the Examiner are concerned is possible because of markings in that set, which is in the collection of materials from his library housed in Somerville College, Oxford.3 On the front flyleaves of all but the 1830 volume Mill listed his own articles, and (for the volumes for 1831-33) enclosed the parts of the text by him in inked square brackets. Also he made some inked corrections in the texts themselves. For the most part these three sets of information confirm the other, independent list, but the Somerville material enabled us to add seven items to that list.

Other evidence enabled us to add twenty more. Signatures contributed ten of these: “J.S. Mill” adds nine late items (Nos. 414-18, 420, 423-4, and 427), all but the last, an article, being letters to the editor; and, in conjunction with internal evidence, a common signature (“S.”) led us to another (No. 32). (Also, identification of No. 33, vaguely described in Mill’s list, was possible because of a combination of signature and internal evidence.) Identifications of part of one (the addendum to No. 34) and all of another (No. 49) were made through comments by the editors of the newspapers in which they appeared, and one more (No. 285) was made through the editor’s entry in his own file copy. Mill’s correspondence led to identification of No. 101 as his (and also Appendices A and C, not included in this count). One further, a review (No. 379), is said to be Mill’s by Alexander Bain, the author reviewed. Finally, Mill’s list gives only published writings; we have included the five unpublished letters intended for newspapers that remain in manuscript (Nos. 367, 371, 399, 412, and 419, as well as Appendix D).4

These successes have not made us blind to the possibility that some newspaper items remain unidentified, particularly in the final years of Mill’s life. Indeed, Mill’s list contains a disturbing entry: “From this time no memorandum has been made of my letters which have appeared in print: numbers of my public or private letters having found their way into newspapers, of all of which (I believe) the original drafts have remained in my possession.”5 Unfortunately, Mill does not specify exactly what “this time” means; the comment comes in a section evidently added longer after the fact than usual, between the listing for his Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy (published on 13 Apr., 1865) and the entry which, as he says, is misplaced, of his “Austin on Jurisprudence” (Oct. 1863). The two items that bracket these are for 29 April, 1865 (No. 413) and April 1866 (“Grote’s Plato”; in CW, XI, 375-440). What Mill actually had in his possession when he wrote the entry we of course do not know; still surviving are many drafts and some clippings from newspapers, most of which, as originally private letters, are in the final volumes of Later Letters. We have therefore scanned newspapers most thoroughly for the period from April 1865 to May 1873 (when Mill died); the result is a disappointingly small number, but Mill seems not to have used the periodical press very much in his years in Parliament or subsequently.

In his bibliographic list, Mill carefully designates fifteen of these items, like other of his writings, as “joint productions” with Harriet Taylor, who married him in 1851 after twenty years of close friendship.6 He actually uses three formulations, saying just a “joint production” in three cases (Nos. 318, 393, and 394), commenting “very little of this [article] was mine” in eight (Nos. 305, 329, 350, 389, 390, 392, 395, and 396), and combining these two descriptions in three (Nos. 303, 307, and 383); No. 400, the last one to which such a comment is attached, has a comment that has defied particular analysis: “This, like all my newspaper articles on similar subjects, and most of my articles on all subjects, was a joint production with my wife.” On that basis, however, one may speculate that nine others (Nos. 367, 369, 371, 397, 398, 399, 401, 406, and 407) were at least influenced by her, and that two more (Nos. 363 and 386) might also be included, as well as Appendix D, which, as unpublished, is not in his list. Furthermore, external evidence of the share that her daughter, Helen Taylor, had in his work after her mother’s death, and the similar tone of the letters in question to letters known to be hers, make it reasonable to think of Nos. 417 and 424 as “joint productions” with her.7

There are in total 427 items in the text proper: these are taken from twenty-seven newspapers, seventeen of them daily and ten weekly. The greater number, 261, appeared in weeklies, most the result of Mill’s dedication to the Examiner, especially from 1830 through 1834, which resulted in 235 contributions to that paper over his lifetime. In fact, after Mill’s first few years of writing for newspapers (much of it consisting of letters to the editor of the Morning Chronicle), contributions to weeklies dominate the record through the 1830s, Mill’s busiest period as a journalist. Beginning in the 1840s, he contributed more commonly to dailies, with leading articles for the Morning Chronicle and a variety of letters to editors making up the bulk. Among the dailies the Morning Chronicle, which provides 114 items in all, is as dominant as the Examiner is among the weeklies. The only other weekly with a significant number of items is the Spectator with 12; among the dailies important to this record are the Daily News with 16 items, the Globe and Traveller with 11, and The Times with 8.8

The distribution over time is significant: 42 of the items appeared in the 1820s, 246 in the 1830s, 99 in the 1840s, 20 in the 1850s, 11 in the 1860s, and 9 in the 1870s. Equally significant is the distribution of genres: 182 are leading articles, 106 news reports, 72 letters, 47 reviews, and 6 obituaries; 14 may be called miscellaneous. These two distributions are combined in Table 1.

Table 1
1820s1830s1840s1850s1860s1870sTotal
Leaders586781003182
News Reports01060000106
Letters2961399672
Reviews434711047
Obituaries0600006
Miscellaneous48101014
Total422469920119427

Referring to the contents of the volumes simply as “newspaper writings” disguises some problems. The basic definition, “those of Mill’s writings that appeared in daily or weekly newspapers,” needs refinement. First, we have included letters that, in view of their intended audience, can be called “public,” even though they were initially directed to private individuals, and even if they exist only in draft form.9 Similarly, we have included letters to editors that failed to be published, because, though some of them are obviously drafts, they were intended for newspaper publication. Another problem arises concerning articles or parts of articles that were reprinted in newspapers from other of Mill’s writings. If one were to see these volumes as gathering together the total materials that revealed Mill to newspaper readers, it would be regretted that some very telling pieces are excluded as extracted reprints. But actually no one reader would have been able to see Mill the journalist whole, for most of his writings were anonymous, and they were scattered over such a period of time and in so many papers that the likelihood of anyone’s reading them all is so small as to be negligible. Furthermore, we cannot pretend that we have found all examples of such reprints: the newspapers of the day commonly made extracts of this kind (often with the intention of puffing), and Mill was a popular author.10 Finally, we have been reluctant to reprint anything that appears elsewhere in the Collected Works, even though it could be argued that some items should have been saved for this volume. We have, therefore, excluded letters that might be judged to be “public” if they are in the correspondence volumes of this edition, Volumes XII to XVII. But in a few cases we have included material also in other volumes of the Collected Works: for instance, Mill used some of his leading articles on French agriculture in an appendix to his Principles of Political Economy; these were collated for Volumes II and III of the Collected Works, where the substantive variants are given. But it is appropriate to give the original versions here, because they are part of a series, not all of which was used in the Principles, and because the rewriting altered the form of the argument, though not its substance.11

Mill reprinted very few of his newspaper writings, undoubtedly judging them to fall within the area of proscription he defines for his periodical essays in Dissertations and Discussions. Those excluded from the volumes, he says, “were either of too little value at any time, or what value they might have was too exclusively temporary, or the thoughts they contained were inextricably mixed up with comments, now totally uninteresting, on passing events, or on some book not generally known; or lastly, any utility they may have possessed has since been superseded by other and more mature writings of the author.”12 While recognizing Mill’s wisdom in many matters, we are not disposed to heed him here. At the very least, the bulk of these materials gives them very considerable significance, and we trust that Mill refutes his own vivid indictment of reprinted journalism: “The Spartan in the story, who, for the crime of using two words where one would have sufficed, was sentenced to read from beginning to end the history of Guicciardini, and at the end of a few pages begged to commute his punishment for the galleys, would have prayed to exchange it for death if he had been condemned to read a file of English newspapers five years old.”13 He exempts Albany Fonblanque’s writings, and we here dogmatically assert that in his case too any commutation would be a punishment in itself.

That the items are arranged chronologically needs little explanation: such heterogeneous materials resist division into themes or subjects, though two major subjects dominate, French politics in the early 1830s and Irish land in the late 1840s. However, these two themes are so densely grouped in time that they cohere even within a chronological ordering. Furthermore, some other groupings would be quite arbitrary, and there would be a ragtail remnant for a miscellaneous category that would be more irritating than helpful. More determining is the positive benefit of reading the items in the order of their appearance, for their cumulative value lies in their recording Mill’s development and emphases; interesting as many of them are in their own right, the total effect in this arrangement is much more than the sum of the individual effects.

This arrangement makes separation into “chapters” somewhat arbitrary. The divisions we have made serve only to suggest relatively important phases in this aspect of Mill’s life, reflecting, as the Introduction makes clear, changes and influences of various sorts in his behaviour and thought that reveal thematic and cross-generic affinities.

The titles of the items are taken, when possible, from the copy-text (or from another version of the text that Mill oversaw), even though there is a strong likelihood that a large number of the headings were not chosen by him. The guides to identification mentioned above, Mill’s bibliography of his writings and the copy of the Examiner in Somerville College, are the authorities for many titles that exactly or closely follow his own wording. Some modifications are easily justified: for example, in his bibliographic list Mill uses two wordings for his news reports on French politics: “summary of French affairs” and (usually after No. 116) “summary of French news”; in the Examiner he normally lists each of these same items as “article on France”: we have for convenience adopted “French News” with a bracketed serial number for all of them. In the case of the series on Ireland, which he lists in his bibliography as being on “Irish affairs,” we have chosen a more descriptive title drawn from the contents of the articles, “Condition of Ireland,” again with serial numbers to distinguish them one from another. In both these cases the serial numbers are editorially added; in a few cases (“The Spirit of the Age” for instance) Mill or the newspaper provided numbers for series: to indicate the difference in origin of the numbers, we use roman numerals for those in the copy-text and arabic for those editorially supplied.14 To distinguish it from the seven-part series “Prospects of France,” which begins with No. 44, we have entitled No. 98, which does not belong with the series, “The Prospects of France.” A few titles derive from references to the articles by Mill in letters, and finally some are editorially chosen as appropriate to the contents and genre. The reviews, for example, which are normally headed in the copy-text by bibliographical identifications, are here given titles combining the author’s name and the short title of the work under review. The obituary notices are (in conformity to Mill’s occasional usage) headed “Death of” the deceased.

Beneath the title appear the provenance and date of publication of the item, while the headnotes indicate briefly the place of the item in relation to others in these volumes and give the minimal historical information needed as background (a broader view is given in the Introduction, and more detail in the footnotes). Each headnote also gives the evidence that the item is by Mill and justifies (usually implicitly) the choice of title. The context in the newspaper from which it is extracted is sketched (location within a section and headings, for instance) and, when appropriate, mention is made of the choice and treatment of the text.

Two kinds of footnote are appended to the items. Those from the copy-text, that is, Mill’s own notes or those by the editors of the newspapers, are signalled by the series*, †, etc., beginning anew in each item. When necessary, the source of such notes is added in square brackets (e.g., “[Editor’s note.]”). While there are far more quotations in Mill’s newspaper writings than one would expect in such a genre, he does not give references to many of them; in a few cases his references need correction.15 When he is quoting only or mainly from one source (as in the reviews), page references are given in the text to reduce the number of footnotes.

The footnotes that are editorially supplied are signalled by a separate series of arabic numbers in each item. In accordance with the practice throughout the edition, we attempt to identify in these notes all Mill’s allusions to people and references to and quotations from written works and speeches, trying to specify where possible the edition he used or may be presumed to have used; to his notes we add (in square brackets) missing identifications and correct mistaken ones. In the interest of economy, when Mill quotes from newspaper leading articles and letters to the editor, the references (which are almost invariably to only one page) are given in the headnotes. In the footnotes only the primary place of publication is given, and publishers’ names are limited to the first two in a longer series; full information is given in Appendix J. Also the full titles of statutes are given only in Appendix J.

In these volumes we have followed the practice, established in the correspondence volumes, of giving additional contextual information of an historical and biographical (as well as bibliographic) kind, in an attempt, necessarily falling short of perfection, to give the reader the perspective of a nineteenth-century newspaper reader. We have restricted our enthusiasm by giving only information (including biographical detail) up to the time of the article in cases when Mill continues the story later, but have tried to intimate the conclusion when there is no further allusion. After long contemplation, we decided not to translate foreign words and phrases; it is easier to annoy than to please in such matters, and all the terms Mill uses may be quickly located in dictionaries. We are aware that in falling short of the ideal we shall frustrate some legitimate expectations, but we have aimed a little higher than did James Mill, whose confidence in his readers was as astonishing as was his bland insouciance; in one not untypical note he says: “See the writings of Kant and his followers, passim; see also Degerando, and others of his school, in various parts of their works.”16

Cross-reference within the text and the Introductions is by item number rather than page; to make such reference easier, the running titles include the item numbers and the dates.

As indicated above, there is little problem in choosing copy-text for these items: there is normally only one version. In only nineteen cases are there competing texts:17 ten appeared in part in other writings of Mill’s (three of these in the posthumous fourth volume of Dissertations and Discussions; one of them also in a pamphlet and a printed version of a lost manuscript), five appeared in more than one newspaper, two have surviving manuscript versions, and two exist in both English and French versions. These last are given in both versions (in text and appendices); the others, almost all different in kind, are printed with variant notes.

Our practice is to indicate only substantive variants, defined as all changes of text except spelling, hyphenation, punctuation, demonstrable typographical errors, and such printing-house concerns as type size, etc. Paragraphing is considered substantive, as are changes in italicization for emphasis. The variants are indicated in the following ways:

Later addition of a word or words: see 356d. In the text, the passage appears as “20 per cent; d”; the variant note reads “dMS [footnote:]” followed by a footnote Mill added to the manuscript used in the preparation of his Principles of Political Economy (here signalled by “MS”). As the footnote is not in the copy-text, the implication is that it was added to the later version.

Deletion of a word or words: see 356i-i. Here the passage reads “cause iamplyi sufficient”; the variant note reads “i-i-MS”. The interpretation is that in the manuscript used for the Principles Mill altered the passage by deleting “amply”.

Substitution of a word or words: see 356J-J. In the text, the passage appears as “a Jmuch largerJ increase”; the variant note reads “J-JMS considerable portion of this”. Placing the example in context, the interpretation is that the reading between the variant indicators was altered to that of the variant note in the manuscript used in the Principles.

In these volumes, exceptionally, there are no places where there are additions (requiring a plus sign) resulting from rewritings of an earlier version for the copy-text version.

The benefit of having normally no choice of copy-text is balanced by the need to intervene editorially. While the spelling and punctuation of the copy-texts are generally followed (without the use of sic), there is no point in ignoring the fact that Mill’s newspaper writings are flawed in all the ways typical of their genre: characters are dropped or broken, sorts are mixed or lacking, compositors (one may legitimately infer) were inexperienced or careless, and Mill’s hand (again one may infer) has been misread. Also, newspapers differed in their treatment of some conventions of the genre and the period, and even within one paper they vary inexplicably and over time; in addition, some non-substantive practices are annoying to readers not habituated to nineteenth-century newspapers. Many of the emendations permit of general description and are made silently, except when a correction was indicated by Mill, or when there is a possible ambiguity, or when one such correction is contained within a more significant one; in these cases they are listed with others in Appendix F. Unnoted common trivial corrections are:

1. Dropped and misplaced characters, and misplaced or absent word spaces (e.g., “discharge sthe” to “discharges the”; “o fchildren” to “of children”; or “allthose” to “all those”).

2. Missing or misplaced French accents, including those on proper names. Mill’s French was very good, and undoubtedly better than that of most compositors, who, moreover, seem often not to have had the types (or enough of them) to hand. (In this context, it may be mentioned that the habit of setting names in small capitals meant that accents usually could not be indicated.) Also, there is inconsistency in nineteenth-century accentuation, which also differs in unpredictable but disturbing ways from later usage.

3. French proper names. Once more it seems probable that most of the variant spellings were introduced by compositors, and occasionally more than one spelling was acceptable. To avoid annoyance, we always give, for instance, Jean Paul Courier (never Courrier), Casimir Périer (not Casimer or Perrier), Jacques Laffitte (not Lafitte), and (to illustrate what are more clearly compositors’ errors) Cormenin (not Cormerin) and Cauchois-Lemaire (not Cauchors-Lemaire).

4. Majuscule / minuscule changes of initial letter. These have been made sparingly and only to make individual passages (not the volumes as a whole) consistent, on the grounds that Mill’s hand is not infrequently ambiguous in this regard for some letters, and that the change in these specific words cannot be seen as emphatic.

Other emendations not signalled in the apparatus result only from the desire for easy reading, without any implication of error in the copy-text. For example, the titles of works are italicized; definite articles are not treated as part of the titles of newspapers, except for The Times and for those French newspapers whose titles are visually English homographs (for the same reason the English Globe is given its full title, Globe and Traveller); monarchs are identified in the form “Louis XVI” rather than “Louis the Sixteenth”; names appearing in small capitals in the copy-text are given in upper and lower case; italics are substituted for small capitals indicating emphasis except when the small capitals are themselves italicized (in which case they are retained in roman); in transcribing manuscripts, “&” has been rendered as “and” and superscripts in abbreviations have been lowered to the line; indications of ellipsis have been normalized to three dots plus, when necessary, terminal punctuation; double quotation marks are used where single appear in the copy-text (except, of course, for quotations within quotations); long quotations are set in reduced type and the quotation marks are removed (in consequence, occasionally Mill’s words have to be enclosed in square brackets, but there is no likelihood that these will be mistaken for editorial intrusions, as we have added only volume and page references); terminal punctuation in italic type has been given in roman except when the punctuation functions as part of the italic passage; abbreviations for monetary units are always italicized (“50l.” becomes “50l.”); and long quoted passages (which are set down, with square brackets around Mill’s inserted comments) are introduced by a colon only, rather than a colon and dash. The styling done by different newspapers is also not preserved; so, for instance, the salutations in letters to the editor are always given as “sir,—”; and the publishing information in the headnotes is regularized.

Appendices. The appended materials are of two kinds, texts (given in chronological order) and lists. Appendices A and C are translations by Mill from the French of Cavaignac’s and Enfantin’s speeches; Appendix B is the French version of an item by Mill; Appendix D (properly seen as a “joint production” with Harriet Taylor) is the English version of an item also extant in French; while Appendix E is an item attributed to Mill by George Holyoake without any cited evidence of authorship. The other appendices are guides of various kinds to the text: Appendix F gives the textual emendations not covered by the general rules cited above; Appendix G lists the editorial corrections to Mill’s bibliography of his published writings; Appendix H is a guide to the signatures Mill used in newspapers; Appendix I lists all the newspapers for which Mill wrote; and Appendix J provides (as in all our volumes) an index of the persons and works cited in the newspaper writings. Finally, there is an analytic Index, prepared by Dr. Jean O’Grady with her habitual diligent equanimity.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

for permission to publish manuscript material we thank the National Provincial Bank (residual legatees of Mary Taylor, Mill’s step-granddaughter), the British Library of Political and Economic Science (London School of Economics), the Library of University College London, the Library of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Brotherton Collection of the University of Leeds, and Yale University Library. We have been as ever blessed by superb co-operation from not only these libraries but also from many other institutions and their staffs, including, in Britain: the British Library, the Royal College of Surgeons of England, the Somerville College Library, the University of London Library; in Canada: the Robarts Library of the University of Toronto, the St. Michael’s College Library, the Trinity College Library, the Victoria University Library; in France: the Archives du Ministère de l’Economie; the Archives de l’Ordre des Avocats à la Cour de Paris; the Archives Départementales de la Gironde, du Jura, de la Loire-Atlantique, de Meurthe et Moselle, du Puy-de-Dôme, and du Rhône; the Archives Municipales de Grenoble; the Bibliothèque Nationale; the Bibliothèque Nationale et Universitaire de Strasbourg; and the Service d’Archives de Paris; in Germany: the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität (Freiburg), the Generallandesarchiv Karlsruhe, and the Universitätsbibliothek and the Staatsund Stadtbibliothek (Augsburg). For the illustrations, we express our gratitude to the British Library Newspaper Library, the Principal and Fellows of Somerville College, Oxford, the Pierpont Morgan Library, and the Yale University Library. Never have the research and editorial assistants on this edition deserved more credit than for these testing volumes: without the dedicated and inventive labours of Marion Filipiuk, Jean O’Grady, and Rea Wilmshurst publication would never have occurred. The student assistants have also contributed greatly, not least by their easy and cheerful accommodation to what must have sometimes seemed unreasonable requests: Allison Taylor, Jonathan Cutmore, Margaret Paternek, Mary-Elizabeth Shaw, Marion Halmos, and Jannifer Smith-Rubenzahl; we thank them now as we have during their labours. Other scholars and friends who have answered requests promptly and unselfishly include the gifted members of the Editorial Committee, especially Margaret Parker, copy-editor of these volumes, and others: Frank Baker, T.D. Barnes, R.D. Collison Black, the Rev. Leonard Boyle, O.P., Maureen Clarke, G.M. Craig, John Cronin, Eileen Curran, the Rev. J.L. Dewan, Robert Fenn, William Filipiuk, F.T. Flahiff, Joseph Hamburger, Helen Hatton, Eleanor Higa, Dwight Lindley, Muriel Mineka, Albert C. Outler, A.C.W. Robson, J.S.P. Robson, Catherine Sharrock, and Cecelia Sieverts.

When plans for these volumes were made, Francis E. Mineka was asked to share the editing with us. With the dedicated help of Cecelia Sieverts, he worked on the annotation for some time, until his health failed and he was obliged to retire from the project. Their labours lie behind much of these volumes, all their notes having been made available to us, and their generosity of spirit having inspired us. The death of Francis Mineka early in October 1985 was a serious loss to Victorian scholarship generally, and to us a sad deprivation, only partially balanced by the widespread recognition of the high quality of his scholarly legacy. To him we dedicate these volumes.

Our final acknowledgment is of our mutual debt; this, like most of our other writings, is, as someone has said, “a joint production, very little of which is mine.”

lf0223-22_figure_001

>Exchangeable Value [1]

Traveller, 6 December, 1822, p. 3

The British Library Newspaper Library

lf0223-22_figure_002

>The Spirit of the Age, V [Part 1]

Examiner, 15 May, 1831, p. 307

Somerville College Library

[1 ]The surviving scribal copy, in the London School of Economics, edited by Ney MacMinn, et al., as Bibliography of the Published Writings of J.S. Mill (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1945), will be found in re-edited form in the concluding volume of the Collected Works. The entries in this list are given in headnotes to individual items, with the scribal wording corrected (the original and amended versions are listed in Appendix G). In some cases the scribal list is mistaken or lacks information (usually a date is involved): our policy has been (a) if the missing information is obvious, to give it in square brackets; (b) if there is doubt about the exact reading, to leave a blank space between square brackets; and (c) to add “[sic]” to mistaken dates (the correct dates being given in the articles’ headings). The copyist sometimes, like all of us, tended to drift away; for example, in the entry for No. 239 “9th” is cancelled and “2d” substituted. Another probable example of the wandering mind is seen in the entry for No. 14, where the signature is given as “A Lover of Caution,” whereas the copy-text reading is “A Friend to Caution”; because that for No. 15 (properly) gives “A Lover of Justice,” it seems likely that the scribe’s eye skipped.

[2 ]In a review of MacMinn’s edition, Jacob Viner calls attention to the announcement in the Examiner that the Edinburgh Times would appear on 22 January (Modern Philology, XLIII [1945], 150; the notice is in the Examiner of 16 Jan., 1825, 48). Specific issues of the Edinburgh Times are mentioned in the Examiner on 20 Feb., 1825, 122, and on 10 Apr., 1825, 233.

[3 ]See Ann P. and John M. Robson, “John Stuart Mill’s Annotated Examiner Articles,” Victorian Periodicals Newsletter, X (Sept. 1977), 122-9. We there describe the three volumes for 1830, 1832, and 1833; subsequently we located two more, for 1831 and 1834.

[4 ]It may be added that in his list but not identified as his in the Somerville College Examiner are Nos. 158 and 245.

[5 ]MacMinn, 96. In fact, three such letters are in the list, Nos. 421 and 422, and a letter printed in the Nation (15 Oct., 1868), which is in LL, CW, XVI, 1443-8.

[6 ]The first of these is dated 10 February, 1846; the last, 28 August, 1851.

[7 ]See CW, I, 286-7, for Mill’s imprecise account of her share in his writings.

[8 ]The other weeklies here represented are the Black Dwarf (four items), the Leader and the Sunday Times (two each), and the Lancet, the Reader, the Reasoner, the Republican, and the Weekly Dispatch, all with one. The other dailies are the Sun with two items and, with one each, the British Traveller, Le Globe, the Guide, the Morning Post, Le National, the New Times, the New York Tribune, Our Daily Fare, the Penny Newsman, the True Sun, and the Voix des Femmes. The total of these is 424: there are three anomalous items, explained in n9. The items are attributed to the papers for which they were intended, so the unpublished items are included in these counts; one piece (No 255), intended for Le National, in fact appeared in the Monthly Repository.

[9 ]The three exceptions mentioned above are two public letters (Nos. 402 and 403) which did not appear in newspapers, written in 1852 concerning the dispute over publishers’ restrictive practices, and a draft concerning the Westminster election of 1865 (No. 412), enclosed in a letter to Edwin Chadwick and clearly intended for public use, though it has not been found in a newspaper.

[10 ]Those that we have located have been collated with the copy-texts, though there is no evidence that Mill had anything to do with the text of the reprints; we have found nothing of textual interest.

[11 ]In two other instances we have overridden the criterion: Mill’s obituary of Bentham (No. 170) is also in an appendix to Volume X, where it is a useful companion to his other assessments of his great teacher; and his petition for free trade (No. 289) is in an appendix to Volume V, where it serves as an added indication of his economic views.

[12 ]Essays on Ethics, Religion and Society, Collected Works, X (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969), 493.

[13 ]“Fonblanque’s England under Seven Administrations,” CW, VI, 352.

[14 ]We have altered the copy-text title of No. 404, “The India Bill,” by adding “I” to make it consistent with that of No. 405, “The India Bill, II.”

[15 ]The corrections are (page and line number, followed by the copy-text reading and then, in square brackets, the corrected reading): 38.35 8 [8-9], 74.4 120 [120n], 413.23 37 [37-8], 711.6 9 [9-10] (the reference is moved to the end of the quotation), 789.10 26-46 [26-47], and 789.12 87 [87-97].

[16 ]“Jurisprudence,” in Essays, 4n.

[17 ]One potentially maddening possibility, variations between editions of newspapers, has not been pursued to its depths. The Examiner occasionally had different pagination for Mill’s articles in second editions (not so identified in the paper), but we found no variants except the deletion (or addition) of subheadings. No words can express our palpitating sympathy for anyone who attempts collation of twentieth-century newspapers through their several editions.