Antiquaries
Day 118 of the Journey
This isn’t the one I scanned; this is the one available on the Internet Archive at https://archive.org/details/johnstuartmilla00holygoog/page/n2/mode/2up
I read another enjoyable post by
about John Stuart Mill this morning, which sent me to my 5 TB "Archive of Everything" backup drive, looking for a source I read over a decade ago that suggested to me that Mill had been caught as a very young man, distributing handbills to the homes of working people in London to educate them on birth control. He spent a night in jail and seems to have been extremely traumatized by the event. Given that Mill admits he had a bit of a mental breakdown when he was a young adult and that he studiously avoids talking about neo-Malthusian ideas for the rest of his life, I wonder whether there's a connection between this event and his personal and political style, which seems to have been much more tentative and incrementalist than the activism of someone like Charles Bradlaugh. Now it's easy to say that Mill was a deeper thinker than Bradlaugh and that caused him to be less enthusiastic and more nuanced about supporting causes. But I'm not sure I'm prepared to buy the idea that nuance is the only reason.I searched broadly on "Mill" in my archive and got a lot of responses that had nothing to do with JSM (I've done a bit of research and writing on water power and the early textile industry, for example). But also a lot that did. Found a bunch of scanned pages from an article George Jacob Holyoake had written in response to a negative notice in the Times after Mill's death. This led me to spend some time just trolling through all the Mill-related stuff, and then all the stuff in my "Bradlaugh" folder, which contains a few hundred gigabytes. There are LOTS of interesting items in there, and I could easily get lost for days. Maybe I should create a tab on MakingHistory where I post "Antiquaries". Items that are just interesting and old, without having to prove a historical point or help us understand the present. Like the Slang Dictionary. Sometimes the past is just fun in its own right. In any case, I think I'll start doing that and see how people like it.