John Stuart Mill

Abstract

Why should those who love and study English literature read Mill? It is not quite enough to say that everyone who is moved by Victorian poetry and novels and who tries to criticize them should enlarge his understanding of the age by becoming acquainted with its philosophers. It is not even enough to point out that literature is concerned among other things with morality and society, and that Mill (1806–1873) wrote about both. But what did he write that compels a critic or a student to study him? Since the war four Cambridge critics have answered this question, and perhaps it is of interest in passing to note that their answers were given in response to the challenge that teaching literature makes. In literary studies—unlike the natural sciences—the best research often springs from the delight and the despair of teaching.