John Stuart Mill

Abstract

In mid-summer 1831 Carlyle had completed his Sartor Resartus and travelled down to London to arrange for its publication. One of his subsidiary purposes was to discover and meet the author of a series of essays that had recently appeared in the Examiner. They were entitled ‘The Spirit of the Age’ and had much in them to attract his attention. Their main theme was that society was suffering the disabilities of a transitional state. The old ideas no longer carried conviction. The constituted authorities no longer commanded respect. Power was held by those unfit to exercise it. ‘There must’, said the author, ‘be a moral and social revolution which shall, indeed, take away no men’s lives or property, but which shall leave to no man one fraction of unearned distinction or unearned importance.’¹ In tone the essays displayed a certain mild irony, a sharpness of expression and an air of unchallengeable self-confidence. It is easy to imagine how Carlyle must have enjoyed them. In London he learnt to his surprise that the author was John Stuart Mill, from that same Mill family of the Utilitarian connection that had formed one of the objects of his ravenous satire in Sartor Resartus.