Henry Fawcett

Abstract

In his second extant letter to Henry Fawcett, Mill sagaciously observed that his young correspondent’s blindness ‘will, I am satisfied, be very much in your favour, not only by exciting interest, and neutralizing envy and jealousy, but because it will cause you to be much more and sooner talked about’.¹ Mill was, of course, correct. Though it may ultimately have kept him out of the Cabinet,² his blindness probably improved Fawcett’s formidable oratorical talents, and secured him the sympathetic attention of much of the nation.³ It quite possibly also made more palatable his intransigent radicalism, and it certainly made more credible his persistent advocacy of the doctrine of self-help.