Mill Marginalia Blog

Tome Cinquieme (vol. 5) of Mill’s copy of Essais de Michel Seigneur de Montaigne (London: Jean Nourse, 1739) is the most heavily annotated of the six-volume set.  It contains summative annotations on successive back endpapers from both James and John Stuart Mill, with corresponding marks throughout.

Written in ink, some of which has faded to brown and some of which has remained strongly black (suggesting two different periods of reading), James Mill’s marks appear more extensive than his son’s, which are written in pencil.  At times, the pencil marks overlap with those in ink; at other times, they identify different passages on already-marked pages worthy of attention; and in still other instances, they underline or score passages on pages previously deemed unworthy of note.  Very occasionally, John Stuart’s summative penciled annotation will comment on passages marked exclusively in pen (pp. 60 and 65, for instance), but most often, the summative annotations of father and son are readily tied to their respective marks.

One page deemed worthy of marking by both men was p. 76, whereon Montaigne unflatteringly describes his adversarial relationship with his servants.

The same passage—marked by James Mill with a marginal “x.,” a marginal score, and intermittent underlining, and by John Stuart Mill with a marginal score and additional underlining—translates as follows: “I do not fly into a rage once a year over the faults of those over whom I hold sway; but when it comes to the sheer stupidity and obstinacy of their allegations, excuses, and defenses—donkey-like and brutish as they are—we are at each other’s throats every single day.”

In addition to its caustic humor, what makes this passage significant is the way in which its marginalia interacts with the summative statements on the volume’s back endpapers.  Although he marked the passage in three different ways while reading, James Mill did not find it worthy of comment in his final annotation to the entire volume.  By contrast, John Stuart included p. 76 among those which he recalled for himself after reading:

Moreover, his comment, “Applicable in perfection to me + my wife,” offers rare insight into Mill and Harriet’s relationship with their servants—apparently simmeringly contentious—while also allowing one to attach a date range to Mill’s remarks (April 1851- November 1858, the years of their marriage).  Finally, his readiness to include a personal observation among his summative annotations, which are otherwise more broadly conceptual and concerned to highlight Montaigne’s relevance to social or what Mill might have termed ethological questions, suggests a slightly less purpose-driven approach to reading than we might otherwise imagine for him.

Albert D. Pionke, Project Director

Mill Marginalia Online is now nearing completion.  Earlier this month, I visited Somerville College Library for what should be my last data-gathering trip, photographing pages missed during earlier visits or mislaid during previous website migrations and capturing the marginalia in a recently rediscovered volume (vol. IV) of The Works of Francis Bacon.  Mill’s hand was only indirectly in evidence in the latter, which had been subjected to erasures by doubtless well-meaning librarians and then marked and annotated again by at least one subsequent Somerville reader, who had found Bacon’s words “constructive”:

Still barely discernible are also numerous faint scores, underlines, and marginal X-marks that appear consistent with the other volumes in The Works and, indeed, throughout Mill’s library – erased but not forgotten, he remains a ghostly inscribed presence throughout this volume.

At the same time, Mill’s web presence is soon to receive a major update.  Eric Culus, of Mijnwebsiteonline is hard at work redesigning the underlining architecture of Mill Marginalia Online to maximize querying speed, minimize uploading complications, and greatly increase the efficiency and effectiveness of user searches.  The new site should seamlessly replace the old site before the end of summer, with all remaining data transcribed and uploaded before the end of the calendar year.

At that point, researchers anywhere in the world should have access to the totality of marginalia in Somerville’s John Stuart Mill special collection.  Then shall the bacon (and Bacon) be brought home indeed!

Albert D. Pionke, Project Director

I have just returned from my thirteenth data gathering trip to Somerville’ College’s John Stuart Mill Collection, as well as my sixth March Mill seminar, most recently entitled “Tea with Mill (and Taylor).”  At the latter it was my pleasure to announce both that the Somerville College Library staff had completed the marginalia census (with a provisional count of 49,296 items that is almost certain to rise as photos are processed and marks and annotations transcribed) and that, earlier in the week, owing to an absence of marginalia in Mill’s German and Italian works, I had caught up with them.

Also announced was the rediscovery of one of the lost volumes of Mill’s copy of Francis Bacon’s collected works, which will itself need to be accessioned, surveyed, and subsequently photographed.  And so, one more trip, at least, will be needed to claim that the digitization of all handwritten marks and annotations in Mill’s library has been completed.  Nevertheless, these two marginal milestones still merited a toast of finger sandwiches and miniature scones.

Evidence that the collection continues to serve as a primary source for new research was provided by Polish doctoral student Elżbieta Filipow, who presented on “Harriet Taylor Mill and Other Women: Inspirations of John Stuart Mill’s Feminist Sensitivity.”  With a comprehensive list of female authors, female relatives and acquaintances, and texts purporting to offer “words of weight” about the Woman Question—all with a presence in Mill’s library—Filipow showed how it might be possible to reconstruct a richer family of influences at work upon Mill’s thoughts, words, and deeds concerning women than has yet been acknowledged by his biographers.

That more work waits to be done was also perceptible to me in the midst of the rush of photography.  Mill’s copy of the 1819 Renouard edition of Voltaire’s collected works (66 volumes), for example, is extensively and unevenly marked.  Volumes 24 (Mélanges Historique), 29 (Philosophie Tome I) and 39 (Romans Tome I) all show expansive evidence of Mill’s thorough attention.

Thoroughness, although not always of the sort one might expect, is also apparent in Mill’s 1739 copy of Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica.  Obviously owned by a succession of meticulous pupils, the text contains at least four palimpsestic layers of marginalia in various pencils and inks.  These often appear alongside one another, nowhere more amusingly than on p. 395 of volume I, where a lesson in spherical geometry becomes an opportunity for cartoonish doodling:

By adding a ladle to Newton’s hemisphere, an eighteenth-century reader has converted the lesson into a “Punch bowl with 2 lemons,” to be served by “old Waiter Isaac” to one fully inked gentlemen who appears to have imbibed before (“Waitarre! Punch for two here”) and his half-inked companion (“Punch for Ever say I”).  On the bottom half of the page are two more figures whose style and location suggest that they may have been added later.  Was a young John Stuart, who was “observed twice when he came out of a room where he had been shut up with Newton’s principia” (Mill, CW I: 564), in October 1817, aged 11, perhaps inspired to indulge in an inutile moment?

Albert D. Pionke, Project Director

My first introduction to annotation was learning how William Shakespeare’s annotations of new words contributed to the English vocabulary and had a huge impact on the standardization of the English language. Whilst several annotations from earlier times were done using pencils, pens, ink, and print media at some point, I find it intriguing that today, annotations can now be made timeless through digitization. Digitizing Mill Marginalia is such an adventure for me, as I have experienced the impact of technology as a gateway across spaces.

Digital annotation is not merely about going through historical books. However, the act of engaging with the historical content is discourse and is also rhetorical. Every (annotated) text in English, French, German, Greek, or Latin and every marking whether a “score”, “bracket”, “circle” or even an “idle mark” is a statement, building on the ongoing conversation. Although I am here now in the 21st century, as I engage with a wide range of Mill’s thoughts, I feel like an active contributor to Mill’s 19th-century discourse.

I am excited to play this role in shaping the discourse of this digital age by making accessible discourse across centuries to contribute to the intellectual and digital landscape of humanities.

Reliance Enwerem, Research Assistant

Mill Marginalia Online could not progress without the careful, creative, and dedicated work of its undergraduate and graduate Research Assistants. Brought on board in August of 2023, Reliance Enwerem has been alacritously processing data from my May 2022 visit to Somerville. About to shift from processing the over 5000 photos to transcribing their pixelated marginalia, Reliance offers a summative visualization and accompanying verbal explanation of the results still to come:

Cleaned using MS Excel, and then analyzed and visualized on PowerBI, these 5303 raw page images from 72 distinct titles (130 individual volumes) come from books written between 1800-1849 (3845 marginalia in pages) and 1750-1799 (530 marginalia in pages). Based on this data, I would say Mill found the works of Erasmus Darwin, Jonathan Swift, and Thomas Bruges Flower particularly significant.

Reliance Enwerem, Research Assistant

Recent users of the site will have noticed changes to its functionality and visualizations. The latest update, undertaken with essential assistance from Tuscaloosa’s own local code ninja (thanks Shelbybark!), pushed the site to over 31,000 examples of marginalia and 20,000 associated page, author, and spine images. The sheer amount of data has begun to spawn errors and slowdowns indicative of a platform at the edge of its capacity and so I have, reluctantly, replaced the Author, Library, and Volume views with a pared down View Marginalia interface. You can now download the project metadata, manipulate it however you wish on your own machine, and then search for individual page images that are of interest (for file names, see column O). I have begun the lengthy process of applying for external funding to support the development of Mill Marginalia 3.0, which will, ideally, be able to support the roughly 20,000 examples of marginalia and associated 15,000 photos that have yet to be digitized.

In the meantime, work on the marginalia continues, with my most recent RA, Reliance Enwerem, hard at work on the May 2022 data, as you’ll soon see.

Albert D. Pionke, Project Director

May 14-19 saw me back at Somerville to photograph further marginalia in the John Stuart Mill Collection.  I took roughly 6400 pictures of 5500 individual examples of marginalia found on 2500 pages in 91 bound volumes that, collectively, account for 21 new titles, all French.  It was a return to the beginning of the project in some ways, as I advanced to within only two three-volume novels of Alexis de Tocqueville’s De la démocratie en Amérique, which was the very first book I photographed back in July 2015.  Both John Stuart and James Mill’s hands were evident, along with others whose identities may never be known.  Only a handful of books in French and Italian, along with Mill’s collection of German literature, remain.

Albert D. Pionke, Project Director

Earlier this month, I was pleased to return to Somerville College to gather further data from the John Stuart Mill Collection and to present at the Annual John Stuart Mill Seminar.

Over the course of a week, I took 5480 photographs of just over 2000 individual pages in 224 volumes that, collectively, comprise 59 new titles for a future update of Mill Marginalia Online.  With roughly 80% of the collection now photographed, the end of the project’s data collection phase is gradually coming into focus.  I estimate that three more trips will be sufficient to capture images of all remaining pages with marginalia.

This year’s Annual Seminar featured introductory remarks highlighting the ongoing marginalia census being continued by Jane Macintyre, as well as papers from Dr. Jeremy Fix of Keble College, Somerville Emeritus Fellow Julie Jack, and myself.  Philosophy was the unifying discipline this year, with Mill’s Utilitarian consequentialism contrasted with  Kantian deontology as the basis for identifying moral agents and patients (Fix), his solution to Zeno’s paradox in the System of Logic (1843) reconnected with its Aristotelian roots (Jack), and Mill’s marginal responses to Henry Home, Lord Kames’s Elements of Criticism (1762) revealed for the first time and in the light of Mill’s subsequent publications on their shared subjects of perception, memory, and cognition (Pionke).

The following slide captures Mill’s generally critical reaction to Home’s Elements of Criticism:

Unmentioned by title anywhere in Mill’s published works, Home’s Elements nevertheless prompted Mill’s unpublished attention, which is, of course, precisely the point of digitizing his marginalia.

This effort at digitization gained a new collaborator in late 2022, as my longtime Oxford partner Anne Manuel retired and was succeeded by Sarah Butler as Somerville Librarian.  We met for the first time in person in March, when Sarah organized the Annual Seminar, generously listened to my rhapsodies about the importance of nonverbal marks, and generally created a welcoming and productive atmosphere for a frenzy of photographic work.  Here we are, taking a brief breather amidst Mill’s books:

Just beyond Sarah’s left arm are the works the Jules Michelet, the last author whose books I photographed on this March 2023 trip.

Albert D. Pionke, Project Director

After over two years of work on three continents, much of it completed during a global pandemic, I am pleased to announce that the redesigned Mill Marginalia Online is now up and running.

The differences from a user’s perspective are subtle: a single button now allows anyone to download the project’s full metadata to date, rather than having to do so one book at a time; and critical introductions are now grouped together and accessible via button on the Home screen rather than pinned directly to their specifically associated Volume pages.

Behind the scenes, however, almost everything has changed. Newly rebuilt in WordPress, MMO no longer requires a resident code ninja to update and maintain, which fact has finally allowed the data set to return to growth.

The new site features a fresh 8000+ examples of marginalia, representing almost the entirety of Mill’s extensive Classics collection. There is also a new multi-part critical introduction to George Grote’s History of Greece, which is perhaps the most extensively annotated title in Somerville’s Mill Library. The now-26,000+ marks and annotations represent the roughly one-half of the total books remaining from Mill’s Blackheath library.

And there’s more on the way! Mill’s English books of literature, history, botany, and other subjects are currently being processed. Stay tuned to learn when you’ll be able to review on-the-page responses to Boswell, Bulwer-Lytton, Butler, Byron, and that’s just the B’s.

Albert D. Pionke, Project Director

At long last, after three years’ absence, I was very pleased to return earlier this month to Somerville College, where I found the Mill Library serenely unchanged by either global pandemic or international conflict.  Resuming my photographic collection of marginal data, I progressed from the east to the west side of the library’s south-facing window, thereby moving from the last remnants of ancient Greece into Mill’s collection of comparatively modern and to-him contemporary English literature.  Over five days, under the benign glare of new studio lights, I took over 5500 photos of over 2500 pages in over 100 volumes, about which more in future postings.

I also joined Drs. Anne Manuel and Helen McCabe and Professors Menaka Philips and Roger Crisp in presenting at the Annual John Stuart Mill Seminar.  Here, a heady mix of the evolving history of the management of the Mill collection, Mill’s complex relationship with a variety of pre-Marxian socialisms, his more recent role as “essential” (and also too-simplistic) referent for all things liberal, and an overview of ten newly acquired letters (most unknown to and therefore unpublished in the Collected Works) written by Mill between the 1830s and 1860s, was leavened by tea, biscuits, and cake.

My own presentation concerned Mill’s marginalia in his friend, George Grote’s History of Greece (1846-56).  Comparing the individual pages featuring marginalia in Mill’s first-edition personal copy with the corresponding pages of all subsequent editions through the 1862 “new” edition, as well as the text of each of Mill’s annotations with the letters he wrote home to an ailing Harriet during his 1854-55 trip to Italy and Greece, I was able to approximate when and in what spirit Mill contributed his handwritten additions to Grote’s already-lengthy text.  My findings, summarized in the following bullet points, reveal that Mill must have read and annotated volumes I-XI at least twice:

• Firstly, after their 1^st edition publication, [almost certainly prior to their review], and definitely before any revised editions
  • Vol. I & II: March 1846 – [April 1846] January 1849
  • Vol. III & IV: April 1847 – [June 1847] January 1849
  • Vol. V & VI: December 1848 – [March 1849] March 1851
  • Vol. VII-VIII: February 1850 – [March 1850] December 1851
  • Vol. IX-XI: February 1852 – [October 1853] March 1856
• Secondly, after Mill’s trip to Italy Greece (December 1854 – June 1855), and before Grote’s proofs for the November 1862 edition

Incidentally, volume XII need only have been read once, after the March 1856 1^st edition, since it appeared after Mill had returned from his trip (to which none of the marginalia in volume XII refers).  In any case, in contrast to the earlier volumes, which feature nearly 150 textual emendations made in response to Mill’s generously offered editorial advice, Grote made no changes to his final volume in response to Mill’s marginalia, which he may or may not have ever seen.

Those interested in the data behind these findings may wish to read the new Critical Introduction to Grote’s History of Greece, co-authored by myself and my most recent RA, Riley Hines and forthcoming on Mill Marginalia Online in April (we hope).  In the meantime, expect more marginal news in this space.

– Albert D. Pionke, Project Director