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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