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My work on the project began in August 2016 and spanned a few months and various tasks until the end of the semester in December. As I was a research assistant to Dr. Pionke, my job description was basically identical to Carissa’s, so I won’t repeat what she has already written about the job except to say that I spent a great deal of time typing in spreadsheets and attempting to decipher Mill’s handwriting.

Fast-forward a few months, and I have graduated from the University of Alabama, am no longer working on the project, and have managed to stumble into a temporary job in the property department of an insurance company.  At first glance, these jobs seem incredibly different. After all, what could the study of margin notes in the books of a nineteenth century writer and philosopher have in common with property insurance? Oddly, more than one would expect.

Admittedly, these similarities are mainly logistical in nature. For example, I still spend a great deal of time typing in spreadsheets. Now, instead of information about authors, editors, and publications, it’s policyholders, mortgagees, and personal articles floaters. Excel, however, is a staple program in many operations, and so its role in both academic and insurance spheres is rather unremarkable. The aspect of my insurance job that really caught my attention and drew these parallels in my mind is the amount of time I spend in my cubicle, squinting at haphazardly-scrawled New Business applications for homeowner’s insurance and attempting to decipher policy numbers, addresses, or endorsement descriptions. This task reminded me greatly of pressing my face up close to my computer screen in an attempt to decipher certain margin notes in Mill’s books that verged on indecipherable.

Clearly, insurance and John Stuart Mill differ more than they coincide, but what I find interesting about the overlap in method – however small – is how different avenues for written text yield distinct personae of the writer. For instance, Mill’s longer notes or the notes on full pages at the ends of chapters tend to be much neater than the notes he took while in the midst of reading. These hastily-scribbled notes seem to indicate that in many cases, Mill did not write his margin notes with the intention that they should be read by anyone other than himself. I tried to remind myself of this possibility as I sat hunched over specific margin notes and struggled to decipher letters from the squiggles. Of course, that was not always the case, but the untidy nature of the notes suggests a sort of candidness. Not only was Mill likely too preoccupied with his reading to worry about the neatness of his handwriting, but he also was not going to great lengths to present the critical persona he assumes in his published works.

The similarly-rushed handwriting of insurance applications seems to indicate something different. The obvious answer is that the purpose of these applications is to provide basic, accessible information that is required in order to extend insurance coverage. Yet, the underwriters and not the applicants themselves fill out the applications, and there are occasional instances where the underwriter makes a minor mistake in the address field, for instance. As the amount of insurance coverage and the premium are determined in part by the location of the property, this mistake is one that applicants would be unlikely to make themselves. What this avenue of written text seems to indicate then is an impersonal distance between the writer of the text and the party that is directly affected by it.

To conclude, this was my first experience participating in a research project, and though there were many aspects of the job that interested me, this multi-faceted nature of the written word and its ability to create different personae of the writer has been my main takeaway. I’ve found myself trying to apply these same ideas to the various forms of text I encounter from day to day – from marginalia to insurance applications to text messages to the narrators of the novels post-graduate life has finally allowed me to get around to reading.

— Lauren Davis, Research Assistant To Professor Albert Pionke at the University of Alabama

That John Stuart Mill valued the poetry of the British Romantics, preeminently that of William Wordsworth, is amply attested by his famous account of his own mental breakdown and recovery within his Autobiography (CW 1.148-63).  That Mill appreciated the early promise of a later skillful adapter of Romantic poetics, one who would ultimately succeed Wordsworth in his position as Poet Laureate, is evident from his 1835 review essay of “Tennyson’s Poems” (CW 1.395-418). That Mill himself imbibed and helped to articulate the poetic principles shared by Wordsworth and Tennyson becomes clear in his still-anthologized distinction between the “heard” and the “overheard” from “What Is Poetry?”—itself first published in January 1833 in the Monthly Examiner and later republished as the opening section of his longer “Thoughts on Poetry and its Varieties” in Dissertations and Discussions (1859) (CW 1.343-53).  That Mill, as an adult, ever attempted to put these principles into practice by writing his own poetry is nowhere in evidence in his published works (in his Autobiography, Mill does recount that “writing verses . . . was one of the most disagreeable” facets of his childhood education, retrospectively judging that the “verses I wrote were of course the merest rubbish, nor did I ever attain any facility of versification” [CW 1.17-19]).

Mill’s marginal annotations to Percy Shelley’s Posthumous Poems (1824), however, provides evidence that even the more mature Mill was not immune to the temptation of original poetic composition.  On p. 164, in the interlinear space between lines four and five of Shelley’s “Stanzas: Written in Dejection, Near Naples,” appears Mill’s characteristically cramped script:

It is difficult to discern whether Mill intended for his “The breath of the moist earth is light!” to replace, supplement, or merely reflect upon Shelley’s original “The purple moon’s transparent light.”  It is also impossible to reconstruct the spirit in which Mill wrote his own line.  With only six pages of Posthumous Poems containing any sort of marginalia, there is simply insufficient evidence within this particular book to speculate about intent.

What is obvious is that Mill has adopted Shelley’s iambic meter and appropriated Shelley’s end-rhyme, even as he has ignored the syntax of Shelley’s poetic sentence.  Also readily apparent is the relative amateurishness of Mill’s line, which is built entirely of monosyllables, one wasted on a preposition and another on a conjugation of “to be” that neglects to achieve the taut anaphora of Shelley’s opening line; and which includes an adjective, “moist,” that jarringly shifts attention from the play of light upon the landscape to the emission of water from it.  As an example of original composition, then, Mill’s handwritten line seems eminently forgettable.

As a tangible sign of Mill’s engagement with second-generation Romantic poetry, however, one that reveals Mill taking the time to appreciate the form of Shelley’s line by reproducing it, this annotation seems worth noting.  Moreover, although Mill’s annotation is impossible to date precisely, it is tempting to imagine the young John Stuart attempting to come to terms with what he would later term the “crisis in my mental history” by either reading or recalling his reading of Shelley’s “Stanzas,” and seeking from that experience the solace for his own dejection, not in nature directly, as occurs for Shelley’s poetic speaker, but in nature “overheard” thanks to Mary Shelley’s posthumous publication of the poem.

–Albert D. Pionke, Project Director

Provided an opportunity to reflect on the productively fractious nexus of technological change, unregulated investment, philosophical idealism, and logical empiricism that characterized the original age of steam, in both its literal and its institutional-intellectual sense, Albert presented “Measuring Hot Air in the Age of Steam: Mill on Carlyle on Hudson” at the 2016 meeting of the Victorians Institute, hosted by North Carolina State University in Raleigh.  Building upon one of the rare pieces of published scholarship about the Mill Collection, Edward Alexander’s “Mill’s Marginal Notes on Carlyle’s ‘Hudson’s Statue’,”  English Language Notes 7 (1969): 120-23, he focused on the recurrent concern evinced by Mill’s marginal marks and annotations about what he saw as Carlyle’s misplaced anxiety over the statue-building predilections of “fools” who should not “count.”

At the core of Mill’s critical response to his former friend is the very crowded p. 31 of Hudson’s Statue:

This page, which contains four separate pairs of marks and annotations, goes unmentioned in Alexander’s original essay, which is unfortunate since in its bottom margin is Mill’s most pointed objection: “all the world knows this – except the fools + they don’t count – all his mistake is in counting the fools.”  There is a tantalizing upstroke at the bottom of the page, indicating that Mill might have somehow qualified his supremely confident, even illiberal, judgment; but a subsequent rebinding has literally lost this handwritten paratext on the cutting room floor.

We are left, then, with the context provided by Mill’s two further fool-related annotations, which appear on pages 26 and 29, respectively.  In both places—the first a sympathetic acknowledgment of Carlyle’s personal experience of being judged “a kind of interloper and dissocial person” and the second an impatient dismissal of Carlyle’s interrogation of the fictional Fitzsmithytrough—Mill reiterates the position articulated earlier, in his public and private responses to the second volume of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, about the imperative to secure the rights of the (intellectual) minority within a democratic society.  In other words, making sure that those who “count” can be heard over the speech of “fools.”

The problem for Carlyle, as Mill sees it at least, is that his legitimate claim to belong to this minority—as evidenced by his first-hand knowledge of being found out as someone “who obstructs the harmony of affairs” (26)—is continuously undermined by his appeals to fools, whether those actually planning to erect a statue of George Hudson, or those fictionally grinning “as an ape would” at Carlyle’s rhetorical questions about “Immensity” (29).  In excoriating the idea of memorializing the “Railway King,” Carlyle, Mill judges, runs the risk of himself appearing to be full of steam, which is by definition merely hot air that’s all wet.

– Albert D. Pionke, Project Director

My work locating the marginalia in the volumes of the John Stuart Mill Library here at Somerville started at the end of June. Just over 10 weeks and about 320 volumes later, and my spreadsheet runs to over 12,000 entries – that’s over 12,000 asterisks, sidelines, underlines, symbols, full sentences, critical comments, incredulous question marks and indignant exclamation points. As Albert has explained, the sheer number and variety of marks show the different ways in which James and John Stuart Mill used these volumes: as textbooks to be mined for material for parliamentary speeches (or later, for Oxford undergraduates’ essays); as teaching materials to be memorised; or as works by contemporaries to be rigorously critiqued.

Rather ironically, given that my job is to find written marks, one of the things that has repeatedly struck me over the course of this project is that marginal annotations are just one of a variety of traces left in these volumes by readers. Evidence of reading comes in many forms: alongside deliberate, handwritten marks are the accidental, unintentional, physical ones too. For example, countless ink blots and idle pencil marks pepper the pages of many of these volumes. We can’t tell who they were made by, and can only make a rough guess as to when, but their very presence – in margins, through lines of text and across otherwise pristine, blank flyleaves – is proof of reading. They tell us that someone saw the page, paused at it or flicked past it, holding a pen or pencil a fraction too close to the paper.

Then there are the ways readers have used the physical features of the books themselves. I’ve found pages marked in many different ways, from corners neatly – and not so neatly – folded over, to ribbon markers placed – or simply left? – between specific pages. In the absence of ribbon, other items have been used as improvised bookmarks. My favourites include a handwritten note on how to run a local society election (appropriately tucked into The Ballot Act, by W. A. Holdsworth (1880)); several early twentieth-century library loan slips; and a note in what looks like a shaky, nineteenth-century hand, complaining about a leaky water closet.

The physical state of the books gives some clues too. Now-flimsy binding and evidence of rebinding could be as much an indicator of use, as of age. More unusual is the faint, reverse imprint of handwriting and printed text from other sources, that is evident on the pages of several volumes.

What might we deduce from this about Mill’s reading habits? It suggests open books being stacked chaotically, or essays and notes tucked between the relevant pages of a well-used text. It suggests cross-referencing and active, interactive use. These volumes were opened, even if they weren’t annotated.

Even more intriguingly, some of the physical properties of these books also point to a lack of use. A surprising proportion of the volumes in the library have unopened, or uncut pages. It is the product of the way they were made: multiple pages of text were printed onto one large sheet of paper, which was folded up, bound together with others, and then the folds cut, in order to separate individual pages. In several of these volumes, however, the pages are still attached on their outer and top sides which means that they can’t be opened, and the text within them can’t be read.

The presence of uncut pages is a pretty convincing indication of which volumes – and how much of them – Mill didn’t read, and in some cases we can hazard a guess as to why. The large quantity of uncut pages in a multi-volume edition of Jeremy Bentham’s works, for example, is unsurprising given that it was reputedly very poorly edited and full of inaccuracies. In addition, there is a strong correlation between the amount of flattery or admiration for John Stuart Mill that appeared in a book’s title page, preface or introduction, and the number of its pages that Mill himself left uncut. It is as if he was unimpressed – or at least left unmoved – by the admiration of contemporary writers.

These non-written, more physical, accidental indicators of reading – and non-reading – do not strictly fall within the remit of this project. However, the great advantage of a digitisation project like this one, which incorporates photos of the physical appearance of these books down to the very page, is that these aspects will be captured and available for the future researcher to examine. A roughly-cut page, a folded corner, an ink splatter across lines of text; all give a richer sense of the ways in which these volumes were used, and provide vital context to the 12,000 marks we have found so far.

– Hazel Tubman, Research Assistant, Somerville College, Oxford