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Autobiography

John Stuart Mill - Author

John M. Robson - Editor/introduction

Paperback | $16.00 | add to cart | view cart
ISBN 9780140433166 | 240 pages | 03 Apr 1990 | Penguin Classics | 5.07 x 7.79in | 18 - AND UP
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Summary of Autobiography Summary of Autobiography Reviews for Autobiography An Excerpt from Autobiography
At three years old John Stuart Mill was studying arithmetic and Greek; by the time he was six he was enjoying Hume and Gibbon and writing Roman histories.

Diffident, intellectually brilliant, fearless and profound, he became one of the greatest of the Victorian liberals and his works - particularly On Liberty, Utilitarianism, The Subjection of Women and this Autobiography - are among the crowning achievements of the age.

'Ask yourself whether you are happy and you cease to be so . . .' Central to the Autobiography is Mill's moving account of the mental crisis he suffered as a young man, and his discovery of a world of feeling and emotion that drew him away from Benthamite utilitarianism and his father's ambitions for him and towards the Romantic radicalism of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Jane and Thomas Carlyle, Auguste Comte and Saint-Simon. The tension between thought and feeling, the struggle to improve the individual and society, preoccupied Mill all his life and imbue his Autobiography with enduring integrity and power.
Autobiography

Introduction
Editor's Note

I. Childhood, and Early Education
II. Moral Influences in Early Youth. My Father's Character and Opinions
III. Last Stage of Education, and First of Self-Education
IV. Youthful Propagandism. The Westminster Review.
V. A Crisis in My Mental History. One Stage Onward
VI. Commencement of the Most Valuable Friendship of My Life. My Father's Death. Writings and Other Proceedings up to 1840
VII. General View of the Remainder of My Life

Index of Personal Names

‘In his own time and ever since, the most common reaction to the Autobiography has been one of astonishment, mixed with either awe or horror, at his education’ – John Robson