Biography Essay

Like many aspects of John Stuart Mill's life and work, his literary artistry remains a subject of enduring interest and lively disagreement. Few people would now question Mill's importance as spokesman for the humane liberal tradition in the history of ideas, although considerable controversy still flares over the nature and value of his views upon such topics as individual liberty, epistemology, Utilitarian ethics, sexual and racial equality, economic theory, and religious belief. Similarly, the question of Mill's prose artistry is far from settled.

From the day in 1873 when Thomas Carlyle in a letter to his brother John dismissed Mill's Autobiography as the life history of a steam engine, to the recent characterization of Mill in a widely used anthology of literature as the "least literary of the important Victorian prose writers," some readers have insisted that Mill's prose is almost entirely devoid of art. Mill has...