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Logical Writing in the Education of John Stuart Mill: The Autobiography and the Privileging of Reason

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Kathleen E. Welch
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Extract

In his Autobiography, published posthumously in 1873, twenty years after it was first drafted, John Stuart Mill writes a series of logical essays on ideas. The people who appear in the book do so as personifications of these ideas rather than as palpable characters. This writing strategy leads Mill to make ideas rather than people exciting, and this unusual hierarchy makes his autobiography not only a fascinating book but a peculiar one as well. One in fact wishes that Mill had thought of the title The Autobiography of an Idea sixty years before his intellectual grandson, Louis Sullivan, used it for his autobiography. Mill composes his autobiography of personified ideas with a series of logical essays on his remarkable education and on his political and philosophical writing. Consequently, deductive writing forms these essays, a kind of writing that is not surprising for a logician and an essayist but rare for an autobiographer.

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 16 , Spring 1988 , pp. 153 - 168
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1988

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