1806
John Stuart Mill was born in London, son of James Mill and Harriet Burrow. Mill
was the typical English Victorian gentleman, with all admirable and lamentable
traits that go along with that. His father was a well-known philosopher and
follower of Jeremy
Bentham. He was home-schooled, beginning Greek at age three
and Latin at age eight. Read six of Plato's dialogues by age ten. Studied Bentham's
work from his fifteenth year.
1823 At the arrangement of his father, Mill received a post in East India House, which became his career for the next 30 yrs.
1826 Mill suffered a breakdown and went through a period of severe depression. He begins reading Wordsworth and Coleridge, to teach himself to feel as his father taught him to think. He encounters the philosophies of Saint-Simon and Comte, though the religious and mythical forms Comte gave to his vision of the "new humanity," and Comte’s rigid political authoritarianism repelled him. He loses faith in the strictly quantificational utilitarianism preached by Bentham and his father, though he doesn’t reject utilitarianism completely.
1830 Meets with Lafayette and other the revolutionaries in Paris. Retuns to England and contributes articles to the Westminster Review, advancing the cause of the British "philosophical radicals."
1831 Met Harriet Taylor, the wife of a successful merchant. A strong friendship develops quickly, and they later seemed to have collaborated on a number of works. Mill claimed that Harriet was the chief intellectual influence on his life, next to his father of course.
1843 A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive (2 vols). A work on epistemology.
1848 Principles of Political Economy (2 vols).
1851 Harriet and Mill are married (Harriet's husband had died in 1849.)
1858 Harriet and John moved to Avignon, France. Harriet died shortly after their arrival, and her daughter comes to take care of Mill. He spends his time in literary and political activity, publishing: On Liberty (1859), Utilitarianism, Considerations on Representative Government (1861), Auguste Comte and Positivism, An Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy, (1865), The Subjection of Women (1869)
1865 After being asked to run for Parliament, he is elected without campaigning, and spends two years working on behalf of women's suffrage, Irish land reform, and the rights of Jamaican blacks. Half of each year he spends in Avignon, to be near Harriet.
1868 Returns permanently to France, and writes his Autobiography, dying in 1873, shortly after its completion.
