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Description of materials
In the volumes will be found 427 items, from 27 newspapers, 17 of them daily, and 10 weekly; however, the greater number, 261, appeared in weeklies, the loading factor being Mill's dedication to the weekly Examiner, especially from 1830 through 1834, resulting in 235 contributions over his lifetime. In fact, after Mill's first few years of writing for newspapers (much of it consisting of letters to the editor of the Morning Chronicle, many of which were probably solicited, or at least guaranteed a place), contributions to weeklies dominate the record through the 1830s, Mill's busiest period as a journalist. Subsequently his contributions to dailies are more common, with leading articles for the Morning Chronicle (in which 114 items appeared) and a variety of letters to editors making up the bulk. In addition to the Examiner, the weeklies (in order of the frequency of Mill's contributions; and where these are equal in number, in the order of date of those contributions) include the Spectator
The distribution over time is important: 42 of the items appeared in the 1820s, 246 in the 1830s, 99 in the 1840s, 20 in the 1850s, 11 in the 1860s, and 9 in the 1870s. Equally significant is the distribution of types: 182 are leading articles, 106 news reports, 72 letters, 47 reviews, 6 obituaries, and 14 miscellaneous articles.[11] Just why I call these important and significant cannot here be explicated, though I trust the reasons for the judgment will be obvious; I should emphasize merely that I am thinking not only of analysis of Mill's career and thought, but also of editing practices.
Simply referring to the contents of the volumes as "newspaper writings" disguises some problems. I said above that we have included all of Mill's writings that appeared in a daily or weekly newspaper, with some exceptions. This definition needs refinement in several ways. First, the volumes are part of a collected edition, and have been published towards the end of that edition. When Francis Mineka was preparing Mill's correspondence, he (following Mill) made a distinction that seemed perfectly appropriate at the time, and still has general validity, between "private" and "public" letters, the basis being the intended audience. He excluded "public" letters from his volumes, leaving them for later consideration. We decided to include them here, for all but three of them were designed for newspapers, though not all of them appeared.[12] This decision is based on our unwillingness to leave a few letters, more closely related in genre and form to what is in these volumes, for a miscellaneous volume that will be heterogenous enough without them. Similarly, we included those letters to the editor that failed to be published, because, though some of them are obviously drafts, they were intended for newspaper publication, and almost certainly were sent in fair copy.
Another problem arises with articles or parts of articles that were reprinted in newspapers from other of Mill's writings. If one sees these volumes as gathering together the total materials that revealed Mill to newspaper readers, it must be regretted that some very telling pieces are excluded as extracted reprints. But actually no one reader would have been able to see Mill the journalist whole, for most of his writings were
Finally, we were reluctant to reprint anything that appears elsewhere in the Collected Works, even though it could be argued that some items should have been saved for these volumes. In particular, and with great reluctance, we excluded letters already published in our volumes of correspondence, often in draft form; according to received theory, these manuscript versions have the greater authority (at least as to accidentals), but the printed versions have greater polish, suggesting a Millian finishing. This criterion has been put aside in a few cases: for instance, Mill used some of his leading articles on agriculture in an appendix to his Principles of Political Economy; these were collated for the text of the Principles, and the substantive variants are given there. But it seems appropriate to give the original versions in the Newspaper Writings, because they are part of a series, not all of which was used in the Principles, and because the rewriting altered the form of the argument, if not markedly its substance. And we reprinted two other items, Mill's obituary of Jeremy Bentham (1832) and a petition for free trade (1844), believing that we were mistaken in including them in appendices to earlier volumes, where they lose part of their appropriate contexts. These cases of exclusion and inclusion are, it will be seen, special to our situation.
Also special is the confidence with which we can identify these items as Mill's. How many of them could we have been able to call his were it not for the survival of a copy of the list he kept of his published writings?[13] Alexander Bain, Mill's closest disciple, whose detailed knowledge is shown in his slight but informative biography,[14] using the information in Mill's Autobiography, some now unrecoverable family memories, as well as his practised judgment, was able to identify the larger proportion of Mill's early writings in monthlies and quarterlies, but could do little to pin down his newspaper writings. Similarly, F. A. Hayek, to whom is attributable the revival of interest in Mill after World War II, and who had a good eye for Mill's work, dismissed the series, "The Prospects of France," signed "S," one of Mill's common identifications, as not being in his style, and failed to find another signalled by a reference in one of
Confirmation of the list, so far as the important early writings in the Examiner are concerned, is found in a bound set of that newspaper in the collection of books from Mill's library housed in Somerville College, Oxford.[16] On the front flyleaves of all but the 1830 volume Mill listed his own articles, and (for the volumes for 1831-33) enclosed the parts of the text by him in inked square brackets. Also he made some corrections in ink. For the most part these three sets of information confirm the other, independent list, but the Somerville material enabled us to add some items to Mill's corpus.
Other evidence, such as the correspondence, signatures, and internal connections with identified items, enabled us to add a few more. Also, Mill's list included only published writings; we have, as mentioned above, included the meagre number of unpublished letters intended for newspapers that remain in manuscript. We have scanned the likely sources for further items, especially for the years after 1865, because Mill's list contains a very disturbing if excusable note: "From this time [presumably after April 1865, the date of publication of the preceding item] no memorandum has been made of my letters which have appeared in print: numbers of my public or private letters having found their way into newspapers, of all of which (I believe) the original drafts have been retained in my possession."[17]
In total, we added only 27 items to Mill's list: 10 of these (mostly in Mill's later years) have signatures; 7 come from the Somerville College Examiner; 5 are unpublished holographs; 3 are identified by external evidence and 1 by internal; and 1 is an ambiguous entry in MacMinn's edition.[18] Therefore, while we are pleased to have added any to Mill's list, it remains the vital source. With all our experience, we should have greatly underestimated and underrepresented his journalism without it; it is, we say with full understanding of the implications, impossible to search carefully through the files of nineteenth-century British newspapers to find Mill's writings. We envy, as all editors must, the reliance of Dickens' scholars on the devoted and loving efforts of myriads of readers over the past century who have found, by accident as well as design, the trails of Dickens in tangled banks of Darwinian complexity—but Mill was not Dickens, and Mill scholars, avid as they are, do not have the devotion of Dickensians.
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