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
(12 times), the
Black Dwarf (4), the
Sunday
Times
(2), the
Leader (2), the
Republican (1), the
Lancet (1), the
Reasoner (1), the
Weekly
Despatch (1), and the
Reader (1); the dailies, after the
Morning Chronicle, are the
Daily News (16),
the
Globe and Traveller (11),
The Times (8), the
Sun (2), the
News Times (1), the
British
Traveller (1),
Le Globe (1),
Le National
(1),
the
True Sun (1), the
Guide (1),
La Voix
des
Femmes (1), the
Morning Post (1), the
Penny
Newsman (1),
Our Daily Fare (1), and the
New
York Tribune (1).
[10]
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
anonymous, and they were scattered over such a period of time and so
many papers that the likelihood of anyone reading them all is so small as
to be negligible. Furthermore, we cannot pretend that we have found all
examples of such reprints: the newspapers of the day commonly made
extracts of this kind (often with the intention of puffing), and Mill was a
popular author. We collated those found with the copy-texts used in other
volumes of our edition, though there is no evidence that Mill had anything
to do with the text of the reprints; we have found nothing of textual
value.
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
Mill's letters.
[15] The surviving private
correspondence would lead with considerable certainty to a few items, and
some others (especially letters to the editor in the latter part of his life) are
signed either with his name or with initials or pseudonyms
that—provided
one somehow came across the items—would permit identification.
But I
much doubt whether we would have found more than 25% without his surer
guidance.
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.
