ABSTRACT
When in 1910 Mr. Hugh S. R. Elliot edited his two volumes of The Letters of John Stuart Mill2 he had before him rough drafts of ‘many thousands’ of letters, comprising probably the greater part of all the letters written by Mill during the last twenty-six years of his life. From this wealth of material Mr. Elliot published a selection which might well satisfy us so far as this part of Mill’s life is concerned. But for the period till 1847, the year in which Mill reached his forty-first year and completed his second magnum opus, the Principles of Political Economy, no such drafts seem to have been available. Mr. Elliot was fortunate enough to secure for this earlier period three series of hitherto unpublished letters, to Thomas Carlyle, John Sterling, and Edward Bulwer; and a selection from these is included in his volumes. Yet, interesting as these are, they represent only a few sides of Mill’s intellectual development during the formative and the most productive time of his life which was also the period in which in many ways he took a much more active part in public affairs than he did later. Not only many of his varied interests, but also fairly long intervals of his life are entirely unrepresented in Mr. Elliot’s collection.
