ABSTRACT
This is a welcome publication of one of the most important documents from John Stuart Mill’s boyhood, together with some hitherto unknown supplementary material which considerably enhances the value of the whole. The chief document is the ‘journal’ the boy sent to his father during the early part of the stay in France for which he had left a few days before his fourteenth birthday. The great influence of this experience on his later outlook and thought is well known, and the document has been extensively used by Mill’s first biographer, Alexander Bain, and occasionally been consulted by later writers. It would have deserved publication in extenso even if the present editor had not been so fortunate as to discover a manuscript book containing the rough notes from which part of the ‘journal’ was written and extending considerably beyond the date at which the ‘journal’ stops.
