Tommy Denby
Birth of Modern Europe
D-band
5/9/04

Mill and I

"William! William, what are you doing?" The shrill and familiar voice of Marcy Jennings whistled up the stairs and sternly pulled William’s attention away from the letter he was reading. "You know that if we are to get to the 5:30 train to Bath in time, you should have been dressed by now! Do you expect to go vacationing in just a dressing gown?!"

"Why yes, of course you’re right, dear!" He heard himself call back, automatically. "I’ll be down shortly!" But even before he was finished speaking, his eyes went back to slowly reading the letter in his hands. He finished it shortly and sat back heavily in his favorite wooden chair with a prolonged sigh.

"My goodness…," he said to himself in bemused tone. "Isn’t that interesting?" William began to stroke his chin methodically and to think of memories from his childhood life through which he had not tread for some time. A serving woman entered the room and began to change the sheets on the bed, but he violently waved her away. As he looked back on himself as a boy, a
torrent of nostalgia, regret, hate, and envy flowed to his head and flooded his senses, bringing him nearly to the point of tears. Questions started to arise in his mind. "Why, of all times, did this person want to see me now?" he pondered. "Why not ten years ago? Or even twenty?" William’s mind continued to wander until his wife briskly stomped into the room and demanded that he get dressed immediately.

"What is that?" she inquired curiously, when she saw the curved and beautiful script written on the piece of paper in William’s hands.

"Look at it yourself," he muttered, and handed it to her while his eyes drifted off into space and his mind into memories that seemed to make up, after so long, an entirely different universe. His wife snatched the piece of paper and read the words "John Stuart Mill" in large letters at the bottom of the page. It was a name which, if one looked, could be found quite easily in any newspaper or magazine of the day, and was, in the Jennings household, usually held in high regard.

"Umm, Marcy…" William pleaded, "perhaps it would be best if you sat down for a moment." Marcy slowly sat down on the half-made up bed opposite William’s favorite chair, still reading the letter from John Stuart Mill.

"I assume," William began, "that you will want to know why a man of John Stuart Mill’s caliber would be sending me letters. Unfortunately, I would not be able to explain to you the history between Mr. Mill and me without first imparting to you some knowledge of my childhood. Up to this point, I have been very guarded about what I have told you, and there is a reason for that. I did not grow up, exactly, under the circumstances which I related to you previously."

Now Marcy had put down the letter and was listening intently.

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"My memories as a child are filled with contradictions; but before I get to that I must tell you that my father was not a successful shoemaker from London, as I told you before—he was a country bumpkin from some small town outside of Edinburgh, the name escapes me now, who grew up with nothing. He was drawn to London, just like every other poor chap in England, by the promise of work and the intrigue and mystery that London had in those days. He came here in 1796, about sixty years ago, and, although he certainly worked in a shoe factory, he was far from owning one. He met my mother soon after coming to London, and, ten years later, I was born. I know this must seem a remarkable story to you, because, for so many years, I have deceived you into thinking I led a middle-class life much like your own. That was, however, a falsehood. I’m sorry I deceived you, but once the act had been done I never knew the opportune time to reveal the truth. I have been giving this issue much thought, as of late, and had recently decided that I would tell you the truth. Thankfully, this letter seems to have given me the opportunity."

Marcy returned William’s sincere stare with an odd expression—she had a mix of shock and compassion on her face. Her eyes betrayed her deep love for William, but her wide-open jaw left him with the impression that his rash decision was, perhaps, a mistake.

"I did it only out of love for you," he said earnestly. "Will you forgive me, my love?" At hearing this plea the slack-jawed expression of awe left Marcy’s face and was replace with one of sympathy and forgiveness.

"How could you even ask me such a question? You know I do not care about where you came from, but just about who you are." When he heard this William once again leaned back in his favorite chair and plopped his foot on an ornate ottoman lying upon the oriental carpet.

"It is truly relieving to hear that," he admitted. After a moment of profound silence, they began to talk again.

"In all your long ramblings about family genealogy," Marcy muttered playfully, "you still have not mentioned why John Stuart Mill would send you a letter."

"Yes, yes, of course. It was through a job, that I met John—I was James Mill’s stable boy. I can still remember the advertisement he posted in The Times. It was stern and harsh, just like the man himself. I was eight at the time, and when I met young John, he was a mere five, but was already well versed in both Latin and Greek."

"Incredible!" Marcy exclaimed.

"Yes," John said in agreement, "it was. And it seemed especially impossible to a boy like me, who could not write, read or speak a word of proper English. The only education I got came in the form of songs and myths my mother would impart to me, describing mythical and valiant characters of legend."

"So you had no formal education at all?" Marcy inquired.

"None. How would I have had time to go to school? If I didn’t work I would have starved!"

"Oh dear…" Marcy said concernedly, "you poor child…"

"Those were most certainly hard times…. But to get back to my story, it seems as though the match of my informal and John’s formal education was one forged by the gods—we both had what the other desired. I was so hungry for knowledge it felt as though my ignorance had created a cage which surrounded me, and John needed some diversion from his unbelievably rigorous studies. So soon we became good friends, although I sometimes found him a bit stiff, and he taught me to read and write. It was hard for me—I had never truly been taught anything before. But my insatiable thirst for knowledge fueled me, and soon enough I was reading the likes of Wordsworth if you can believe it!"

"My goodness! That is truly a wonderful story!" Marcy commented brightly.

"If it wasn’t for him, I would probably be working in a factory—not The London Times. It’s amazing how much effect he had on my life. And I do think, as you can tell from that letter, I had quite an equal effect on his. I taught him every game I had ever played, every myth or story I had ever been told, every song I had ever sung, and he was still craving for more. Of course, John’s father would have been absolutely furious if he had known about the "inconsequential and unimportant entities," as he scientifically called them, that I was teaching John. Luckily James was rarely outside of his study, and when he did pull his head out of his studies it was usually to attend a meeting of some sort."

"James Mill always had a reputation for being rather dull, wasn’t that true?" Marcy asked.

"‘Dull’ is quite an understatement—the man was lifeless at best." William answered dryly. "But fear of his anger didn’t stop John from indulging in our little secret. Fairly soon John and I were inseparable—and that’s why he was the first one I told about my uncle."

"What about your uncle?" Marcy impatiently interrupted.

"I was just getting to that. Supposedly, he had been caught stealing bread from a shop.

"Stealing?! Why would he do such a thing?"

"He was a good man, my uncle, who steered clear of the bottle and vice in general, but he couldn’t find a job. You see, he and his family had come to London when he was a boy and his parents decided to put him to work in an iron works. After a couple months of employment there was a terrible accident with some of the machinery, and he lost his left leg and a large part of the right one as well."

"Oh how horrid!"

"Yes, it was tragic. He was a good man…." William’s eyes wandered off into the distance for a moment. "It was terrible, what happened to him. After the accident occurred the factory he was working for offered him no compensation, and since he had no other family once his parents and sister passed away, he had leaned on my family for support for most of his life. Around the time when he was caught stealing, we were in particularly tough straights, and we just didn’t have enough money to support him. What could he do? Should he have starved?"

"Why no, of course not! I do suppose some exceptions can be made from the law. Still, it’s a terrible business, being forced to steal."

"It certainly is, and John’s reaction was very similar to yours when I was telling him this story. Luckily, his father overheard us talking and forced me to tell him the story as well. When I told him that the jail sentence could have been up to ten years for a piece of bread, he was outraged. He and his good friend, Jeremy Bentham, had been fighting a fierce battle against harsh prison sentences at the time, if you can recall, and when he heard my story he became irate. What he did next was as benevolent as it was unbelievable. He went to court and represented my uncle as his lawyer! Being the brilliant man that he was, he won, of course, and my uncle served a sentence of merely two months. It certainly was unpleasant, but god knows he would have died in that prison if he had had to stay there for ten years."

"Thank god for Mr. Mill!" Marcy exclaimed.

"Yes, he surprised me greatly by helping my uncle. When I asked him why he did it," William said, taking a mock serious tone, "he told me, ‘It had not a thing to do with pity, my boy; it was merely the illogicality of it.’"

Marcy laughed. "That certainly sounds like a fitting answer to come from such an empirical man. Did you talk with him much?"

"We only had a few conversations that didn’t have to do with my work, but the day after my uncle’s trial I was feeling particularly close to him, so I took it as an opportunity to ask him a question that had been on my mind for quite a while. I realize now that it was probably not a good idea to question such a stubborn man—in fact, I’m surprised he didn’t fire me on the spot."

"What did you say to him?"

"I asked him why he didn’t let John play, or tell him any myths, or teach him any songs, and why he made him read all day. Bentham happened to be at the house visiting that day, as he often was, and I was then subjected to a terribly dull thirty minute lecture on Utilitarianism and its applications. Being just nine years old at the time, I found the talk quite boring. Still, I can recall a few things he said, especially when Bentham began to talk about the connection between the working class and drunkenness. This struck a particular chord with me—unfortunately, my father was a drunk, and sometimes became abusive. So when he brought up such a personal issue I told him of my father. He then proceeded to explain to me, in a rather cold and detached manner, that my father’s drunkenness was probably caused by his horribly boring work—he worked in a shoe factory, and although I don’t know exactly what he did, I assumed that he pulled the same lever or hammered the same type of shoe a few thousand times a day."

"I should think one would go insane with a job like that," said Marcy grimly.

"Yes," William agreed, "my father did seem to be on the brink of insanity sometimes. When I related this to Bentham he exclaimed, ‘Aha! This is the reason why James educates his son so thoroughly—if your father had been given an education like John’s, he would have become a businessman, or a lawyer, or even a writer!’"

"He named the last profession with a rather incredulous tone, which annoys me now, but as a child it struck me as just—the fact that my father could have become a writer was as unbelievable an idea as any I had ever heard. Before that I had always assumed that I would grow up to be just like him; that I would always be a stable boy or a factory hand my whole life—that was just how it was, and there was nothing I could do about it. But when Bentham revealed to me the merits of a good education, I realized that I wasn’t doomed to become my father, a miserable drunk whose only pleasure came at the expense of my behind. There was hope after all—with some hard work I could rise in status and actually become a person of importance. It was only then that I understood the value of Utilitarianism—if my father had been brought up in the same manner that John was raised, he surely would have been something more than a factory hand. In a purely material sense, Utilitarianism was a form of freedom—it allowed people to break the chains of the strict class structure which held them down. Furthermore, without Utilitarianism my uncle would have been put in jail for years."

"All of what you say is true," Marcy remarked, "but do you really believe in Utilitarianism so wholeheartedly that you would have wanted to switch your childhood with John’s?"

"Certainly not," William retorted, "but does that mean that nothing can be learned from it?"

"Well, no," Marcy replied, "but one still needs to strike a balance between a formal and informal education. To constantly train your child and to repress his emotions and need for games is totally unfair—children both need and deserve their fun and merriment. It is we, the adults, who should be worrying about Greek and Latin and the fall of Roman empire, not our children!"

"Marcy," William said, "I couldn’t agree with you more. And that is why I let our boys frolic with the other children."

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William rose, parted the curtain, gazed fondly down at the youngest of his children playing in the garden, then finished his story. "After I had my small epiphany," he said, "I went to Mr. Mill with a plea to help support my family so that I could get a proper schooling. He surprised me once again, and not only did he take care of my family while I was being schooled, but he sent me to a boarding school for English boys in Scotland! Can you believe it? When I first told my father about the idea he was irate—he couldn’t believe another man could be so vain as to step in and take his place—but when I told him about his compensation, he immediately swallowed his pride and was happy for me. After school, I began my career in journalism, and, well, you the know the rest. Unfortunately, John and I lost track of each other over the years. But he is now, after all this time, seeking a reunion. "

"My goodness!" Marcy exclaimed. "I was not expecting to hear such a riveting story." She took a deep breath and let her hands fall conclusively upon her thighs. "And after all that time," she said playfully, "you’re still not dressed!"

John laughed heartily. "I think you should go to Bath by yourself, my dear—I cannot even wait for one more day. The silence between John and me has been in place too long and is too painful to bear any longer. Today I must meet once again with the man who changed my life."