2003 Hilda Hulme Memorial Lecture

It is a great honour to have been asked to deliver the Hilda Hulme Memorial Lecture for 2003, and I thank the Institute for English Studies for inviting me. This is to be a story about families, and I am delighted to see some of my immediate family here this evening. It is also a great pleasure to see so many students, friends and colleagues here for a lecture to commemorate the life and work of a distinguished scholar who taught English Language and Literature at UCL from 1944 until her retirement through ill health in 1976. Hilda Hulme died in 1983, the year in which I began teaching in Australia. My lecture will also explore some of that psychological and cultural territory that lies between Britain and her Antipodean colonies, traversed with such emotional and intellectual courage and resilience by our nineteenth-century forebears, and still requiring to be negotiated by their descendents in Australia and New Zealand today. It does not engage with Hilda Hulme's particular area of expertise in Shakespeare's language, but I hope it shares some of the passion and excitement she expresses for her work, and it does, I believe, reflect her profound belief in the connections between the cultural scholarship in which we engage and what she termed 'real-life experience' (Hulme, 1972, 90).

One of my interests in Victorian literature is in how it responds to the imagined 'real life' of the past, how it represents and makes use of historical periods, forms, ideas, and persons for its own purposes, and how we in turn represent and make use of the Victorians. In our own time we are experiencing a historicist turn, a renewed fascination with narrativising the lives of literary figures from the past, and making sense of them again for a modern generation. Witness the recent success of The Hours, for example, a clearly fictional portrayal of the life and work of Virginia Woolf, herself the daughter of a distinguished Victorian writer of lives, Leslie Stephen, and Julia Jackson, poetic photographic portraits of whom by her aunt Julia Margaret Cameron are currently on display at the National Portrait Gallery. And of course they were a couple whose marriage was to be fictionalised in their daughter's novel To the Lighthouse. My topic this evening is the intellectual and personal relationship between two other eminent Victorians, Harriet Taylor and John Stuart Mill; more specifically, how that relationship, the subject of so much ideological contestation, has been constructed and appropriated by aftercomers keen to establish ownership of their story. My title alludes, of course, to Antonia Byatt's wonderful Booker Prize-winning novel Possession: A Romance, published in 1990 and dedicated to Isobel Armstrong, my predecessor in the 19^th century Chair at Birkbeck, and made newly current, albeit quite inadequately, by the recent film.[1] For this too is to be a romance, exploring modern struggles for possession of not only the intellectual history but the elusive private lives and family secrets of this intriguing couple, a story involving transcontinental claims on them, graveside encounters, geneological puzzles. My interest too, like Byatt's, is in desire, the desire that drove these formidably cerebral intellectuals into such an unconventional love affair; and no less compellingly in desire otherwise configured, expressed as longings for identity and personal meaning, particularly in the context of colonial history, in postcolonial desire; and of course in the desire that drives modern scholars and indeed amateur historians and genealogists to understand and to plot the past, to possess and be possessed by its stories, in desire as narrative form. For as Catherine Belsey reminds us 'Stories are about desire . They also seek to elicit the desire of the reader'; and furthermore, 'Desire writes us "like living stories"' (Belsey, 1994, 208).

Desire has tended to be written out of Harriet Taylor's and John Stuart Mill's story. Their relationship was famously chaste, even, it is speculated, after their marriage, and Phyllis Rose, in her study of five Victorian marriages, Parallel Lives, explores in some detail the intricacies of the twenty-year sexless 'virtual ménage à trois' Harriet Taylor shared with her husband and Mill, 'a companion to both, lover to neither' (Rose, 1983, 19). Mill himself, who at the tender age of seventeen had spent one night in confinement for distributing pamphlets advocating birth control, adamantly denied that there was any sexual dimension to their liaison before Harriet's husband John Taylor's death, claiming in his Autobiography 'our relation to each other at that time was one of strong affection and confidential intimacy only. For though we did not consider the ordinances of society binding on a subject so entirely personal, we did feel bound that our conduct should be such as in no degree to bring discredit on her husband, nor therefore on herself (Mill, 1969, 137). In an earlier draft of the Autobiography, he expressed himself more plainly: 'We disdained, as every person not a slave of his animal appetites must do, the abject notion that the strongest and tenderest friendship cannot exist between a man and a woman without a sensual relation'; and claimed 'our life, during those years, would have borne the strictest scrutiny' (Mill, 1961, 171).

Of course feminist writers from Mary Wollstonecraft on, as part of their refusal of contemporary ideologies of sexual difference that gendered the mind as masculine and the body as feminine, were inclined to emphasise the importance of rational self-control at the expense of the physical. Reason supervenes passion, for example, in Wollstonecraft's foundational feminist work A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), where she proposes that, 'In order to fulfil the duties of life, and to be able to pursue with vigour the various employments which form the moral character, a master and mistress of a family ought not to continue to love each other with passion. they ought not to indulge those emotions which disturb the order of society, and engross the thoughts that should be otherwise employed' (Wollstonecraft, 1995, 35). Against male constructions of woman's nature as primarily sexual, Wollstonecraft advocates the repression of desire, and recommends companionate marriage based on friendship rather than passion. Feminists who followed her were made aware of just how damaging a recognition of female sexuality could be to the cause for which they were fighting by the backlash that took place after her death when William Godwin published his Memoirs of his wife (1898) in which he spoke frankly of her love affairs, her illegitimate child by a former lover, Gilbert Imlay, her two suicide attempts after Imlay left her, and so on. As a consequence, her important feminist work was restrospectively discredited, so that even her most serious and moral writings appeared to the next generation somehow 'reprehensible', as George Eliot was wryly to observe in her mid-Victorian essay on the Vindication (Eliot, 1990, 333). This certainly would have suggested to feminists such as Taylor and Mill, and of course George Eliot herself, whose private lives defied convention that they had better be very discreet indeed about 'loving each other with a passion'.

Such considerations notwithstanding, most commentators on Mill's life seem to conclude that he never consummated his relationship with Harriet Taylor, who is constructed by some as having a frigid 'aversion to sexual intercourse' (Pappe, 1960, 29) to match the alleged impotence of her lover proposed by others (Kamm, 1977, 41). Still others speculate that the couple shared a philosophical aversion to the 'animal function' (Mill, 1986, 37) of the sexual act which kept them chaste. But Matthew Sweet, in his recent provocative book, Inventing the Victorians, about how we moderns have swallowed whole and continue to perpetuate the view fabricated by Bloomsbury of the Victorians as ludicrously prudish and sexually repressed, has taught us to be sceptical of such stories. Indeed, he cites John Stuart Mill's and Harriet Taylor's '[cohabitation] for a decade before the latter's husband died, leaving them free to legitimise their union' as an example of his contention that within Victorian marriage 'there was . plenty of scope for permutation' (Sweet, 2002, 216-17). There has equally been plenty of scope for permutation in the representation of Taylor's and Mill's intellectual and personal relationship. In this lecture I want to explore some of the ways in which Taylor and Mill have been invented and re-invented in our own times, to question, and perhaps dislodge, the hegemony of the intellect and recuperate the body into the way their story is told. Further, I want to use the example of the rich and contested critical and imaginative afterlife that has been woven around them to look at some of the more general issues that underlie our negotiations with a past that continues to impinge very directly on the present.

Let me begin by reading a passage from Olive Schreiner's haunting novel of 1883 The Story of an African Farm in which the young hero Waldo, who has spent his life on an isolated farm on the Karoo, discovers a case of books in the loft:

He stuck his hand in among the books, and pulled out two. He felt them, thrust his fingers in among the leaves, and crumpled them a little, as a lover feels the hair of his mistress. The fellow gloated over his treasure. He had had a dozen books in the course of his life; now here was a mine of them opened at his feet. After a while he began to read the titles, and now and again opened a book and read a sentence; but he was too excited to catch the meanings distinctly. At last he came to a dull brown volume. He read the name, opened it in the centre, and where he opened began to read. 'Twas a chapter on property that he fell upon - Communism, Fourierism, St Simonism in a work on Political Economy. He read down one page and turned over to the next; he read down that without changing his posture by an inch; he read the next, and the next, kneeling up all the while with the book in his hand, and his lips parted.

All he read he did not fully understand; the thoughts were new to him; but this was the fellow's startled joy in the book - the thoughts were his, they belonged to him. He had never thought them before, but they were his. (Schreiner, 1992, 76)

The work on Political Economy that so excites him, whose ideas were his own, 'belonged to him', is John Stuart Mill's Principles of Political Economy, published in 1848, and the transformative effect it has on Waldo not only speaks of his profound and global significance as a thinker, but also recalls the effect on Mill himself of reading Wordsworth's poems for the first time in the late 1820s, when he was experiencing a mental breakdown that he ascribed to the excessive cultivation of his intellect at the expense of his feelings. As he describes it in his Autobiography, 'They seemed to be the very culture of the feelings, which I was in quest of' (Mill, 1969, 89). The intellect and the feelings, that seemed to the young Mill so impossibly polarised, were brought together in 1830, when he met and fell in love with Harriet Taylor, the twenty-two-year-old wife of a pharmaceuticals wholesaler, whom he was eventually to marry in 1851, following John Taylor 's death in 1849, after a twenty-year love affair that was acknowledged and accepted by her husband. The two had a close collaborative working relationship, sharing an interest in the area of socio-political philosophy, with a particular interest in women's rights. Harriet's best known work in her own name is her essay 'The Enfranchisement of Women', but she clearly had a significant input into some of the most important books published by Mill, in particular the work that so inspired Schreiner's character Waldo, Principles of Political Economy, and On Liberty (1859). The libertarian principles espoused in the latter book, published after the death of his wife, and dedicated to her, are directed particularly at the 'woman question' in The Subjection of Women (1869), and Mill made use of his three years as Liberal M.P. for Westminster (1865-68) to fight for women's suffrage and further the cause to which he and Harriet had together been so committed. He was devastated by her death in 1858, and bought a house overlooking the cemetery in Avignon where she was buried, and where he himself was eventually laid to rest fifteen years later in 1873.

His passionate eulogy, inscribed on her tombstone, barely containable within its marble boundaries, memorialises the woman who was his inspiration over many years:

"To the beloved memory of Harriet Mill the dearly loved and deeply regretted wife of John Stuart Mill. Her great and loving heart, her noble soul, her clear, powerful, original and comprehensive intellect, made her the guide and support, the instructor in wisdom, and the example in goodness as she was the sole earthly delight of those who had the happiness to belong to her. As earnest for all public good as she was generous and devoted to all who surrounded her, her influence has been felt in many of the greatest improvements of the age and will be in those still to come. Were there even a few hearts and intellects like hers the earth would already become the hoped for heaven. She died, to the irreparable loss of those who survive her, at Avignon Nov. 3 1858."

Mill's words have been described as 'hopelessly hyperbolic . the phrases knock together bombastically' (Rose, 1983, 141). But when I saw it I found myself deeply moved, like George Eliot who visited the grave with George Henry Lewes in 1861, by the fact that even this vast marble slab seemed too small for the overflowing of Mill's love for his wife, and that he had left no room for the marking of his own death, which was to be relegated to the side of the slab (Eliot, 1954-55, 1978, vol. 3, 407n).

Mill honours Harriet Taylor in a similarly extravagant way in his Autobiography as 'the source of a great part of all that I have attempted to do, or hope to effect hereafter, for human improvement' (111). Regenia Gagnier takes his description in the public manifesto of The Subjection of Women of what she calls 'the perfect dialogical couple' - 'Two persons of cultivated faculties, identical in opinions and purposes, between whom there exists that best kind of equality, similarity of powers and capacities with reciprocal superiority in them' - as '"autobiographical," derived from personal experience' (Gagnier, 1991, 256). In his wife Mill found the perfect union of what he identified as the main formative influences of his life: the speculative intellect embodied by his father, the Utilitarian James Mill, and the poetry exemplified by Wordsworth. He took advantage of the opportunity of writing his autobiography to pay tribute to the level of the contribution she had made to his published writings, which were, he said, 'not the work of one mind, but of the fusion of two' (Mill, 1969, 114), 'as much her work as mine' (Mill, 1969, 145). Such open recognition of his wife's intellect was not at all well received in his own day, and neither has it been in our own. Among their Victorian contemporaries, Leslie Stephen, for instance, sceptically notes, 'It may be true that Mrs. Mill was more of a poet than Carlyle, and more of a thinker than Mill himself; that she was like Shelley, but that Shelley was but a child to what she ultimately became; that her wisdom was "all but unrivalled", and much more to the same purpose', but, he asks, how can it be proved or disproved of 'a person of whom the world knows so little?' (Stephen, 1874, 4, 221-22) Thus he turns Mill's attempt to introduce to a wider public 'one whom the world had no opportunity of knowing' (Mill, 1969, 3) back upon itself. Stephen's own view is that 'these extravagant expressions of admiration may have been lavished upon a living echo - an echo, it is true, skilful enough to anticipate as well as to repeat, but still essentially an echo' (Stephen, 1874, 4, 221-22). More modern critics have been similarly hostile to the notion that one of the great thinkers of the nineteenth century might have owed so much to a woman. Jack Stillinger, for example, remarks in 1969 that Harriet 'may have aided Mill by ordinary wifely discussion and debate', but asserts that she 'was no originator of ideas'; he concludes, 'It is unfortunate that Mill did not simply thank his wife for encouragement, perhaps also for transcribing a manuscript or making an index, and let it go at that' (Mill, 1969, xix), as, he might have added, male academics have been in the habit of doing for years. More resistant still to what he refers to as 'the Harriet Taylor myth' is H.O. Pappe, who jocularly closes the preface to his book designed to dispel the myth of her intellectual ascendancy with the words 'I trust that I shall not lay myself open to the suspicion of trying to create another myth by thanking my wife for her assistance without which this thesis could not have been written' (Pappe, 1960, viii).

The enlightened author of The Subjection of Women (1869) was acutely aware of the inequitable position of women in Victorian society, and his praise for Harriet Taylor's role in his life's work constitutes not only a personal acknowledgement to his wife, but also a more general recognition of women's unwritten and unrecognised lives, of the absence of women from mainstream accounts of intellectual history above all, an absence that modern feminist cultural historians have sought to address. In the case of Harriet Taylor in particular, American academics such as Alice Rossi and Jo Ellen Jacobs have made a serious study of her work, and this has led to a re-evaluation of the intellectual contribution she made to Mill's published writing and her role in the shaping of his thought. Such scholars have also questioned the received story of their private life, and proposed other readings. Most recently, and sensationally, the editor of The Complete Works of Harriet Taylor Mill, Jo Ellen Jacobs, in her biography of Harriet Taylor published last year has proposed that one reason for her subject's 'limited' sexuality (Jacobs, 2002, xxvi), and equally for her husband's famed 'generosity' towards her relationship with Mill, may have been that he had infected her with syphilis. She bases her case on the fact that not only were the symptoms Harriet displayed consistent with the disease which, she speculates, John Taylor, ten years her senior, may have contracted from a prostitute before his marriage, but also that she consulted a doctor in the 1850s who was noted for his treatment of syphilis, and that she took an iodine/mercury medication popularly used as a remedy for syphilis. Contemporary 'therapies for syphilis', she claims, 'exactly match those treatments used by Harriet' for her ailing physical condition (Jacobs, 2002, 136-37).

In her disarming introduction to her book The Voice of Harriet Taylor Mill, Jacobs describes how 'Visions of Possessions [sic] danced in my head' as she went to South Australia to consult the Hardy family papers held by Harriet's great-great niece, hoping to find 'a small leather-bound diary with letters stuck between the pages' (Jacobs, 2002, 1-2). When no such find presented itself, she decided to invent such a diary, basing each entry on historical evidence, as a way of trying to recover her subject's voice (Jacobs, 2002, xxvii), an overt recognition of what Lyndall Gordon, in a discussion of the challenges of writing the 'unmapped country' of women's lives, describes as 'the gaps [that] invite some play of imaginative truth' (Gordon, 1995, 89). To invoke Possession at the start of such a ficto-biographical enterprise seems entirely apt, and indeed as we witness the Mill and the Taylor critics of different persuasions on both sides of the Atlantic locking horns over the critical possession of their stories, the comparison with Byatt's witty depiction of modern academia is irresistible. But of course in that novel another story altogether intrudes into the banal world of scholarly one-upmanship and ideological competitiveness, in the form of a text - Randolph Henry Ash's drafted letters to an unknown woman that Roland Michell discovers between the pages of one of his books in the London Library - and a quite different narrative begins to unfold, unravelling this polarised academic account, muddying the waters, unsettling the established boundaries, as real life intrudes, and the ideological battles give way to a very material tussle over ownership of their stories, that culminates at the graveside of Ash and his wife.

We have probably all of us experienced real life crashing in on our intellectual life at some time or another, the messy business of ordinary human needs invading the orderly rational space of libraries and books and academic conferences, and I would like to tell you about my own experience when I visited the grave of Harriet Taylor and John Stuart Mill in Avignon last summer.

Conjure the scene. It is hot, hot, the relentless noise of cicadas invading the deep silence of the Cimetière Saint-Véran, caressed on the southern side where their tomb lies by Avenue Stuart Mill, all that remains of the grief-stricken man who watched over his wife's grave from the house he had bought to be near her. I should have brought flowers to this most romantic of graves. I'm full of regret. The great slab of Carrara marble that he had imported from Italy shining so white that it hurts the eyes. It is a sight for sore eyes, though, a site of intense imaginings, of uncanny encounters, a million miles from the scene that opens Great Expectations, but as rich with possibilities. Of course I must capture the moment, and as I move forward to focus the camera, my attention is drawn to a pile of stones at the foot of the frame. There is something more, underneath the stones. I kneel down before them and find a small plastic envelope containing a folded paper. A message? From beyond the grave? Or a map, promising the start of some great adventure? I already feel caught up in this. As I open the envelope, made soft in the heat, I find a letter, dated six weeks earlier, Sunday June 23, 2002, 11.00hrs. Must have been written spontaneously on the only piece of paper to hand, le plan du cimetière. What does it say? JOHN STUART MILL and SIMON MILL OF NEW ZEALAND, graphically connected, but how do they connect? Read on:

As the only (?) living line of James and John Mill I wonder under whose authority Harriet and John Mill's grave has been rebuilt?

I, Simon Michael Mill of Masterton, N.Z., Great Grandson of John Mill of Fifeshire (?) (who was lovechild of John Stuart Mill and Mrs Harriet Taylor - brought up by Dr Lang of Tayport as 'an orphan' & emigrated to Dunedin at 18 years of age) regret the crass refurbishment of this grave.

The note is already becoming faded by the sun, and it seems miraculous that it is still here undisturbed, nearly two months after it had been so carefully hidden beneath the pebbles. I meticulously copy the words into the back flyleaf of my Blue Guide to Provence, but feel torn on the question of leaving this poignant and courageous claim on the Mill family name to the elements, or to others, or of taking it into my own possession. What to do? I decide to return it to its place under the stones.

But I later regretted my decision, and the thought of natural decomposition was the self-justification for a change of heart. My husband Rob went back to the cemetery that evening, in true Roland Michell style, to retrieve what seemed to us a message in a bottle, an original document that I needed not merely to copy but to possess.

I was of course haunted by the ghost of Possession as I thenceforth entered a world of confabulation made none the less compelling by the fact that my desire to narrativise was so knowing, so self-conscious about the available plots and their potential meanings. What the fragments of this story represented for me and for Simon Mill was naturally quite different, as I acknowledged when I wrote to him following my return to England. He was anxious to recover his lost family history, whereas for me this sketched in life-that-might-have-been opened up intriguing questions and possibilities. We entered into enthusiastic correspondence, and he sent me all the information he had about this story of his family lineage that he himself had been told by his father and his great aunts, as he himself admitted, based on 'very sparse details (correct or not!) his daughters told us'; a story, then, embellished by multiple retellings, told through the prism of memory and desire. He wrote:

My father had a theory based on research of reading Mill literature and dates that Mrs Harriet Taylor's "illness that sent her into the country" about 1843 had something to do with John Stuart Mill and John Mill might have been the cause?

He adds, 'My father wrote Bertrand Russell about this as he was J.S.Mill's [godson], and Russell said "an interesting theory" but no more'. 'Is it possible?' he asks.

How extraordinary if it were! The material traces of the young John Mill's life in Scotland were frustratingly scant: an entry in the old family bible, indicating that he was born in 1843 in March Inch; a painting of Dr and Mrs Lang's house in Tayport where he grew up now hanging in the family home (Simon Mill sent me a photograph of the house as it is now, with him standing in front of it).

There is evidence aplenty of John Mill's later life, as he was to become a distinguished figure in Port Chalmers where he arrived on the 'Sarah Anne' in 1862, married and settled, raising himself from his lowly beginnings to become the owner of one of the largest stevedoring companies in New Zealand. But there was, I was told, no firm evidence to connect the John Mill who emigrated to New Zealand in 1862 at the age of nineteen, and his namesake. I began, like Simon Mill's father before me, to look at the letters and any other extant biographical evidence about Harriet Taylor and John Stuart Mill at the time of her supposed pregnancy, to see whether there were any unexplained gaps and silences in the record that might support his theory.

There are always gaps in the historical record, particularly of course in the most intimate areas of people's private lives, and the most scandalous, and also in cases of radical disruption and dislocation, such as colonial migration, where the connecting threads are lost. Simon Mill's desire to be reconnected and to understand and to tell his own family story is entirely understandable, but how legitimate is it to enter into imaginative confabulation in the writing of lives which must always be only partially known to aftercomers? Modern biographers are the first to acknowledge the problems of not knowing, and to foreground the role of informed speculation in their art. Richard Holmes, for example, in an essay on 'Biography: Inventing the Truth', notes that as a genre, Biography's 'genius, and indeed its very genealogy, is impure', that it is a 'bastard form', the offspring of a marriage of fiction and fact (Holmes, 1995, 15): 'The biographer has always had to construct or orchestrate a factual pattern out of materials that already have a fictional or reinvented element' (Holmes, 1995, 17), such as diaries, letters, memoirs - memory itself. 'The fluid, imaginative powers of re-creation pull against the hard body of discoverable fact. The inventive, shaping instinct of the story-teller struggles with the ideal of a permanent, historical and objective document' (Holmes, 1995, 20). But what Holmes says here about Biography is of course true of History itself. In his beguiling book Dead Certainties (Unwarranted Speculations), dedicated to the memory of John Clive 'for whom history was literature', Simon Schama imaginatively reconstructs the death of General Wolfe at Quebec, and the gruesome murder in the family of Wolfe's chronicler, Francis Parkman, revealing an extraordinary history of stories. He describes his account as a pair of 'historical novellas' since, though based 'on what documents suggest', they include some passages that are 'pure inventions' (Schama, 1998, 322). Although Schama is careful to emphasise that he does not 'scorn the boundary between fact and fiction' (Schama, 1998, 322) (he would, I'm sure, share Quentin Skinner's view of historical stories that 'they are at least supposed to be true' (Skinner, 1969, 29)), he also shares the desire of Henry James' young historian Ralph Pendrel in The Sense of the Past for 'the unimaginable accidents, the little notes of truth for which the common lens of history, however the scowling muse might bury her nose, was not sufficiently fine. He wanted evidence of a sort for which there had never been documents enough or for which documents mainly, however multiplied, would never be enough' (quoted Schama, 1998, 319-20).

It seems to me that we do have a responsibility to the interstices for which there are no documentary records, particularly with regard to a woman's life, where as biographer Lyndall Gordon argues, 'it is necessary to open up the gaps' (Gordon, 1995, 88), for 'the surface, collectable facts of women's lives . will not suffice' (Gordon, 1995, 94):

Women's lives deviate from the set stories of traditional biography. We are adept at stories, the approved stories our culture has produced . But what story will elicit the uncategorized ferment of hidden possibilities? What form do we give to the potent shadow in which women of the past lived? (Gordon, 1995, 97)

She quotes Virginia Woolf's view that 'the actual event practically does not exist', and agrees that 'subversive as this may be of our craft, I fear it is, in a sense, so' (Gordon, 1995, 95). For feminist historians, especially those engaged in writing family history, the task is even more challenging, as Leonore Davidoff et al discuss in their book The Family Story: Blood, Contract and Intimacy, 1830-1960. Their last chapter looks at 'some of the silences and secrets which have been constructed by families, highlights their impact upon the identity of family members, and considers how an investigation of such silences and absences can enrich our understanding of the history of the family' (Davidoff, 1999, 244). They include silences about illicit sexual relationships outside marriage, illegitimate children, allegedly orphaned children being sent to Australia. As Annette Kuhn observes 'A family without secrets is rare indeed' (Kuhn, 1995, 1):

Family secrets are the other side of the family's public face, of the stories families tell themselves, and the world, about themselves. Characters and happenings that do not slot into the flow of the family narrative are ruthlessly edited out. (Kuhn, 1995, 2)

In the case of Harriet Taylor and John Stuart Mill we know, of course, that although their illicit relationship was in a sense an open secret, they conducted it in such a way as to preserve appearances. Indeed, they developed an ethos of deception, not least when they went away together. In a letter to her husband about a holiday she plans to take with Mill in 1849, Harriet writes 'He does not tell even his own family where he goes for his holiday as I so hate all tittle-tattle. Therefore I do not mention it either except to you' (Hayek, 1951, 151). As the editor of their letters, F.A.Hayek, notes of their preparations for a holiday together in Italy much earlier, in 1838, 'Both Mill and Mrs. Taylor appear at this time to have taken great care not to let it be known that they were to travel together. Mill let it be understood that he was going to Malta, while Mrs. Taylor was ostensibly proposing to visit one of her brothers and his Italian wife at Pisa' (Hayek, 1951,105). None of the letters and other documents of the period make any allusion to their joint journey, and indeed many of the letters written over the two decades of their extra-marital relationship are either missing or have been mutilated.

In the context of such deliberate concealment strategies, it seemed perfectly reasonable to hypothesise a hidden pregnancy, a disappearance on holiday to cover the period of the latter stages of pregnancy and the birth of a baby. Was there any evidence to support such a story, though? Were there any hard facts that could be checked? At this point I turned for help to my sister Sally, who is researching our own family history, and who has become a very knowledgable genealogist. She told me that John Mill's birth may not have been registered, because statutory registration was not introduced in Scotland until 1855. She searched the available records nevertheless, but could find no evidence of a John Mill being born in March Inch, or Markinch, in 1843. Not to be beaten, and knowing that spelling variations and other errors are common in the early records she spread her search more widely, looking for any John Mills born anywhere in Scotland during the period from 1830 to 1873. And here we struck gold. For there were only four children of that name registered over those four decades, and one of them, named John Tosh Mills, was born on 28 February, 1849 in Kirkcaldy, only eight miles from Markinch, to parents named James Mills and Helen Taylor, the names, with variance, respectively, of John Stuart Mill's father and Harriet Taylor's daughter. Here, finally, was the connection we had been looking for.

Accordingly I revised my own search through the letters to take account of this new time horizen, and found that Harriet and her daughter Helen were, supposedly, away in France at the relevant time, even though John Taylor was seriously ill and anxious for his wife to be with him. Her excuses for not returning to nurse her dying husband seemed very thin. Furthermore, although none of her letters to Mill from this date are preserved, and only a few of his carefully numbered letters to her remain, one of these, dated 27 January 1849, after he had returned from seeing her, seems especially passionate and revealing, as he responds to 'the excessive sweetness & love' of an 'exquisite letter' from her, that 'makes it like something dropt from heaven'. He goes on to tell her:

I had been literally pining for it & had got into a state of depression which I do not think I shall fall into again during this absence. When I left you my darling & during all the journey back I was full of life & animation & vigour of wish and purpose, because fresh from being with you, fresh from the influence of your blessed presence & of that extreme happiness of that time which during the last week or fortnight I have hardly been able to conceive that I ever had - much less that I should ever have again - but this angel letter has begun to bring back happiness & spirit & I begin to feel the holiday & journey & that blessed meeting as if they would really be - & to feel capable also of being & doing something in the meanwhile which I had entirely ceased to feel. (Hayek, 1951, 131)

It seemed as though something truly momentous had happened between them at this time, and I persuaded myself that, although the dates didn't quite fit with John Mill's New Zealand history, the circumstantial evidence did seem to support the idea that John Tosh Mills could indeed be their child, whom they had given up to adoption, perhaps to protect the reputations of Harriet's husband and three children, or indeed their own reputations and the liberal causes with which they were associated.

Ultimately, alas, this theory was dashed by three pieces of apparently firm evidence against. First, Simon Mill obtained a copy John Mill's death certificate, another document, but this time one bearing an official stamp, listing the parents as James Mill (occupation - farmer) and Agnes Mill, née Laing (a relative, then, of the Laings who raised the orphaned John Mill). Secondly, Sally discovered in the Register of Baptisms for the Parish of Kirkcaldy (under the 'neglected entries' section that was for all births that hadn't been registered before statutory registration was introduced in Scotland) a list of children, including John Tosh, born to a James Mills and a Helen Taylor, who obviously lived there and were not connected to John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor. And thirdly, she found an entry in the 1841 census for one John Mill, aged 4 months, living in Markinch with his father James Mill, 27, agricultural labourer, two sisters and one brother, and a 25-year-old woman named Mary Mill, who was perhaps his aunt. There is no mention of Agnes, named as his mother on the death certificate. Perhaps she died in childbirth, or possibly her name was entered incorrectly on John Mill's death certificate. I felt hugely disappointed. I hadn't indeed realised just how much I had invested in finding this connection. I hadn't recognised the extent of my desire to believe in and narrate this story. If it wasn't true, how could I deliver this lecture? But then I came round to thinking that it didn't actually matter, to me at least, whether or not it was true.

Why do we need to tell such stories? First, what drove Simon Mill and his father before him to trace their family line back to John Stuart Mill? Obviously the coincidence of the name John Mill may have suggested the particular connection, and for a family that had made good in a material sense to be able to locate itself in an intellectual and cultural heritage of such distinction would naturally be attractive. My own grandfather was a stevedore (though he didn't alas go on, like John Mill, to own a large stevedore company), and it is not hard to imagine how the idea that he was really the illegitimate son of a major nineteenth-century thinker might take a grip on one, and seem ironically to confer a kind of legitimation. The desire for origins, for a family story, a place in history, that seems so prevalent in, for example, the huge current interest in genealogy, is the more powerfully felt among the dispossessed. In the former colonies, it seems every other person imagines themselves to be descended from some illustrious, fabulously wealthy, or otherwise romantic forebear. My husband's family, for example, five generations in South Australia, claims to be descended from a Spanish sea captain (their name is Raphael), and counts at least one Lord Mayor of London among their ancestors. This is the other side of that colonial desire about which Robert Young writes so compellingly, the postcolonial desire the Empire writes back for connection with the absent mother country. In a speech on 'The True Conception of Empire' delivered at the annual dinner of the Royal Colonial Institute in 1897, Joseph Chamberlain explained to his audience: 'As regards the self-governing colonies we no longer talk of them as dependencies. The sense of possession has given way to the sentiment of kinship' (Ledger and Luckhurst, 2000, 138-39). The 'mother country' is, he notes, 'still able to send forth troops of stalwart sons to people and occupy the waste spaces of the earth' (Ledger and Luckhurst, 2000, 141). Possession has given way to kinship, to the relations of mother and sons, but this makes the need for real familial ties all the more crucial among those who feel themselves culturally dispossessed.

The search for the mother, on the part of the illegitimate and the dispossessed, has a particular resonance in the colonial context, but in the nineteenth century the need to rediscover one's history reflects a more general cultural condition. Foucault has drawn attention to the sense of historical dispossession felt by many in the period, to the fact that in a post-Darwinian world 'nature no longer speaks to [humanity] of the creation or the end of the world, of his dependency or his approaching judgement; it no longer speaks of anything but a natural time' (Foucault, 1970, 368). In the face of 'the simple fact that man found himself emptied of history', Foucault argues, 'he was already beginning to recover in the depths of his own being, and among all the things that were capable of reflecting his image . a historicity linked essentially to man himself' (Foucault, 1970, 369). As part of his recovery of his own historicity, he was obliged to rewrite his story, and this is the explanation, or so argues Peter Brooks, for 'the enormous narrative production of the nineteenth century'. Brooks suggests that a widespread cultural 'anxiety at the loss of providential plots' may explain 'the nineteenth century's obsession with questions of origin, evolution, progress, genealogy, its foregrounding of the historical narrative as par excellence the necessary mode of explanation and understanding' (Brooks, 1984, 6-7). This is something that Mill's friend Thomas Carlyle (from whom he was to become estranged over his relationship with Harriet Taylor) understood when he remarked on the importance of linearity in narrative in his essay 'On History' (1830). Narrative, he proposes, 'travels towards one, or towards successive points', thereby enabling a person to feel part of a teleological historical order, and to 'unite himself in clear conscious relation [.] with the whole Future and the whole Past' (Carlyle, 1896-1901,vol. 27, 88-9). Seen in these terms, the desire to locate oneself within a family story, especially for those whose family line had been diverted to a colonial space, seems entirely explicable.

However, Franco Moretti, in his discussion of the way plot generates meaning in the European Bildungsroman, distinguishes between this kind of teleological rhetoric, whereby 'events acquire meaning when they lead to one ending, and one only', and its opposite, whereby 'Meaning is the result not of a fulfilled teleology, but rather, as for Darwin, of the total rejection of such a solution' (Moretti, 1987, 7). I find myself thinking of those Victorian novels with multiple or chance-driven plots, or alternative endings, like that novel I have already mentioned that begins in a graveyard, Great Expectations, and of Possession itself, with its Postscript opening everything up again, and it seems to me that John Mill's story similarly resists closure. Simon Mill is still searching for that elusive connection that his father believed in so powerfully that he wrote to Bertrand Russell with his extraordinary narrative. And of course it would be immensely satisfying for him to find evidence to authorise this family story. But as Annette Kuhn remarks, 'Although we take stories of childhood and family literally, I think our recourse to this past is a way of reaching for myth, for the story that is deep enough to express the profound feelings we have in the present' (Kuhn, 1995, 1).

Annette Kuhn's work on autobiography and memory in her book Family Secrets explores the complex territory of personal and collective memory, probing the points at which they connect and cross over into each other. This is the territory that this lecture has been exploring too - in the case of both Simon Mill's story, and my own - and oddly enough she finishes up in the same place. In the final essay in the volume, she describes walking home one evening in Bloomsbury:

Our stroll takes us to the passageway through the University of London's Senate House that connects Malet Street with Russell Square [just a few yards from here]. As we emerge from Senate House, we are brought up short by the extraordinary sight of a huge rubbish skip filled to overflowing with books, and more books scattered around on the tarmac. One or two people have climbed up into the skip and are picking over the books. When I take one up, I see that it has been discarded by the University of London Library. (Kuhn, 1995, 114)

For Kuhn, the experience has its own meanings, but for me this is such a powerful image of possession and dispossession - of books, words, stories. Bloomsbury, the centre of the English word, with its literary heritage, its great libraries, its university, the British Museum, the mother of all imperial collections, the repository of all knowledge, consigning what is surplus to need to the garbage. It is also an example of the way Kuhn's book, like Possession, works and plays in that no-man's zone between academic and personal discourses, between the public and the private, between history and fiction, in ways that can open up Victorian literature for us. For we too inhabit coincidence-driven plots and literary mises-en-scènes. I discover, on re-reading Possession for the first time in several years, that Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte, those fictional reincarnations of the Victorian poets I love, first met at 30, Russell Square, the current home of the School of English and Humanities, perhaps in my office! And back last summer, just the other side of the city wall from where the year before, as a Professeur Invité at the University of Avignon, I had been teaching Mill and Taylor on the subjection of women, I was brought face to face, at their place of burial, with their living story.

I owe special thanks to Simon Mill for allowing me to make use of his family history for this lecture and, more, for entering so enthusiastically into my research. Without the help of my sister, Sally Clark, I would not have known where to start with the genealogical research that she undertook so willingly on my behalf. Thank you, Sally. Thanks to Rob Fraser for accompanying me to the cemetery in Avignon and sharing my enthusiasm for the project. Finally, I am grateful to all those friends who have given their encouragement and support as well as their particular expertise to the project: Ruth Abbey, Deirdre Coleman, Patricia Crawford, Rod Edmond, Margaret Harris, Judy Johnston, Gail Jones, Prue Kerr, Jeremy Moon, Robyn Owens, Alf Smyth, Cynthia Werthamer, and, especially, Nick Burton.

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Carlyle, Thomas, The Works of Thomas Carlyle, ed. H.R. Traill, centenary edn., 30 vols (London: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1896-1901)

Davidoff, Leonore, Megan Doolittle, Janet Fink and Katherine Holden, The Family Story: Blood, Contract and Intimacy, 1830-1960 (London: Longman, 1999)

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Hayek, F.A., (ed.), John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor: Their Correspondence and subsequent Marriage (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1951)

Holmes, Richard, 'Biography: Inventing the Truth', in The Art of Literary Biography, ed. John Batchelor (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995) pp.15-25

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Mill, John Stuart, The Early Draft of John Stuart Mill's 'Autobiography', ed. Jack Stillinger (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1961)

___ Autobiography, ed. Jack Stillinger (London: Oxford University Press, 1969)

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Skinner, Quentin, 'Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas', in History and Theory 8 (1969), 3-53

Stephen, Leslie, Hours in a Library, 3rd edn, 4 vols (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1907)

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[1] Both Antonia Byatt and Isobel have delivered the Hilda Hulme Memorial Lecture in recent years.

THE 2003 HILDA HULME MEMORIAL LECTURE

Possession and Dispossession:
Owning the Story of Harriet Taylor and John Stuart Mill

Hilary Fraser

THE 2003 HILDA HULME MEMORIAL LECTURE

Possession and Dispossession: Owning the Story of Harriet Taylor and John Stuart Mill

Hilary Fraser

Possession and Dispossession:
Owning the Story of Harriet Taylor and John Stuart Mill