John Stuart Mill

John Stuart Mill was born in Pentonville, London, on 20 May 1806, the eldest son of the Scottish philosopher and historian James Mill. He was educated at home on a plan devised by his father and Jeremy Bentham, beginning Greek at three, Latin at eight, and logic and political economy in his early teens, with no schooling and almost no company of other children. At twenty he suffered the breakdown he later described in his Autobiography, and credited his recovery in part to reading Wordsworth.

In 1823 he joined the East India Company at India House as a clerk in the examiner's office, the department that drafted the correspondence governing British India. He remained there for thirty-five years, becoming chief examiner of India correspondence in 1856, and left in 1858 when the Company's administration was transferred to the Crown after the Indian Rebellion. He wrote his books in the hours outside that office.

He met Harriet Taylor in 1830 and married her in 1851, two years after the death of her first husband. She died at Avignon in November 1858, and Mill bought a house near her grave and spent much of each year there afterward. On Liberty appeared in 1859 with a dedication to her memory. From 1865 to 1868 he sat as Member of Parliament for Westminster, where he spoke for the extension of the franchise to women and moved an amendment to the Reform Bill to that effect. He died at Avignon on 7 May 1873.