“A knowledge of Mill’s writings is essential to our understanding of Victorian literature. He is one of the leading figures in the intellectual history of his century, a thinker whose honest grappling with the political and religious problems of his age was to have a profound influence on writers as diverse as Matthew Arnold, Algernon Charles Swinburne, and Thomas Hardy.
“He began as a disciple of the Utilitarian theories of his father and of Jeremy Bentham but became gradually dissatisfied with the narrowness of their conception of human motives. Working in the empiricist tradition, Utilitarians attempted to show that most traditional views of politics, ethics, and psychology were based on nothing more than long-standing superstition and habit, and that superstition and habit generally stood in the way of progress.
“Though Mill was raised in this no-nonsense, reforming tradition, his honesty and open-mindedness enabled him to appreciate the values of such anti-Utilitarians as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas Carlyle and, whenever possible, to incorporate some of those values into the Utilitarian system.
“His tribute to the therapeutic value of art (because of its effect on human emotions), both in his Autobiography and in his early essay “What Is Poetry?” (1833) would have astonished Mill’s master, Bentham, who had equated poetry with pushpin, an idle pastime.
“His fundamental concern was to prevent the subjection of individuals in a democracy. His classic treatise ON Liberty (1859) is not a traditional liberal attack against tyrranical kings or dictators; it is an attack against tyrannical majorities. Mill foresaw that in democracies such as the United States the pressure toward conformity might crush all individuals (intellectual individualists in particular) to the level of what he called a “collective mediocrity.” Throughout all of his writings, even in his discussions of the advantages of socialism, Mill is concerned with demonstrating that the individual is more important than institutions such as church or state. In On Liberty we find a characteristic example of the process of his reasoning; but here, where the theme of individualism is central, his logic is charged with eloquence.”
John Stuart Mill Introduction, The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. 2, 8th Ed., (W.W. Norton & Company: New York, 2006): 1043-1044.
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