‘Think yourself lucky,’ said my husband when I told him about poor John Stuart Mill’s mother, who had nine children by a man strongly in favour of birth control and who brought up his children ‘in the absence of love and in the presence of fear’.
Parenthetically, I have only just discovered that the Mill family name had been Milne, changed to sound less Scottish. Gladstone’s name in his youth was Gladstones. Arthur Wellesley, later Duke of Wellington, only changed his name from Wesley at the age of 29. Why are so many great men pseudonymous?
Anyway, the bad-tempered James Mill used to stay with Jeremy Bentham from 1814 to 1818 at the stupendous Forde Abbey, Somerset, where they worked in a room hung with great tapestries made from Raphael cartoons now in the V&A.
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