John Stuart Mill

Fashioning a New Life

Following Harriet's death and during that part of the year that Mill and Helen had spent at the house in Blackheath Park, Mill began to cultivate a new social life with some old friends, including Grote. Mill had praised Grote's History of Greece in the Edinburgh Review in 1853, and this had paved the way to reviving their friendship; they had been estranged because of Mrs. Grote's opposition to the marriage with Harriet. Mill made some new friends as well. He organized Saturday dinners at Blackheath Park and dutifully arranged to meet his guests at 5:00 p.m. as they alighted from the train from Charing Cross. Those guests included Bain, the Amberleys (Lord Amberley was the eldest son of Lord John Russell and subsequently the father of Bertrand Russell, to whom Mill would become godfather in 1872), Fawcett, John Elliot Cairnes (a young man Mill had met at the Political Economy Club in 1859), Moncure Conway (an American who had succeeded Fox at South Place Chapel), Herbert Spencer, Louis Blanc (the exiled French socialist), Gomperz (Mill's German translator), Mill's ex-colleague Thornton, Thomas Hare (who had proposed the system of proportional representation), and John Morley.

Thornton had once expostulated to Gomperz on the rare privilege of being one of Mill's friends: “Few enjoyed it, but those who did, knew how to value it. Of the immeasurable goodness of this man he could not as yet have any idea.