Six Victorian marriages, part 5: Harriet Hardy Taylor and John Stuart Mill

Harriet Hardy Taylor, ca. 1834. Image source: National Portrait Gallery, London

This is the fifth in a series of posts based on Phyllis Rose's Parallel Lives (Knopf, 1984) and Diane Johnson's True History of the First Mrs. Meredith (NY Review Books, 2020). 

Harriet Hardy Taylor and John Stuart Mill

While our image of a typical Victorian marriage is that of endless pregnancy—Queen Victoria herself had nine children—sexless, celibate or companionate marriages were apparently not uncommon in the 19th century. Sexual ignorance, as in the case of Effie Gray and John Ruskin, was one reason; sexual indifference, as in the case of Thomas Carlyle, was another.

But celibacy could be a mutual choice. For one thing, at a time when pregnancy and birth were extremely dangerous, abstinence was a sure form of birth control. Childlessness could also be a way of minimizing the burdens of domestic management, childcare and early education, which, even when servants could be afforded, fell disproportionately on wives. Catherine Dickens was so overwhelmed by the responsibility of caring for her nine surviving children that she sank into a permanent state of depression.

Harriet Taylor and John Stuart Mill chose celibacy as a protest against the "legal subordination" of women in marriage, an institution which gave a man conjugal rights over his wife regardless of her wishes or desires. Forced sex was "the lowest degradation of a human being," wrote Mill in The Subjection of Women, "that of being made the instrument of an animal function contrary to her inclinations." Such unjust laws, he continued, "ought to be replaced by a system of perfect equality." [1]

In an unequal world, the pleasures of sex were enjoyed disproportionately by men, and its dangers, risks and responsibilities borne disproportionately by women. What better demonstration of intellectual respect and equality, what better way to show that you are sincere in your appreciation of your partner's mind and ideas, than to willingly forego the "animal function" of sex?

One circumstance that exacted celibacy during the first 18 years of their relationship was that Harriet was married to another man, the merchant John Taylor, with whom she had three children. But soon after she met Mill in 1831, she told her husband that she would no longer have sex with him because she loved Mill more. She also promised her husband that she wouldn't have sex with Mill either, and remarkably, Taylor believed her assurances. He agreed to allow her to continue seeing and travelling with Mill (while he footed the bill), bought her a home outside London where she could meet Mill inconspicuously, and often absented himself so that they could be together without him.

Curiously, while Mill wrote of the need for perfect equality and opposed slavery, he supported the colonial administration of India. He worked for the East India Company for 35 years and attempted to justify its rule.

Those who are still in a state to require being taken care of by others, must be protected against their own actions as well as against external injury. For the same reason, we may leave out of consideration those backward states of society in which the race itself may be considered as in its nonage. The early difficulties in the way of spontaneous progress are so great, that there is seldom any choice of means for overcoming them; and a ruler full of the spirit of improvement is warranted in the use of any expedients that will attain an end, perhaps otherwise unattainable. Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improvement, and the means justified by actually effecting that end. [2]

Mill does not see that by creating hierarchical dichotomies ("civilization" versus "barbarism," "higher" versus "lower" pleasures), he is replicating the very system of thought he ostensibly opposed, in which men were considered superior and women inferior—the intellectually, morally and physically weaker sex requiring male control.

John Stuart Mill, 1865, by John & Charles Watkins. Image source: National Portrait Gallery, London

John Taylor died in 1849, and after waiting two years, Harriet and Mill finally decided to wed. A month before their marriage Mill made an unusual declaration repudiating the "legal power and control over the person, property, and freedom of action of the other party, independent of her own wishes and will" that were conferred upon husbands. He wrote,

in the event of marriage between Mrs. Taylor and me I declare it to be my will and intention, and the condition of the engagement between us, that she retains in all respects whatever the same absolute freedom of action, and freedom of disposal of herself and of all that does or may at any time belong to her, as if no such marriage had taken place; and I absolutely disclaim and repudiate all pretence to have acquired any rights whatever by virtue of such marriage. [3]

It's not clear whether they remained celibate after their marriage, but their intellectual companionship continued until her death in 1858, and, in fact, beyond. In Mill's own view, he and Harriet were a creative partnership of equals. Rose thinks that this formulation masks a reality in which the dominant partner was actually Harriet: it was her experiences that informed Mill's theories, she set the agenda and suggested topics for their consideration. Their interchange was reflected, for example, in The Subjection of Women (1869), which was based on her experience of marriage.

Title page of the first edition of The Subjection of Women. Image source: Internet Archive

In Mill's dedication to On Liberty (1859), published a year after Harriet's death, he wrote that she

was the inspirer, and in part the author, of all that is best in my writings—the friend and wife whose exalted sense of truth and right was my strongest incitement, and whose approbation was my chief reward. . .Like all that I have written for many years, it belongs as much to her as to me.

Harriet's essential contribution to Mill's work and thought has recently received fuller exploration by critics and scholars. But Mill himself always acknowledged it; in his Autobiography (1873) he asserted: "Not only during the years of our married life, but during many years of confidential friendship which preceded it, all my published writings are as much my wife's work as mine." [4]

Following Harriet's death her daughter Helen Taylor came to live with Mill. She became deeply involved in the women's suffrage movement, and worked together with him in that cause and many others.

John Stuart Mill and Helen Taylor in the 1860s. Image source: New York Times

In 1866 Mill presented the Ladies' Petition on suffrage to the House of Commons; Helen "was influential in its wording, organization, and presentation, and was the main conduit of correspondence and contact between Mill and the women petition organizers." [5] She also wrote an article on the petition for the Westminster Review, and engaged in debates on the issue. After Mill's death in 1873 she edited for publication his Autobiography; the Three Essays on Religion: Nature, the Utility of Religion and Theism; Chapters on Socialism; and the fourth and final volume of Dissertations and Discussions. 

In a late passage in his Autobiography, Mill paid tribute to both of his collaborators:

Surely no one ever before was so fortunate, as, after such a loss as mine, to draw another prize in the lottery of life[—another companion, stimulator, adviser, and instructor of the rarest quality]. Whoever, either now or hereafter, may think of me and of the work I have done, must never forget that it is the product not of one intellect and conscience, but of three. [6]

Next time: George Eliot and George Henry Lewes
Last time: Catherine Hogarth and Charles Dickens

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1. John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women, Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1869. "Legal subordination," p. 1; "lowest degradation," p. 57; "perfect equality," p. 1. Project Gutenberg. 
2. Mill, On Liberty (People's Edition), Chapter I: Introductory. Longmans, Green, And Co., 1867, p. 6.
   
3. Quoted in Rose, Parallel Lives, p. 119-120.
4. Quoted in Rose, p. 128.
5. Philippa Levine, "Taylor, Helen (1831–1907), promoter of women's rights." Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2009. Retrieved 24 Oct. 2020. doi: 10.1093/ref:odnb/36431
6. Mill, Autobiography, Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1873, p. 264. The phrase in brackets is quoted in Rose, p. 139-140. It was apparently deleted by Helen Taylor for the editions published during her lifetime, but was restored in the 20th-century edition consulted by Rose for Parallel Lives.