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John Stuart Mill was killed by his kindness to nightingales. That, at least, was the 'poetical end' ascribed to him by the secularist campaigner George Jacob Holyoake. The miasma that killed Mill might have been mitigated by fresh breezes if only he had allowed the trees clustered around his Avignon retreat to be felled; his refusal to do so, according to Holyoake, was out of admiration for the 'independent-minded birds', which would have resented undue 'interference with the privilege of their leafy home'.1 In truth, the cause of Mill's death was more prosaic: on 5 May 1873 he suffered 'a virulent form of erysipelas'.2 The inflammation of the skin, accompanied by fever, proved too much. His death, on 8 May, twelve days short of his sixty-seventh birthday, was not, by Victorian standards, a 'good death'.3 There was no large family gathered around him; no profound last words; no large funeral gathering. Mill died tended only by his stepdaughter, Helen Taylor; and just five mourners attended, on 10 May, as his coffin was lowered into the French grave already occupied by his late wife, Harriet.4 That morning, nearly 600 miles away in London a 'brief and cold obituary notice' of Mill appeared in The Times.5 It proved to be the opening shot in a bitter war of words fought over Mill's reputation and legacy in the coming months. Holyoake's rather bizarre ascription of Mill's death to an unwillingness to disturb nesting nightingales was merely one idiosyncratic attempt, among many, to assert the essential benevolence and compassion of the philosopher. In the year following his death, such humane motives were not automatically assumed.
Amidst the multitude of biographies and other partial studies of aspects of Mill's life, ranging from religion and sexual politics to his relationship with his father and his love life, relatively little has been written about Mill's posthumous reputation. Stefan Collini's study of Mill's changing place in the 'pantheon of English thought' in the period between 1873 and 1945 remains a notable exception. In the last twenty years little has been done to supplement Collini's pioneering piece; despite his limiting himself to only one aspect of Mill's reputation and making clear the...