Richard Reeves to Lecture on JOHN STUART MILL: VICTORIAN FIREBRAND in Richmond, VA on September 16

Richard Reeves, author the acclaimed biography John Stuart Mill: Victorian Firebrand, will lecture at the University of Richmond in Richmond, Va. on Wednesday, September 16, 7pm. Now available in paperback, Reeves's beautifully written book is the definitive life of one of the heroic giants of Victorian England. A young activist and highly-educated Cambridge Union debater, Mill would become in time the highest-ranked English thinker of the nineteenth century, the author of the landmark essay "On Liberty" and one of the most passionate reformers and advocates of his revolutionary, opinionated age. As a journalist he fired off a weekly article on Irish land reform as the people of that nation starved, as an MP he introduced the first vote on women's suffrage, fought to preserve free-speech and opposed slavery, and, in his private life, pursued for two decades a love affair with another man's wife. Exploring Mill's life and work in tandem, Reeves's book is a riveting and authoritative biography of a man raised to promote happiness, whose life was spent in the pursuit of truth and liberty for all.

Adam Gopnick on the Passions of JOHN STUART MILL in The New Yorker

In this week's The New Yorker, Adam Gopnick takes a look at Richard Reeves's new biography of John Stuart Mill: "It is a hard thing, being right about everything all the time. Nobody likes a know-it-all, and we wait for the moment when the know-it-all is wrong to insist that he never really knew anything in the first place. The know-it-all, far from living in smug superiority, has the burden of being right the next time, too. Certainly no one has ever been so right about so many things so much of the time as John Stuart Mill, the nineteenth-century English philosopher, politician, and know-it-all nonpareil who is the subject of a fine new biography by the British journalist Richard Reeves, John Stuart Mill: Victorian Firebrand (Overlook; $40). The book’s subtitle, meant to be excitingly commercial, is ill chosen; a firebrand should flame and then die out, while Mill burned for half a century with a steady heat so well regulated that it continues to warm his causes today—“Victorian Low-Simmering Hot Plate” might be closer to it."

Richard Reeves on Character

Richard Reeves, author of John Stuart Mill: Victorian Firebrand and newly appointed director of Demos, a British think tank for "everyday democracy," recently published a fascinating essay in Prospect Magazine on the importance of character in a successful society. He writes:

"The three key ingredients of a good character are: a sense of personal agency or self-direction; an acceptance of personal responsibility; and effective regulation of one's own emotions, in particular the ability to resist temptation or at least defer gratification. Progressives are realising that, thus defined, character is intimately linked to many of their social goals—and also that it is unevenly distributed. Indeed, inequality of character may now be as important as inequality of economic resources."

Reeves's biography of John Stuart Mill pays great attention to the influential thinker's strong character. Mill, who always practiced his progressive policies, sometimes to a fault, certainly fulfills the three key ingredients mentioned above. Reeves brings Mill up later in the essay:

"British Enlightenment thinkers from Adam Smith to John Stuart Mill placed a huge emphasis on character development. Smith and Mill knew that good character is about successful self-regulation—without which the case for a strong state or stifling religious guidance becomes harder to resist."

John Stuart Mill is currently available from Overlook.

The New York Sun on JOHN STUART MILL: VICTORIAN FIREBRAND

In today's issue of the New York Sun, Adam Kirsch reviews John Stuart Mill: Victorian Firebrand, by Richard Reeves:

"If history, as Edward Gibbon said, is 'little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind,' it makes sense that the greatest criminals tend to receive the most attention from historians. Napoleon, a tyrant who was responsible for millions of deaths, is the most biographized figure in modern history, and it seems that new biographies of Stalin and Hitler crowd the bookstores every year. It is pleasant to be reminded, then, that good men can also make history from time to time — that humanity is not too fascinated by its destroyers to pay tribute to its benefactors.

"'John Stuart Mill: Victorian Firebrand' (Overlook, 616 pages, $40), an accessible and admiring new biography by Richard Reeves, is such a tribute. Mr. Reeves — a British journalist, not the American biographer of presidents Kennedy, Nixon, and Reagan — works hard in this book to humanize Mill, to rescue him from his deadening fame as 'a bone-dry, formal, humourless Victorian.'"

Kirsch concludes his extensive review by boiling down Mill's complex political views into this insightful gem:

"Mill's specific political views do not map neatly onto today's categories of left and right... What united all these opinions, as Mr. Reeves skillfully shows, was a constant dedication to liberty as he understood it: 'the consciousness of working out [our] own destiny under [our] own moral responsibility.'"