 John Stuart Mill was born on 20 May 1806 in Pentonville, then a northern suburb of London, to Harriet Barrow and James Mill. James Mill, a Scotsman, had been educated at Edinburgh University—taught by, amongst others, Dugald Stewart—and had moved to London in 1802, where he was to become a friend and prominent ally of Jeremy Bentham and the Philosophical Radicals. John’s remarkable education, famously recounted in his Autobiography, was conducted with the intention of equipping him for leadership of the next generation of radicalism. For this, at least, it prepared him well. Starting with Greek at age three and Latin at age eight, Mill had absorbed most of the classical canon by age twelve—along with algebra, Euclid, and the major Scottish and English historians. In his early teenage years, he studied political economy, logic, and calculus, utilising his spare time to digest treatises on experimental science as an amusement. At age fifteen—upon returning from a year-long trip to France, a nation he would eventually call home—he started work on the major treatises of philosophy, psychology and government. All this was conducted under the strict daily supervision of his father—with young John holding primary responsibility for the education of his siblings (Reeves 2007: 11–27).