[X] The material in this volume has been rearranged, in order to bring all the material on the same subject into a continuous chronological sequence. The original order was 1, 3, 5, 4, 7, 2, 8, 9, 10, 6, 11.

This volume, like CPB III below, is a series of notes, largely quotations, placed under various headings, (hence the large number of blank pages in each volume), in a large folio (12.5" x 7.8") notebook. The notebook, of the type used for accounts, is made up of paper watermarked 1805 and as CPB III is of the same nature it was presumably supplied by "Needham & Co., Stationers, Spread Eagle Court, Finch Lane", (see the inside front cover of CPB III).

Of the 229 pages in this volume, material may be found on 128 pages (counting a page as both sides of a sheet).

[X] The contents of this volume have been slightly re-arranged to bring together material on the same topic, most notably in the sections on Religion.

This volume is both a scholar's and transcriber's nightmare. It consists of 87 pages on which in some cases scraps of quotations or comments are pasted; of inserted sheets of comments and notes, some obviously preparatory for an article; inserted newspaper clippings with underlinings; and what seem to be draft outlines for speeches. Even stating that the volume contains 87 pages takes some formidable assumptions — so much has been pasted in that in some cases a sheet glued in by its edge might, by one researcher, be numbered as a separate page, and by another, as belonging to another page. As Fenn numbered the pages (in pencil), this description may stay reasonably definitive.

The volume in which this material has been placed, in all probability, belonged to the Mill family at one time (by which Fenn means, of course, that its age and condition indicate that it was made up possibly during Mill's lifetime, or, at most, shortly after his death. Unfortunately, the paper does not appear to be watermarked.) The pages (13.6" x 8.8") on which material has been pasted, once bore leaves or flowers, and the writing identifying them, as well as the outlines of the leaves, etc., may still be seen clearly on some of the blank pages. It would be pleasant to think that Mill whiled away his spare time, (though one doubts that the conception of 'spare time' would ever have occurred to Mill), but the writing is not in Mill's hand. It does appear to be in the hand of the young J.S. Mill. One must wonder who put in these clippings, sheets, etc., as in some cases, they have been so pasted in as to obscure material on the other side, and occasionally to hide material which is a continuation of the visible topic. There is one clue that points to Mill himself as the compiler of this collection. If one looks at 51v, there are two items on which a comment scribbled on the bottom of one is finished on the top of the second. As these two items appear to have come from different sources originally, we may postulate it was put together by Mill as prepartory work for some articles, and it could be argued that some of the material is pregant with ideas for The London Review articles of 1835-36, as is CPB V. One must wonder though why so much material was covered up in the pasting together of this volume.

In describing this volume one cannot follow the method that is used for the other three of this collection. In the other three Mill largely provided the headings and subheadings and it would be perverse to deviate from his own descriptions. However, in this volume there is only a vaguest outline of topics; each page has to be described on its own and in not too many cases is any description provided. When a page contains many small items, be they quotations or comments, we have attempted to indicate whether they be on the left or right of the page; if Mill has provided a title or clue to its contents it has been reproduced; if no title provided it has been supplied.

[X] This volume is exactly the same in format, watermark and binding as CPB I. Some pages in this volume indicate that the original use of this notebook by Mill was as a Common Place Book, but, rather as an accounts book. A printed thumb index included with this volume refers us to pages 1 to 7 for accounts. These pages (9 in total) have been removed.

In this section there is an obvious series of references to various accounts Mill had, both income and expenditure, which give us our only concrete evidence of the sources of his income. It provides, for example, evidence that he did work for the St. James Chronicle. Unfortunately, this is only an index and it refers us to the aforementioned missing pages.

[X] This volume clearly contains some of the earliest material in the whole collection. See 173v, for example, which is obviously a note from Mill’s student days at the University of Edinburgh; possibly the same may be said about the deleted material on 160r. Nearly all the sections begin with early, approximately pre-1808, examples of his hand. There are a number of indications, however, that Mill returned to this volume even late in life. At 45r, one finds the shaky, enlarged hand of his last ten years. Also, at 10r, there is an obvious sign of Mill adding to an item from a later edition. Here he gave a further reference to a Gibbon letter from the 1814 edition of the Miscellaneous Works, having earlier quoted it from that of 1796.

One of the most attractive features of this notebook is that it contains a far larger amount of commentary, or reflection, on the text which he was quoting, as well as notes not based on any text but rather on incidents or events of the period in which they were written; see 1r, for example, for the comment on the 1806 election in Westminster, or 13r, for an incident from 12/7/1820. The material in § 20 may well reflect Mill’s work as a reporter for the St. James’s Chronicle in the early stage of his career in publishing from 1803 to 1807; see also 12r for another.

Some sixteen pages have been torn out of this volume: one before 1r, and between 155v-156r, two between 37v-38r, 52v-53r, 59v-60r, 166v-167r, three between 87v-88r and 172v-173r. In at least one place (161v) a pasted in note comes from paper of this volume. Some of the scraps in CPB V may also come from this source, as may a few of the pieces in CPB II. But as Volume V is in the Mill-Taylor collection and thus separated from the other volumes in the London Library, no comparison could be made of bits of it with the paper in this volume. In order to compare the scraps in II with the paper in CPB V, one would have had to lift them from the surface to which Mill glued them; hence this has not been done. At CPB III 96r there is a reference to a section in this notebook which seems no longer to be extant; it may well have been on one of the torn-out pages. Why Mill removed pages cannot be fully explained, though one may suggest that he wished to re-arrange his accumulated note material after the completion of his History of British India. CPB II certainly represents an effort at such re-ordering.

Physically, this volume is similar in format to CPBs I and III. There are 42 pages of text to be found on the 174 pages of this volume, which measures 8.9" x 7.1". It is possibly symptomatic of Mill's thought in general that the topics on "Imagination and Feeling" and "Wit" both attracted less than a page of comment each.