In 1831, at the age of twenty-five, John Stuart Mill published a series of essays (anonymously, as was the custom) in the radical weekly the Examiner, under the title “The Spirit of the Age.” The opening sentences of the first essay commented on the title: “The ‘spirit of the age’ is in some measure a novel expression. I do not believe that it is to be met with in any work exceeding fifty years in antiquity.”

It was not, in fact, an altogether novel expression at the time.

Read on JSTOR: The Spirit of the Age: Victorian Essays

Buy on Amazon.com: The Spirit of the Age: Victorian Essays