A book which contributed largely to my education, in the best sense of the term, was my father’s History of India. It was published in the beginning of 1818. During the year previous, while it was passing through the press, I used to read the proof sheets to him; or rather, I read the manuscript to him while he corrected the proofs. The number of new ideas which I received from this remarkable book, and the impulse and stimulus as well as guidance given to my thoughts by its criticisms and disquisitions on society and civilization in the Hindoo part, on institutions and the acts of governments in the English part, made my early familiarity with it eminently useful to my subsequent progress. And though I can perceive deficiencies in it now as compared with a perfect standard, I still think it, if not the most, one of the most instructive histories ever written, and one of the books from which most benefit may be derived by a mind in the course of making up its opinions.

Note from KBJ: Don’t you love the image of 11-year-old John reading the manuscript to his father, who compared what he was hearing with what he was seeing on the page proofs? My teacher Joel Feinberg wrote the following in the Acknowledgments section of his book Harmless Wrongdoing (1988), which is the fourth volume of his tetralogy, The Moral Limits of the Criminal Law (1984-1988):

The help of my wife, Betty Feinberg, with the proofreading for all four volumes was invaluable. She examined every letter of every word in over 1400 pages while I read aloud from the typescript.

Joel told me that they did this (or some of it) while they lay side by side in bed.