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The first five volumes of The Correspondence of Jeremy Bentham contain T h e C o l l e C Te d over 1,300 letters written both to and from Bentham over a 50-year J e T period, beginning in 1752 (aged three) with his earliest surviving letter to r h e W o r k s o f his grandmother, and ending in 1797 with correspondence concerning his m e y C attempts to set up a national scheme for the provision of poor relief. against B W o the background of the debates on the american revolution of 1776 and e o l J e r e m y B e n T h a m the french revolution of 1789, to which he made significant contributions, n r le T k C Bentham worked first on producing a complete penal code, which involved him h s T a o e in detailed explorations of fundamental legal ideas, and then on his panopticon m d f prison scheme. despite developing a host of original and ground-breaking t he ideas, contained in a mass of manuscripts, he published little during these t years, and remained, at the close of this period, a relatively obscure individual. o h f e nevertheless, these volumes reveal how the foundations were laid for the Corre sp ondenCe J C remarkable rise of Benthamite utilitarianism in the early nineteenth century. e r o Bentham’s early life is marked by his extraordinary precociousness, but also e r family tragedy: by the age of 10 he had lost five infant siblings and his mother. m r of The letters in this volume document his difficult relationship with his father e y and his increasing attachment to his surviving younger brother samuel, his s education, and his committing himself to a life of philosophy and legal reform. B p e o Jeremy Ben T ham n timothy L.S. SpriggE (1932–2007), philosopher, having n T completed his phd under the supervision of a.J. ayer, was in 1963 appointed d h lecturer in philosophy at the university of sussex, where he remained until e a n 1979 when appointed professor of logic and metaphysics at the university of m C edinburgh. e v o l u m e 1 gEnEraL Editor: J.h. burnS (1921–2012), historian, r eader in the history of political Thought 1961–6 and professor in the history of v political Thought 1966–86 in the department of history, uCl, was in 1961 1 o 1 7 5 2 – 7 6 7 appointed as the first General editor of The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham, 5 l 2 u a post he held until 1978. – m 7 e 6 1 EditEd by timothy L. S. SpriggE Cover desiGn: rawshock design £45.00 Free open access versions available from www.ucl.ac.uk/ucl-press the collected works of jeremy bentham General Editor J. H. Burns Correspondence Volume 1 The CORRESPONDENCE of JEREMY BENTHAM Volume 1: 1752– 76 edited by TIMOTHY L.S. SPRIGGE This edition published in 2017 by UCL Press University College London Gower Street London WC1E 6BT First published in 1968 by The Athlone Press, University of London Available to download free: www.ucl.ac.uk/ ucl- press Text © The Bentham Committee, UCL A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from The British Library. This book is published under a Creative Commons 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0). This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the work; to adapt the work and to make commercial use of the work providing attribution is made to the authors (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Attribution should include the following information: Timothy L.S. Sprigge (ed.), The Correspondence of Jeremy Bentham. Vol.1: 1752–76. The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham. Edited by J.H.Burns. London, UCL Press, 2017. https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781911576037 Further details about CC BY licenses are available at http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/ ISBN: 978–1–911576–05–1 (Hbk) ISBN: 978–1–911576–04–4 (Pbk) ISBN: 978–1–911576–03–7 (PDF) ISBN: 978–1–911576–06–8 (epub) ISBN: 978–1–911576–07–5 (mobi) ISBN: 978–1–911576–08–2 (html) DOI: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781911576037 GENERAL PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITIONS The Bentham Committee was established as a National Commit- tee of University College London in 1959 in order to oversee a new authoritative edition of The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham. Editorial work was assigned to the Bentham Project, which is now an academic unit in UCL’s Faculty of Laws. In the ‘General Preface’, which appeared at the beginning of the first volume of the Corres pondence (see p. ix below), the Committee estimated that the edition would run to 38 volumes. The basic division in the edition was between Bentham’s correspondence and his works. The initial focus was rightly placed on the correspondence, on the grounds that ‘understanding of [Bentham’s] life and personality has at times been dis- torted by lack of access to the essential biographical data contained in his letters’. The Bentham Committee took the sensible decision to publish letters both to and from Bentham. There is, moreover, no doubt that, given limited resources, the correspondence was the correct place to begin, since it not only incorporates material of his- torical interest, but also sheds light on the formal works that Ben- tham was engaged in writing, in terms of their provenance, history of composition, and subsequent dissemination, and as such may be regarded as the ‘backbone’ of the edition as a whole. In turn, as more of Bentham’s works are edited, we are better able to understand the views and concerns expressed in the letters. The first two volumes of Correspondence were published together in 1968, the third in 1971, and the fourth and fifth together in 1981. The first three volumes appeared under the General Editor- ship of the late J.H. Burns (UCL History) and the final two under that of the late J.R. Dinwiddy (Royal Holloway History). Burns had been appointed as the first General Editor in 1961, followed in 1978 by the late Dinwiddy and in 1983 by Frederick Rosen (UCL History), with whom I shared the role from 1995 until Professor Rosen’s retirement in 2003, since when I have been sole General Editor. In total, 12 volumes of Bentham’s Correspondence, reproducing Bentham’s letters through to the end of June 1828, have now appeared. One more volume will complete the Correspondence through to Bentham’s death in 1832, while a further volume of indexes and supplementary letters, that is letters discovered since the publication of the relevant volume, will be needed to complete the series. v GENERAL PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITIONS At present, the Bentham Project has around 60 such supplementary letters on file for the first five volumes of Corresp ondence. The Bentham Project has always recognized that, in order to sur- vive, never mind prosper, it has to meet the highest scholarly stan- dards in its textual editing, and to employ innovative techniques and strategies in order to contain costs and maintain productivity. Hence, Professor Rosen ensured that the Project was quick to adopt computer technology. My edition of First Principles preparatory to Constitutional Code, published in 1989, was the first volume in the Collected Works to be sent to the Press on disk, duly marked up with a complicated array of codes indicating headings of various kinds, italics, ends of paragraphs, and so forth. In 2010 we established Transc ribe Bentham, the pioneering scholarly crowd-sourcing initia- tive which, to date, has seen members of the public transcribe nearly 18,000 pages of Bentham’s manuscript. It is, therefore, entirely fitting that with this UCL Press issue of the first five volumes of Bentham’s Correspondence, originally published by the Athlone Press, we have embraced another pioneering development, namely open access pub- lishing. The volumes have been attractively re-keyed in a typeface that is sympathetic to the original design, and crucially the exact pagination of the original volumes has been retained, so that referen- cing remains stable. The opportunity has been taken, nevertheless, to incorporate the errata printed at the conclusions of volumes III and V and other corrections identified by the Bentham Project. French col- leagues, who are credited in my Preface to each of the volumes, have kindly checked the accuracy of the French material according to the conventions currently adopted in the edition as a whole. In December 2016, Preparatory Principles became the 33rd volume to be published in the edition, which, according to the initial estimate of 38 volumes, suggests that we may be close to com- pleting the edition. The Bentham archive, as research on the edition has proceeded, has yielded such astonishing riches that I now estimate that, if it is to be completed, the edition will run to at least 80 volumes. The edition will not be completed under my General Editorship, and possibly not for decades to come. The production of the Bentham edition will take longer than the 84 year lifetime of its subject, and several times longer in terms of the person-years effort required. But that is the debt we owe to genius. Philip Schofield General Editor of The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham UCL, February 2017 vi PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION OF VOLUME 1 The first volume of Jeremy Bentham’s Correspondence was originally published, together with the second volume, in 1968, under the editorship of the late T.L.S. Sprigge and the General Editorship of the late J.H. Burns, thereby forming the first two volumes to be published in the new authoritative edition of The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham. The Correspondence volumes represent the ‘backbone’, so to speak, of the whole edition, giving scholars the orientation that enables them to begin to make sense of Bentham’s published works and the vast collection of his unpublished papers, consisting of around 60,000 folios in UCL Library and 12,500 folios in the British Library. The present volume has been attractively re-keyed in a typeface that is sympathetic to the original design, and crucially the exact pagination of the original volume has been retained, so that referenc- ing remains stable. The opportunity has been taken to incorporate the corrigenda printed at the conclusion of Volume III of the Corres pondence and further corrections identified by the Bentham Project. Dr Malik Bozzo-Rey (Catholic University of Lille) has kindly checked the accuracy of the reproduction of the French material according to the conventions currently adopted in the edition as a whole. In my ‘General Preface’ to the UCL Press edition, I note the recipro- cal relationship between the correspondence and the works. This is illustrated, in relation to the present volume, by the appearance of two volumes of Bentham’s writings in the Collected Works, namely A Comment on the Commentaries and A Fragment on Government, edited by J.H. Burns and H.L.A. Hart, published in 1977, and Prepa ratory Principles, edited by D.G. Long and P. Schofield, published in 2016. The material in these volumes, written in the mid-1770s, com- plements the letters in the final years of the current volume. A Frag ment on Government, which appeared in April 1776 and, apart from a translation of Voltaire’s White Bull, was Bentham’s first published work, was extracted from a larger, unpublished and unfinished (as so many of Bentham’s works remained) work entitled ‘A Comment on the Commentaries’, a critique of William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England. There is more contemporaneous manuscript vii PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION awaiting publication in the Collected Works, whereupon we will at last have the fullest picture possible of Bentham’s formative years. This first volume of Correspondence begins with letters exchanged between Bentham’s parents before his birth, and ends with him in his late 20s, having published A Fragment on Government. Bentham’s childhood was not easy. He lost five siblings and his mother by the time he was 11 years old, and was sent off to boarding school at the age of seven and to the University of Oxford at the age of 12, reputedly the youngest person to be admitted there up to that time. His father re- married, bringing two step-brothers into the family. He was teased by the family’s servants, and developed an irrational (as he himself recognized) fear of ghosts. He did find some welcome support in his mother’s family, but more particularly in his relationship with his one surviving sibling, his brother Samuel, nearly nine years younger than himself. Two events in Bentham’s young life are crucial to understanding his career. First, in order to take his degree, aged 16, in 1764, he was required to swear to the 39 Articles of the Church of England. By this time he must have already become sceptical of religion, since it was only with great reluctance that he subscribed, and did so because he did not want to disappoint his father, who anticipated a glittering legal career for his precocious son. It was the one occasion in his life that he felt he had compromised his intellectual integrity. The wider point is that Bentham aligned and identified himself with the French Enlightenment, with its scepticism towards organized religion, and not with the orthodox ‘Church-of-Englandism’ and Toryism of his father. When he referred, as he did on to several occasions in letters to his brother Samuel, to acquaintances as being ‘one of us’, it was presumably this radical outlook that he had in mind. Second, as noted above, Bentham was destined for a career in the law by his ambitious father. He attended Blackstone’s lectures on the laws of England at the University of Oxford, but instead of being convinced of the excellence of his subject-matter by the Vinerian Professor, had been disturbed by what he saw as the ‘pestilential breath of fiction’ that infest- ed it. It was in 1769, having qualified for the bar and experiencing some of the absurdities of English legal procedure for himself, that he asked himself whether he had a ‘genius’ for legislation, by which he meant the invention of new laws, and ‘fearfully and tremblingly’ gave the answer ‘Yes’. Hence, he began his long career as a philosopher and reformer. Philip Schofield General Editor of The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham UCL, February 2017 viii GENERAL PREFACE Jeremy Bentham (1748– 1832), leader of the Utilitarian reformers who became known as the Philosophical Radicals, was a major figure in the history of ideas, of law, and of social policy in the nineteenth century. Even today his influence survives in many fields. Yet there has been no modern critical edition of his works. This situation— in striking contrast with the editorial treatment of writers like Jefferson, Ricardo, and Coleridge— is in part ex- plained by the very nature of Bentham’s work. He wrote so voluminously on so many subjects that no single editor, no group of editors from any single field of scholarship, could undertake to present his work as a whole in acceptable critical form. The huge mass of manuscript material left by Bentham at his death reflected his dwindling concern, as his long life advanced, for the eventual published form of what he wrote. The task of reducing to order the uncoordinated statements and restatements of his thought he left to his ‘disciples and editors’. And in fact the French redactions by Etienne Dumont which first made Bentham’s ideas widely known, and the version of Utilitarianism developed by John Stuart Mill largely took the place of Bentham’s own writings for most readers. The consequence has been an impoverished and at times a false picture of Bentham’s thought. For those seeking Bentham’s own writings the principal resource has inevitably been the collected edition completed in 1843 under the supervision of his executor, John Bowring. This has long been out of print; and even when accessible its eleven volumes of small type in daunting double columns (two volumes comprising what Leslie Stephen called ‘one of the worst biographies in the language’ — Bowring’s Memoirs of Bentham) are defective in content as well as discouraging in form. Bowring excluded Bentham’s anti- clerical writings, and for many works the texts in his edition derive at least as much from Dumont’s French versions as from Bentham’s own manuscripts. For half a century after 1843 these manuscripts lay neglected; and even now, despite the valuable work during the present century of such scholars as Elie Halévy, C. W. Everett, C. K. Ogden, and W. Stark, relatively little has been done to remedy these defects. When Bentham is known at all today at first hand, he is known largely from reprints of his Fragment on Government ix