The Correspondence Of Jeremy Bentham, Volume 4 October 1788 To December 1793

556 Pages·2017·5.245 MB·English

by  Jeremy Bentham, Alexander Taylor Milne

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, nT rk leC
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 J Corre sp ondenCe
C
remarkable rise of Benthamite utilitarianism in the early nineteenth century. e
r o
In 1789 Bentham published An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and
e r
Legislation, which remains his most famous work, but which had little impact m r of
at the time, followed in 1791 by The Panopticon: or, The Inspection-House, in
e
y
which he proposed the building of a circular penitentiary house. Bentham’s
s

correspondence unfolds against the backdrop of the increasingly violent french B p
e o Jeremy Ben T ham
revolution, and shows his initial sympathy for france turning into hostility.
n
n
T
AlExAndEr tAylor MilnE (1906–1994), scholar and d
h
historian, was secretary and librarian of the Institute of historical research, e
a n
university of london.
m C
GEnErAl Editor: J.r. dinwiddy (1939–90), historian,
e v o l u m e 4
was educated at new College, oxford, before being appointed successively as
lecturer 1969–78, senior lecturer 1978–83, reader 1983–9, and professor To
d o
v
1989–90 in the department of history, royal holloway College, university eC CT o o C T o B e r 1 7 8 8
of london. In 1977 he was appointed as second General editor of The em oB lu
B e
Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham, a post he held jointly with professor Burns e r m d e Ce mB e r 1 7 9 3
until the following year, and then solely until 1983. r 1 17 e To
7 8 4
9 8
3
EditEd by AlExAndEr tAylor MilnE
Cover desIGn:
rawshock design
£45.00
Free open access versions available
from www.ucl.ac.uk/ucl-press
i

the collected

works of

jeremy bentham
General Editor
J. R. Dinwiddy
Correspondence
Volume 4
ii
iii
The

CORRESPONDENCE
of
JEREMY BENTHAM
Volume 4
October 1788 to December 1793
edited by
ALEXANDER TAYLOR MILNE
iv
This edition published in 2017 by
UCL Press
University College London
Gower Street
London WC1E 6BT
First published in 1981 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.
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Attribution should include the following information:
Alexander Taylor Milne (ed.), The Correspondence of Jeremy Bentham, Vol.4: October
1788 to December 1793. The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham. Edited by J.R.
Dinwiddy. London, UCL Press, 2017. https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781911576150
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781911576150
v
PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION

OF VOLUME 4
The fourth volume of Jeremy Bentham’s Correspondence was origi-
nally published, together with the fifth volume, in 1981, under the edi-
torship of the late Alexander Taylor Milne and the General Editorship
of the late J.R. Dinwiddy. The Correspondence volumes represent the
‘backbone’, so to speak, of the authoritative edition of The Collected
Works of Jeremy Bentham, 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 referencing remains
stable. The opportunity has been taken to incorporate corrections
identified by the Bentham Project. Professor Emmanuelle de Champs
(University of Cergy-Pontoise) has kindly checked the accuracy of the
reproduction of the French material according to the conventions cur-
rently adopted in the edition as a whole.
The letters in the present volume, which opens on the brink of
the French Revolution and closes with Britain embroiled in war
with Revolutionary France, represent a rich and diverse period in
Bentham’s life. The French Revolution provided him with an opportu-
nity, as he saw it, to influence the reconstruction of the French state.
He drew on his knowledge of English political and constitutional
practice, together with the theoretical insights he had developed in
his own work, in order to offer advice to the French as to how they
might achieve peaceful constitutional reform. He offered a series of
innovative solutions, including instructions on how to organize a polit-
ical assembly, recommendations for a constitutional settlement, and a
scheme for the detailed reform of the judicial system.
Two volumes of Bentham’s writings on the French Revolution have
appeared in the Collected Works. Political Tactics, edited by Michael
James, Cyprian Blamires, and Catherine Pease-Watkin, published in
1999, was composed for the Estates-General prior to the outbreak of
the Revolution and contains advice on how to organize a legislative
assembly, both in terms of the physical space it occupied, its formal
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PPRREEFFAACCEE T TOO T HTHE EN ENWE WED EITDIIOTNION
procedures, and its relationship with the people it represented. Rights,
Representation, and Reform: Nonsense upon Stilts and other Writings
on the French Revolution, edited by Philip Schofield, Catherine Pease-
Watkin, and Cyprian Blamires, published in 2002, contains the earliest
utilitarian justification of political equality and representative democ-
racy (including the advocacy of female suffrage three years before
Mary Wollstonecraft began to write her Vindication of the Rights
of Women). In the meantime, in April 1789 Bentham had finally pub-
lished what has become his best-known work, An Introduction to the
Principles of Morals and Legislation, which had been printed in 1780,
although it had little impact at the time.
Very little heed appears to have been taken of Bentham’s work in
France, though the National Assembly did elect him as an honorary
citizen of France in 1792 in recognition of his efforts. By this time,
however, Bentham had become disenchanted with the turn of events
in France, being particularly affected by the stoning to death of the Duc
de La Rochefoucauld in the September Massacres of 1792. War with
Revolutionary France commenced on 1 February 1793, and would con-
tinue, with only two short breaks, until Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo
in 1815.
In the mid-1790s, like many of his fellow countrymen who were
alarmed by developments in France, Bentham came to the view that
political reform should be avoided. He devoted his energies to pro-
moting a variety of schemes that he hoped would address problems
being faced by the British state. Foremost amongst these was his pan-
opticon prison scheme. In 1790 he began to advocate the building of
a panopticon prison in Dublin, and his explanatory essay on the sub-
ject, Panopticon: or, The Inspection-House, appeared early in 1791.
He opened negotiations with William Pitt’s administration to build
a panopticon in London, and also had hopes of establishing one in
Edinburgh and even in Paris. The panopticon project was very much
intended as a joint venture with his younger brother Samuel, who had
returned from Russia in 1791 with a Russian knighthood in recognition
of his military service at Ochakov in 1788.
A significant personal development for Bentham was his meeting
in 1788 with the Genevan Etienne Dumont, who later produced five
French recensions of Bentham’s writings, the first being Traités de lég-
islation civile et pénale in 1802, and thereby establishing Bentham’s
reputation as a philosopher and jurist. Dumont had arrived in England
in 1786, having been appointed as tutor to the son of the Marquis of
Lansdowne, with whom Bentham remained on intimate terms during
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PREFACE TO TH E NEW EDITION
these years. Finally, the death of his father Jeremiah in March 1792
put Bentham in possession not only of significant financial resources,
but of the large house in Queen’s Square Place, Westminster, which
became his principal residence for the remainder of his life.
Philip Schofield
General Editor of The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham
UCL, March 2017
vii
viii
x i
PREFACE

The thanks of the Bentham Committee are due to the following
persons and institutions for access to and permission to print Mss.
in their possession, as well as for assistance afforded to the General
Editor and to the editor of this volume: the British Library Board,
the British Museum; the Keeper of the Public Records, the Public
Record Office; the Trustees of the National Library of Scotland; the
Keeper of the Records of Scotland, the Scottish Record Office; the
Librarian, University College London; Bodley’s Librarian, the
Bodleian Library, Oxford; M.  le Bibliothécaire, Bibliothèque
Publique et Universitaire de Genève; the Provost and Fellows of
King’s College, Cambridge; the County Archivist, Cornwall County
Record Office, Truro; the County Archivist, Devon County Record
Office, Taunton; the County Archivist, Kent Record Office, Maid-
stone; the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine; the
Librarian, American Philosophical Society; the Librarian, Columbia
University, New York; the Librarian, the Free Library of Philadel-
phia; the Librarian, Henry E.  Huntington Library, San Marino,
California; the Librarian, Historical Society of Pennsylvania; the
Keeper of the Hyde Collection, Four Oaks Farm, Somerville, New
Jersey; the Librarian, New  York Public Library; the Librarian,
Yale University; the Most Hon. the Marquess of Lansdowne and
his son, the Right Hon. the Earl of Shelburne; the Right Hon. the
Earl Spencer; Col. Sir John G. Carew Pole, Bt., of Antony House,
Torpoint, Cornwall, the Right Hon. the Baron Congleton; Sir John
Eden, Bt.; Sir Edward Hoare, Bt.; the Right Hon. the Earl
Stanhope; Mr D. R. Bentham.
The grateful acknowledgements of the Committee are also due to
the following bodies for financial assistance towards the cost of the
editorial work on these volumes:  the Pilgrim Trust, the British
Academy and the Social Sciences Research Council. A substantial
advance from the Provost and Council of University College London
and a generous loan from the Friends of University College London
provided the funds required for the volumes to be put into print.
Four editorial assistants in succession gave valuable help in
copying from manuscripts, checking typed transcripts and collecting
information for footnotes:  Miss Judith Stafford (now Mrs T.  Le
Goff), Dr Michael Harris, Dr Ivon Asquith and, in the latest stages,
ix