The Correspondence Of Jeremy Bentham, Volume 5 January 1794 To December 1797

428 Pages·2017·4.625 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
h s
Bentham worked first on producing a complete penal code, which involved him T
a o e
in detailed explorations of fundamental legal ideas, and then on his panopticon m f d
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
e
remarkable rise of Benthamite utilitarianism in the early nineteenth century.
r o
Bentham’s life in the mid-1790s was dominated by the panopticon, both
e r
as a prison and as a network of workhouses for the indigent. The letters in m r of
this volume document in excruciating detail Bentham’s attempt to build
e
y
a panopticon prison in london, and the opposition he faced from local s

aristocratic landowners. his brother samuel was appointed as Inspector- B p
e o Jeremy Ben T ham
General of naval Works and in september 1796 married mary sophia
n
n
fordyce.
T
d
h
e
AlExAndEr tAylor MilnE (1906–1994), scholar and
a n
historian, was secretary and librarian of the Institute of historical research,
m C
university of london.
e v o l u m e 5
GEnErAl Editor: J.r. dinwiddy (1939–90), historian,
T
was educated at new College, oxford, before being appointed successively as o
d Ja v
lecturer 1969–78, senior lecturer 1978–83, reader 1983–9, and professor e n o J a n u a r y 1 7 9 4
C
1989–90 in the department of history, royal holloway College, university em ua lu
B r
of london. In 1977 he was appointed as second General editor of The y m
Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham, a post he held jointly with professor Burns er 1 179 e 5 To d e Ce mB e r 1 7 9 7
until the following year, and then solely until 1983. 79 4
7
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 5
ii
iii
The

CORRESPONDENCE
of
JEREMY BENTHAM
Volume 5
January 1794 to December 1797
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.5: January
1794 to December 1797. The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham. Edited by J.R.
Dinwiddy. London, UCL Press, 2017. https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781911576211
Further details about CC BY licenses are available at http://creativecommons.org/
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781911576211
v
PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION

OF VOLUME 5
The fifth volume of Jeremy Bentham’s Correspondence was originally
published, together with the fourth volume, in 1981, under the editor-
ship 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. All these corrections are relatively
minor, except for the removal of Letter 1279. This letter was included
in the present volume in the mistaken belief that it was dated 2 May
1797, whereas it is in fact dated 2 May 1798, and appears in its cor-
rect place as Letter 1324 in the sixth volume of the Correspondence.
Professor Guillaume Tusseau (Sciences Po, Paris) has kindly checked
the accuracy of the reproduction of the French material according to
the conventions currently adopted in the edition as a whole. Thanks
are also due to my Bentham Project colleague Dr Louise Seaward for
assistance with a variety of queries throughout all five volumes.
The letters in this volume, written against the background of an
increasingly difficult and unsuccessful war against Revolutionary
France, are dominated by Bentham’s attempts to further his panop-
ticon prison scheme. After a certain amount of wrangling, an Act of
Parliament was passed in the summer of 1794, giving the Treasury
powers to enter into a contract for a profit-making prison. Crucially
the Act did not stipulate the acquisition of the site at Battersea Rise
that Bentham wanted. Bentham made strenuous efforts but ultimately
failed to persuade the Treasury to buy the land at Battersea Rise, since
they would not proceed against the wishes of the owner Earl Spencer,
who did not want to give up his land for the sake of a prison. Searching
for another site, Bentham was rebuffed by local landowners at Hanging
Wood, Woolwich, before turning his attention to Tothill Fields, not far
vi
PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION
from his home at Queen’s Square Place. The whole sorry saga dragged
on until he eventually acquired a site at Millbank in 1798, but the prison
was destined never to be built.
In the meantime Bentham’s brother Samuel, who was intimately
involved in the practical aspects of the panopticon, was appointed
Inspector-General of Naval Works, a post created for him, and which
resulted in his introducing new machinery and a host of reforms into
the working practices of the Royal dockyards. Samuel was responsi-
ble to the First Lord of the Admiralty, who, ironically, was the same
Earl Spencer who was thwarting the acquisition of Battersea Rise for
the panopticon. An important family event took place on 26 October
1796 when Samuel married Mary Sophia Fordyce, with the newly-weds
sharing Bentham’s house at Queen’s Square Place. The first of their
five children, Mary Louisa, was born the following year. Samuel also
fathered at least three illegitimate children. The Benthams’ step-brother
Charles Abbot, the future Speaker of the House of Commons and first
Baron Colchester, was enhancing his reputation as a Parliamentarian,
and doing what he could to further the panopticon scheme. Other sup-
port came from the social reformer William Wilberforce, with who
Bentham came into close contact.
At various points from 1796 to 1798 Bentham devoted a great deal
of time to writing on the poor laws. Poor harvests in 1794 and 1795,
together with the disruption caused by the war with France, had pro-
duced a crisis in the administration of the poor laws, and led to the
leader of the ministry William Pitt’s proposing what Bentham consid-
ered to be an ill-conceived scheme of reform. Bentham produced an
elaborate counter-proposal, which would have seen the construction of
a countrywide network of 250 panopticon industry houses, each hold-
ing up to 2,000 paupers, and administered by a joint-stock company.
Bentham’s essays on the subject have appeared in the Collected Works
as Writings on the Poor Laws: Volume I and Volume II, both edited
by Michael Quinn, and published in 2001 and 2010 respectively. While
never implemented in the form that Bentham envisaged, his ideas even-
tually formed the basis of the New Poor Law introduced in 1834.
While Bentham’s career appeared to be mired down in the panop-
ticon, he maintained his friendship with such figures as the Marquis
of Lansdowne, James Trail, George Wilson, and Samuel Romilly, and
made contact with Sir John Sinclair and Arthur Young at the Board of
Agriculture. Of most significance perhaps, Bentham’s literary relation-
ship with the Genevan Etienne Dumont began to bear fruit as the latter
inserted a series of translations of Bentham’s work in the Bibliothèque
vi
vii
PREFACE TO TH E NEW EDITION
britannique which heralded the publication in 1802 of Traités de lég-
islation civile et pénale, the work that established Bentham’s reputa-
tion as a philosopher and reformer.
A more detailed account of Bentham’s activities during the years
covered by this volume appears at the beginning of the fourth volume
of Correspondence.
Philip Schofield
General Editor of The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham
UCL, March 2017
vii
viii
x i
CONTENTS

List of Letters in Volume 5 x
A List of Missing Letters xix
Key to Symbols and Abbreviations xxi
THE CORRESPONDENCE
January 1794– December 1797 1
Index 391
The editor’s Preface and Introduction
to Volumes 4 and 5 of The Correspondence
appear in Volume 4
ix