Table Of ContentThe 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
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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 edi-
tion 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 ‘un-
derstanding 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 togeth-
er 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 publi-
cation 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 ini-
tial 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 es-
timate 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 orig-
inally 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 recog-
nized) 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 fa-
ther. 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
