Jeremy Bentham
Casual visitors to University College London (UCL), just down the road from Madame Tussaud’s, are often taken aback as they spot what appears to be a dummy, sitting in a glass cabinet in the corner of the entrance hall. But this is no waxwork, rather the fully-clothed skeleton of the college’s founder. And these bones are only the last chapter in the extraordinary tale of an East End boy’s remarkable life.
Jeremy Bentham was born in 1748 in Red Lion Street, Spitalfields, now part of Commerical Street. He was a precociously-talented boy, reading Latin at the age of three and going up to Oxford to study at just 12. His lawyer father hoped his talented son would follow in his footsteps, and Bentham did enter Lincoln’s Inn, to practise as a barrister, at the age of just 15.
But a straightforward career in the law was too narrow to contain the extraordinary and eccentric intellect of the young Bentham. He soon gave up his work to study chemistry and the physical sciences, developing his ideas as he travelled in Italy, Turkey and Russia. In those days, scholars did not specialise to the degree they do now — science, politics and philosophy were not the separate disciplines they later became — and the young Bentham soon turned his thinking to philosophy, the law and social policy.
Bentham’s ideas came together in what became known as Utilitarianism, a philosophical theory based on the doctrine of the “greatest happiness of the greatest number”. It was radical stuff and had its real influence a generation on, through philosophers like John Stuart Mill and many of the law reforms of the 19th Century, such as the Poor Law. And Bentham’s renown in the field of social reform was such that in 1792 he was made an honorary fellow of the fledgling French Republic.
What the French champions of “Liberte, Egalite and Fraternite” would have made of Bentham’s Panopticon is not recorded. This was Bentham’s design for a prison where inmates would be under constant surveillance. The philosopher put forward the idea of extending this to workers, soldiers or students to “coerce by means of observation”. He believed organisations would first be transformed as those spied on were stimulated to hard work through fear — and in the next stage workers would take on the values of hard work and diligence of their bosses.
Perhaps it was not surprising the Panopticon never caught on. But Bentham’s ideas did. By the time he died in 1832, his ideas were shaping what we now see as typical Victorian values. In his will, Bentham specified that his friends “take the requisite and appropriate measures for the disposal and preservation of the several parts of my bodily frame”. His skeleton was to be clothed, a wax head was to be added and the body placed in a wooden cabinet.
And he had his memorial in UCL, whose founders wanted to start an accessible university: one that did not exclude students on the basis of religion, wealth, race, or creed. Critics referred to it as the “Godless university”. The eccentric radical sits there to this day. Rumour has it that the body is wheeled into all important meetings of the UCL administration. And in the minutes of the meetings, the East Ender is always logged as “present but not voting.”