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A political history of Britain in the places where it happened: parliament and palace, courts and counting houses, and the streets where people pushed back.
The philosopher who wanted every institution judged by how much happiness it produced, sitting in a glass case in a student building.
Ideas & memoryFree to enter
Also in Science & Engineering.
Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) held that the test of any law, prison or custom is a single question - does it increase happiness, the greatest happiness of the greatest number - and spent fifty years applying it to prison reform, poor relief, religion, international law and the treatment of animals. The best known thing he designed was the Panopticon, a circular prison with the cells round the wall and an inspection tower at the centre from which one man could see into all of them without being seen himself, so that prisoners would behave as though always watched. He took the idea from his brother Samuel's central inspection principle, and no prison was ever built to his specification - but he bought a riverside site at Millbank for it, and Tate Britain stands on that ground now.
He is on display because he left instructions to be. His will directed that his body be dissected, and his friend the surgeon Thomas Southwood Smith did it in June 1832; the skeleton was then dressed in one of the black suits Bentham had worn and seated in his own chair. The head was to be preserved too, and the attempt, using a method reported from New Zealand, failed badly enough that a wax one was made instead. The real head sat in the cabinet, then a wooden box from 1948, then a shelf above the case from 1956, until students took it in 1975 and gave it back for a ten pound ransom paid to Shelter. It has been in a conservation safe since 2005 and is not shown: it is fragile, and it is human remains.
UCL is firm that the better stories are false. The Auto-Icon does not attend council meetings, is not minuted as present but not voting, has not been found at a railway station and has not been used as a football. It moved here from the South Cloisters of the Wilkins Building in February 2020, and it is visible through the glass without going in.
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