The Correspondence of Jeremy Bentham, Volume 3: January 1781 to October 1788

By Jeremy Bentham and Ian R. Christie

The first five volumes of the Correspondence of Jeremy Bentham contain over 1,300 letters written both to and from Bentham over a 50-year period, beginning in 1752 (aged three) with his earliest surviving letter to his grandmother, and ending in 1797 with correspondence concerning his attempts to set up a national scheme for the provision of poor relief. Against the background of the debates on the American Revolution of 1776 and the French Revolution of 1789, to which he made significant contributions, Bentham worked first on producing a complete penal code, which involved him in detailed explorations of fundamental legal ideas, and then on his panopticon prison scheme. Despite developing a host of original and ground-breaking ideas, contained in a mass of manuscripts, he published little during these years, and remained, at the close of this period, a relatively obscure individual. Nevertheless, these volumes reveal how the foundations were laid for the remarkable rise of Benthamite utilitarianism in the early nineteenth century.

The letters in this volume document Bentham’s meeting and friendship with the Earl of Shelburne (later the Marquis of Lansdowne), which opened a whole new set of opportunities for him, as well as his extraordinary journey, by way of the Mediterranean, to visit his brother Samuel in Russia.

Praise for the Correspondence of Jeremy Bentham, volumes 1-5

‘These volumes provide significant additions to our understanding of Bentham’s work in the first half of his life up to 1797. The insights they offer into Bentham’s activities, ideas and method cast light on his philosophical and political positions in a seminal period in British and European history.’British Journal for the History of Philosophy

• Language: English
• Publisher: UCL Press
• Release date: Jun 7, 2017
• ISBN: 9781911576129

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THE COLLECTED WORKS OF JEREMY BENTHAM

General Editor

J. H. Burns

Correspondence

Volume 3

The

CORRESPONDENCE

of

JEREMY BENTHAM

Volume 3

January 1781 to October 1788

edited by

IAN R. CHRISTIE

This edition published in 2017 by

UCL Press

University College London

Gower Street

London WC1E 6BT

First published in 1971 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.

This book is published under a Creative Commons 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0). This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the work; to adapt the work and to make commercial use of the work providing attribution is made to the authors (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Attribution should include the following information:

Ian R. Christie (ed.), The Correspondence of Jeremy Bentham, Vol.3: January 1781 to October 1788. The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham. Edited by J.H.Burns. London, UCL Press, 2017. https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781911576099

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781911576099

PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION OF VOLUME 3

The third volume of Jeremy Bentham’s Correspondence was originally published in 1971, under the editorship of the late Ian R. Christie and the General Editorship of the late J.H. Burns. 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 the corrigenda printed at the conclusion of Volume V of the Correspondence and further corrections identified by the Bentham Project. Professor Anne Brunon-Ernst (University of Paris II) has kindly checked the accuracy of the reproduction of the French material according to the conventions currently adopted in the edition as a whole.

The current volume opens as the American War of Independence was coming to a conclusion and closes on the brink of the French Revolution. In early 1781 Bentham, who was living in Lincoln’s Inn, received a visit from the Earl of Shelburne (raised in the peerage to Marquis of Lansdowne in 1785). Shelburne, who was known for his intellectual interests, was also a major politician, becoming leader of the administration from July 1782 to March 1783, with responsibility for negotiating the peace with America. Bentham could not but have been flattered by Shelburne’s attention, and he accepted Shelburne’s invitation to visit his country home Bowood House in Wiltshire, where he stayed for several weeks in the autumn of 1781. Bentham’s detailed letters from Bowood to his friend George Wilson give a fascinating insight into life in one of the country’s major aristocratic houses.

Bentham’s correspondence is, however, dominated by Russia. In March 1780 his younger brother Samuel had arrived at St Petersburg, where he had begun to establish his reputation as an engineer. Having undertaken an expedition to Siberia, Samuel was taken into service by Prince Potëmkin, a powerful aristocrat with a large estate at Krichëv in the south of Russia, where Samuel took charge of Potëmkin’s industrial and military concerns. In August 1785 Bentham left London, travelled through the Mediterranean to Constantinople and then overland via Bucharest, and arrived at Krichëv in February 1786. He stayed for nearly two years, living with his brother in a farmhouse provided by Potëmkin, and spending most of his time writing, but also dealing with various aspects of Samuel’s affairs. In late 1787 Bentham set off back to England, travelled overland via Warsaw and Berlin, and arrived home in February 1788.

Bentham had hopes of presenting his penal code to Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia, but, remaining in his farmhouse, he failed to seize the opportunity to meet her when she visited Krichëv early in 1787. As was often the case, Bentham had not brought his work to completion, despite composing a large mass of manuscripts (in French, for the benefit of the Empress) under the headings of ‘Projet Forme’ and ‘Projet Matière’. While in Krichëv, Bentham wrote Defence of Usury, which George Wilson, his friend in London, saw through the press, and which was published in late 1787. Bentham’s essay was highly influential over a course of years in presenting the case for the abolition of legal limits on rates of interest. It has appeared in the Collected Works, along with other related material from these years, in Writings on Political Economy: Volume I, edited by Michael Quinn, published in 2016.

A further work to emerge from Bentham’s visit to Russia was his scheme for a panopticon prison, which was eventually printed in 1791 as ‘Panopticon: or, The Inspection-House’. Samuel had proposed to build a manufactory, arranged around a central point, from where he could continuously inspect the activities of his workforce. Bentham realized that the central-inspection principle might be applied to a whole variety of institutions, including factories, schools, and hospitals. The pressing need in England at the time was for a penitentiary, and so Bentham focused his attention on prison design. He imagined a circular or polygonal building, with the cells on the outside, and an inspection tower in the centre. The attempt to build a panopticon prison in London would come to dominate his life for over a decade following his return to England.

As Christie explains in the ‘Introduction’ below, up to 80 letters sent by Bentham to Samuel between 1781 and 1785 are missing. Christie wondered whether the letters might surface in a Russian archive, but they have not yet done so. He also explains that, while all Samuel’s letters to Bentham appear to have survived, he excluded from the present volume those letters and parts of letters that dealt exclusively with Samuel’s affairs. Christie went on to produce a detailed account of Samuel’s activities, including his involvement in the Russian defeat of the Turks at Ochakov in 1788, and of Bentham’s hazardous and eventful journeys to and from Krichëv in his The Benthams in Russia, 1780–1791 (Oxford and Providence, RI: Berg, 1993), which may now be supplemented with Roger Morriss’s Science, Utility and Maritime Power: Samuel Bentham in Russia, 1779–91 (London: Routledge, 2015).

Philip Schofield

General Editor of The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham

UCL, March 2017

PREFACE

The thanks of the Bentham Committee are due to the following 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 Trustees of the British Museum; The Deputy Keeper of the Public Records, the Public Record Office; The Librarian, University College London; The Librarian, the William L. Clements Library; The Most Hon. the Marquess of Lansdowne; Col. Sir John G. Carew Pole, Bt., d.s.o., t.d., of Antony House, Torpoint, Cornwall; Mr D. R. Bentham. The Committee also thanks the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich Hospital Collection, for permission to reproduce the picture which forms the frontispiece. The grateful acknowledgements of the Committee are also due to the following bodies for financial assistance towards the cost of the editorial work on this volume: The Rockefeller Foundation; The Pilgrim Trust; The British Academy.

My labours as editor of this volume have been helped in the highest degree by Mrs Sandra Hole, who bore the brunt of the work of copying from manuscripts, checking typed transcripts, and collecting information for footnotes; and by Miss Judith Stafford, who gave valuable assistance in checking the proofs and compiling the index. I am most grateful to them both, and to Miss Helen Nowell, and also to Mrs Hilary P. Evans and Mrs Audrey Munro who between them produced the typescript. It has been a pleasure and relief to know that the great knowledge of Bentham possessed by the General Editor, Professor J. H. Burns, has been available in case of need, and I much appreciate the help he has given on many points. I owe debts of gratitude to various colleagues in University College, Professor R. A. Humphreys, Dr J. Kells, Dr W. A. Smeaton, and Dr M. Winterbottom, who came to my aid on particular matters; and special thanks are due to Dr C. L. Drage of the School of Slavonic and East European Studies of the University of London for his help in transcribing Russian documents, providing typed transcripts of them complete with idiosyncrasies of spelling, and correcting my attempts at translation. Dr A. G. Cross of the School of European Studies, University of East Anglia, kindly provided identifications of a number of more obscure Russian personalities not to be found in the Soviet Encyclopaedia or the Russian Biographical Dictionary; I regret that the late stage of preparation at which his help was obtained has precluded full use of the information he furnished.

University College London

I. R. C.

CONTENTS

List of Letters in Volume 3

Introduction to Volume 3

1. The Letters

2. Outline of Bentham’s life, January 1781 to October 1788

A List of Missing Letters

Key to Symbols and Abbreviations

THE CORRESPONDENCE

January 1781–October 1788

Index

LIST OF LETTERS IN VOLUME 3

INTRODUCTION

1. The Letters

About three-quarters of the letters included in this volume have not been published before. The place of first publication of all but a few of the remainder was Sir John Bowring’s Memoirs of Bentham, in volume x of his edition of The Works of Jeremy Bentham. Wherever possible the present text has been taken from original manuscripts, and at times the inadequacy of Bowring’s editing stands clearly revealed—a fact which renders the more unhappy the circumstance that the originals of a few of the letters he printed have disappeared, leaving his text as the only source.

The main manuscript sources for the letters in this volume are the two great collections of Bentham’s papers, in the library of University College London, and in the manuscript department of the British Museum. Since the relationship between their contents is not altogether clear, some recapitulation is given here of explanations made in the Introduction to volume i. The first of these collections came into the hands of Bowring as Bentham’s literary executor, and was deposited by him at the College in 1849. Although the main bulk of this collection is made up of Bentham’s works, it contains a substantial number of letters written to Bentham during the period covered by this volume, and also some of his drafts—in a few cases it has been proved, by the discovery of the originals elsewhere or of replies to them, that these represent letters actually sent.

The second collection, now in the British Museum, was not known to Bowring when he edited Bentham’s papers. This collection contains the main mass of the family correspondence—for this period Bentham’s letters to his father and those received by him from his brother which he regularly forwarded on to his father. Bentham himself believed this correspondence had been destroyed by his stepmother before her death in 1809. However, at some time presumably after his death it passed into the hands of his nephew George or sister-in-law Mary Bentham—possibly after lying forgotten in a lawyer’s vault—and Mary Bentham, when writing her sketch of her husband’s life, probably incorporated with it a mass of Samuel Bentham’s correspondence which it now contains. After the death of her son George Bentham, the collection passed to Joseph Dalton Hooker, and from Hooker by purchase to the British Museum.

There are problems relating to the contents of this collection, to Bowring’s possible indirect connection with it, and to its connection through him with the papers now in University College. There are two apparent intrusions. One consists of a number of Bentham’s letters to George Wilson, to the Davieses, to James Anderson and to one or two other addressees. The other is made up of letters to him from such correspondents as Lord Lansdowne, Baron von Raigersfeld, Reginald Pole Carew, François Xavier Schwediauer and Jacques Pierre Brissot de Warville.

How did these letters reach their present location? It seems certain that at some point Bowring was involved. The letters written by Bentham must have been assembled by him as an artificial collection to assist him with the Memoirs; and in some cases where only his printed text is now known, presumably he either returned the manuscripts to the addressees or their heirs, or else disposed of them in some other way. The letters to Bentham, of which he printed only a selection, can only have been extracted from the papers which passed into his keeping in 1832 and which still contain other letters from some of these correspondents. There is later evidence, referred to below, that a private Bowring collection was formed out of these papers; but there is no information as to how this group of letters, or most of it, came to be amalgamated with the papers now in the British Museum.

A small proportion of the letters in this volume are printed from originals in private collections: among these are to be noted especially the Lansdowne Mss. at Bowood and the Pole Carew Mss. at Antony, Cornwall. Bowring’s handling of the correspondence between Bentham and Lansdowne merits comment. It is evident that he did not obtain access to the Lansdowne archives, for in cases where a manuscript is known to exist, his texts of Bentham’s letters to Lansdowne are derived from drafts or copies in what is now the University College collection. There is also evidence that he abstracted a personal collection of the more interesting of Lansdowne’s letters to Bentham from the papers under his control: his grandson Wilfred Joseph Bowring sent one of these to the 5th Marquess in 1910 and mentioned his possession of many others.

All known letters of Bentham’s belonging to the period covered by this volume have been printed in full; so have practically all letters to him, save for those from his brother.

In one respect this volume contrasts markedly with its predecessor. Bentham’s side of the voluminous correspondence which was being carried on with Samuel Bentham in Russia has disappeared—clearly through some artificial division of the papers, since the break comes at the beginning of the calendar year 1781. In Samuel’s replies, and occasionally in Bentham’s letters to his father, and elsewhere, there are specific references to some thirty-eight of Bentham’s letters to Samuel, but there is sufficient indication that the number missing is far greater than this. In the year 1780, the last for which the archive seems complete, Bentham wrote nineteen letters to his brother. Fourteen are known by reference for the first ten months of 1781. One he wrote in September 1783 was numbered ‘XXV’ in a sequence relating to that year (only this one and five of its predecessors of that year are known by specific reference). He sent at least thirteen in the first seven months of 1784. To judge by these figures an average of twenty letters a year seems a conservative estimate. On this basis at least ninety letters are missing for the period from January 1781 till Bentham’s departure from England for Russia in August 1785, plus two sent to Samuel from Constantinople at the end of 1785 and at least another two written towards the end of 1787. The possibility that these exist in some portion of Samuel Bentham’s papers left behind him in Russia cannot be excluded, although the Institute of History of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, which has kindly provided information on surviving letters of Bentham in Russia, has not found trace of them. Of this great series there survive only three incomplete drafts and also one long letter which may have been preserved in special circumstances because of its particularly intimate personal character.

Something of the contents of Bentham’s missing letters to his brother can occasionally be deduced from Samuel’s replies. Judging by their number Samuel’s letters to Bentham have survived almost completely and their bulk has presented a considerable problem of selection. In order not to destroy the balance and proper emphasis of this volume it has seemed advisable rigorously to exclude material dealing with Samuel’s own activities in Russia, and to print only those letters or parts of letters which yield information about Bentham by reference to what he himself had written or to activities in which he was involved on Samuel’s behalf.

Bentham’s surviving correspondence with his father during this period is irregular but not unsubstantial. In the main it falls into three periods; 1783, when the chief topics were Samuel Bentham’s love affair with the Countess Sof’ya Dmitriyevna Matyushkina and the momentary prospect that Samuel might become temporary British chargé d’affaires at St Petersburg; 1786–7, when Bentham was writing to his father from Russia; and 1788, when they were both avidly following the naval war news from the Black Sea. As might be expected from the relations between father and son, there is little evidence in this run about Bentham’s intellectual pursuits. But a rich vein of description and narrative characterizes the second group, and this is also a notable feature of the long journal-letters which Bentham wrote about his stay at Bowood in 1781 and again, between August 1785 and February 1786, about his journey to Russia. Throughout this period it was George Wilson who, more than anyone save his brother, shared his confidence and his intellectual interests. This stands out both in the striking run of the letters to Wilson from Bowood in 1781 and in those exchanged between them while Bentham was in Russia.

The remainder of the letters printed in this volume reflect the growing range of Bentham’s contacts. For the most part these are letters to Bentham. Practically all such known letters have been included, as they yield information about his activities and his intellectual interests not otherwise available, and sometimes, as in the case of Brissot de Warville, provide the only evidence for the widening of his circle which was taking place at this time. Some of them have a biographical interest, not least one or two which show him at work as the business assistant of his brother at Krichëv. Two long and difficult drafts to Lord Ashburton in 1782 provide the fullest information available on the development of his writings on jurisprudence at this time. Every item relating to Bentham’s contact with Lord Lansdowne has been included, however slight, on the ground that for both men it has a cumulatively important biographical significance. Unfortunately Bentham’s own letters to a number of these correspondents remain undiscovered (if they still survive) notably those to Prince Grigoriy Aleksandrovich Potëmkin, Count Sergey Ivanovich Pleshcheyev, François Xavier Schwediauer, James Trail and Brissot de Warville.

For notes on details of editorial practice, see the Introduction to volume i at pages xxi–xxii. In transliterating Russian names the Russian modified ‘e’ (= ‘yo’, or ‘o’ after ‘ch’ and ‘sh’) has been rendered as ‘ë’ in preference to the also frequently-used ‘yo’ or ‘o’.

2. Outline of Bentham’s life, January 1781 to October 1788

1781 The beginning of this year was marked by the break-down, for reasons not disclosed in the correspondence, of Bentham’s plans for a German translation of the Introduction of his Plan of a Penal Code (later published as An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation). The English text had now been set in type, but he proceeded no further with this, being hard at work on part of what he regarded as the main body of his future publication, his Plan of a Penal Code itself, which is referred to for short as ‘Code’ in the Correspondence of this and the following years. In February some light relief was afforded by his cousin Gregory Bentham’s discovery of a graft being carried on over the sale of admiralty appointments, which Bentham took upon himself to report to the First Lord of the Admiralty. There is some indication of continued contact with Shelburne House, for about the end of April a correspondence with the earl’s librarian seems to show that Bentham had agreed to look out for copies of Prynne’s tracts and in exchange he was offered duplicates from Shelburne’s collection. It was possibly this matter that gave Shelburne the opening at the beginning of July for his descent upon Bentham’s chambers at Lincoln’s Inn. Shelburne seems there to have enjoyed a lively and critical discussion of Bentham’s work. He was sufficiently impressed to borrow a copy of the Fragment on Government for perusal at leisure, and to follow up his visit with a pressing invitation to Bentham to spend part of the summer at Bowood and bring his work so that it might be submitted to the judgment of Shelburne’s legal friends, Lord Camden and John Dunning.

Though Bentham showed some hesitation, it was impossible to refuse. At the beginning of August he stayed for a fortnight with the Davieses at Chatham, where he went sea-bathing on his doctor’s instructions. He then travelled down to Bowood where he remained until the middle of October. It was a memorable experience of gracious living in an intellectual household which was also a focus of national politics. During this period, apart from much stimulating conversation he had the diverse pleasures of romping with Shelburne’s infant son, performing violin and harpsichord duets with Lady Shelburne, playing chess with the future prime minister, William Pitt, and indulging just a little (but not too much) tendresse towards one of Lady Shelburne’s kinswomen. Long afterwards he wrote: ‘Those days with the exception of a few months passed in the same company about eight years afterwards, were the happiest of my life’; and his zestful descriptions of the people he met and the gossip he heard in a long series of letters to George Wilson form the major part of his correspondence during this year. During his stay at Bowood, Lord Camden looked through the Fragment and made little of it; but John Dunning was not able to do so, his wife’s pregnancy obliging him to leave Bowood almost immediately after he arrived. At parting Shelburne urged Bentham not to let his brother stay too long abroad, and gave advice that he should take in the naval yards of the Scandinavian countries on his way back to England. If he were ever in a position to do so he would bring Samuel forward in public employment; meanwhile he held out the offer to him of a house at Wycombe, where he had an estate, and a retainer of £1000. Puzzled and not wholly convinced of the sincerity of these offers, Bentham duly relayed them to his brother, but with a caution not to take them too seriously. Leaving Bowood in mid-October Bentham travelled via Oxford and Slough to Thorpe, where he stopped briefly—for the last time, for Wilson was abandoning the cottage he had shared with him there—and by the end of the month he was back at Lincoln’s Inn.

1782 The scanty information available suggests that during most of this year Bentham presumably remained at Lincoln’s Inn at work on his writings. He spent the autumn at Brompton near Chatham, staying with the Davieses, whose home was now to some extent to take the place for him of Wilson’s cottage at Thorpe as a retreat from London.

Shelburne kept in touch with him, and in June, on Shelburne’s insistence, he sent to Lord Ashburton (as Dunning had now become) the printed sheets of the Introduction and a plan, now some months out of date, of the way he intended to develop his study. According to a later memorandum these were never returned to him. Later on Shelburne seems also to have pressed him to tell his brother to return, holding out the prospect of a commissionership of the Navy Board. Bentham reported this proposal to his brother with strong warnings to treat it with caution; he was anxious that Samuel should not on this ground throw up promising prospects in Russia. In fact, for various reasons, Samuel stayed at St Petersburg after his return (in October) from the long tour of exploration in Siberia which had occupied him since February 1781.

Towards the end of the year Bentham had evidently gone some way towards producing a French version of the general treatise on jurisprudence which, in one form or another, had occupied him since about 1770. In a letter to his brother he referred to this as a ‘projet d’un corps de droit’ and as being near completion—the latter statement, however, being characteristically over-optimistic. About this time, too, he made a new friend in the person of the French journalist, Jacques Pierre Brissot de Warville, who in November came over to London in connection with various literary ventures.

1783 This year saw the development of an intimate friendship between Bentham and Brissot, marked by several exchanges of letters, of which only Brissot’s side appears to survive. Bentham’s relationship with Shelburne remained cordial: in February he sought his favour to help in securing French publications on law questions. In the spring of 1783 he found a new friend in the young Cornish member of parliament, Reginald Pole Carew of Antony. Pole Carew had travelled in Russia and had become friendly with Samuel Bentham. After he returned to London it is not clear which sought out the other—possibly the first approach to Carew was taken by Jeremiah Bentham—but a common interest in Samuel’s romance with the Countess Sof’ya Dmitriyevna Matyushkina drew them together. Bentham obtained information about the Countess, owing to Carew’s friendship with Prince A. V. Vyazemskiy, who was then on a visit to England and who, as a relative of the Countess, was making enquiries about Samuel’s family on her behalf.

Bentham’s intellectual interests are reflected in correspondence with an old acquaintance, Baron von Raigersfeld, the secretary of the Austrian legation, who tried to get information for him about German law, and also with a new one, David Steuart, recently provost of Edinburgh, who promised to help him on the subject of Scottish criminal law. His old friend, James Anderson, consulted him about the draft of his pamphlet concerning the development of the Scottish fisheries. Out of the blue an obscure Russian army surgeon, whom his brother had met in southern Siberia, sent him a consignment of seeds which had to be acknowledged; and when a proposal came up for Samuel to act as temporary chargé d’affaires at St Petersburg on the retirement of Sir James Harris, he was drawn into a flurry of correspondence and personal consultation with the new ambassador’s brother, his old friend, William Fitzherbert.

At the end of July Bentham once again left London to join the Davieses at Brompton, and in the autumn he removed with them to their new home at Linstead near Sittingbourne. There is some indication that at this time Bentham was continuing to eke out his slender allowance by hack-work for London booksellers, including the translation of works into English. Meanwhile Samuel Bentham, finally settled in the imperial service in the civilian rank of conseiller de la cour at St Petersburg, began to press his brother to pay a visit to him in Russia, an idea which seems already to have crossed Bentham’s mind. Bentham returned to Lincoln’s Inn about the middle of November. Towards the end of this year he received the first of a string of letters from his brother about his want of skilled craftsmen of various kinds who might be recruited to help him with the mechanical inventions he was trying to develop.

1784 The correspondence of the early part of the year reveals little about Bentham’s activities, save that he was in London. A growing interest in things Russian is evident from his brother’s replies to his enquiries and from his draft of a letter to Samuel discussing the qualities of a possible recruit for service in Russia. In April the reopening of a brief correspondence with his old friend, Francis Villion, who for some years had been dropped from his acquaintance, about the return of books which each had lent to the other, may indicate a desire to tidy up his affairs before going to visit Samuel. There was. discussion of plans for employment in Russia for James Anderson and indications multiply that Samuel, who in March was transferred to the army as lieutenant-colonel under the immediate patronage of Potëmkin, was beginning to use his brother as a private recruiting agent for technical experts.

About the end of April, however, the normal tenor of Bentham’s life and whatever plans he had in view were disrupted by the death of his uncle George Woodward Grove. This event brought Bentham a small legacy, which, together with his father’s allowance, was just sufficient to save him from some of the shifts to which hitherto he had occasionally been driven to make ends meet. But the duties of executor involved him in several months of wearying toil at Grove’s country house at Whitchurch in Hampshire—he was back in London for a week or so at the end of May to deal with probate, but did not finally leave Whitchurch till some time in early November. For some weeks his eyes suffered severely from overstrain: in July he wrote that for two months he had been unable to make any progress with his work. Apart from a stream of letters from Samuel Bentham about workmen wanted in Russia his correspondence during this period included letters to his father about the disposal of Grove’s estate, a long letter to Anderson discussing Russian prospects, two from F. X. Schwediauer about the supply of a set of the new Encyclopaedia Britannica for Samuel and containing chitchat about intellectual life in Edinburgh; and London gossip from his Lincoln’s Inn friends, George Wilson and James Trail.

1785 During the winter and spring Bentham, now back at Lincoln’s Inn, was actively preparing for his forthcoming trip to Russia. He was again in fairly frequent contact with the Marquis of Lansdowne (as Shelburne had now become); in April, perhaps in view of favours to come, he offered a gift of drawings to Lady Lansdowne; and before his departure Lansdowne provided him with some letters of introduction. He now had specific commissions from Samuel on Potëmkin’s behalf. These related to taking out a botanist to serve in the Crimea and arranging the movement of other craftsmen to help develop Potëmkin’s White Russian estate of Krichëv. Somewhat to his brother’s dismay, he wrote at least four letters direct to Potëmkin on these matters. Lansdowne’s friend, John Symonds, the professor of modern history at Cambridge, furnished information about Italy which Bentham planned to visit briefly on the way.

At the end of June Bentham’s baggage was sent off on board the Mary Frances, commanded by Captain Richard Brine, which he planned to join about the end of August at Nice after travelling overland across France. In the following weeks his last preparations were completed. These included a visit to the Foreign Office to pick up letters of recommendation, when he took occasion to draw the secretary of state’s attention to his brother’s interest in commercial development in eastern Siberia and the North Pacific. Early in August he set out from London, reached Brighton on the 6th, and on the night of the 7th–8th crossed to Dieppe. This time there was no dallying as there had been in 1770 along the pleasant country of the looping Seine between Rouen and Paris: leaving Dieppe on the 11th by Saturday, 13 August, he reached the French capital. Here he stayed barely a week, entertained by friends of his father’s, paying a courtesy call on Lansdowne’s friend, the secretary of the French department of foreign affairs, Gérard de Rayneval, who provided him with further letters of introduction, and gathering up the rest of his party which was to accompany him to Russia—the Scottish adventurer, Logan Henderson, whom he had recruited as a botanist and the two Miss Kirtlands, whom he understood to be Henderson’s nieces, who were to run a dairy in the Crimea.

In the small hours of Saturday, 20 August, the party left Paris. They travelled partly by coach and partly by river, via Châlons, Lyons and Montpellier to Marseilles and then to Nice, which they reached on 9 September. They rested there for the weekend, and set out again on the 12th travelling by felucca to Genoa, where, on the 14th, they caught up with the Mary Frances. Here they embarked on the 17th for the voyage to Smyrna. However, the ship’s captain passed ten days or so (20 September–1 October) doing business at Leghorn. This enabled Bentham to spend three days at Florence, where he lived ‘lodging excepted’, at the house of the British resident, Sir Horace Mann, to whom Lansdowne had given him an introduction. Finding, when he returned to Leghorn, that Brine was not sailing so early as he had at first intended, he made a further expedition to Pisa.

About 1 October the Mary Frances left Leghorn on the last stage of her voyage to Smyrna with no further planned port of call en route. Prone to sea-sickness, Bentham seems to have been ill for the next ten days, but after the passage of the Straits of Messina the weather was good and he found energy to write an ample letter-journal. After encountering a severe storm off the Asian coast, the Mary Frances anchored at Smyrna on 24 October.

On 3 November Bentham and his party, together with a Russian merchant named Schneyder, a surgeon named Griffiths escaping from his creditors, and a slave dealer with a group of African girls bound for the slave market embarked on a heavily overladen Turkish caique for Constantinople. Uncertain weather and the caution of the Turkish captain held up their arrival at the Dardanelles until the 13th and they might have been delayed still longer but for the appearance of an English vessel which took them on board at Kvemed on the 15th and brought them to Pera on the 21st.

By this time the season was too advanced for Bentham to follow his original plan of taking ship from Constantinople to the Crimea; and on reaching Pera letters from Samuel Bentham advised him that his brother was at Krichëv and not in the Russian south. An initial scheme proposed by the Russian ambassador, that Bentham’s group should travel in the company of a Moldavian royal party as far as Jassy, on the first leg of the circuitous land journey to Russia, came to nothing owing to the bad state of the roads west of Constantinople. To a coach (necessary for the women-folk) these were impossible. Accordingly Henderson and the Miss Kirtlands waited at Constantinople till the Black Sea should be open again to navigation; and on 10 December Bentham set off by this route on horse-back. To serve him he borrowed Schneyder’s Polish-born servant Ludwig (who was to stay with him for the duration of his Russian visit). A janissary conducted the party, as Turkish law required, either till it caught up the Moldavian party or else passed out of Turkish territory. With him went a servant. The party was completed by a guide who was responsible for bringing back from Bucharest the horses ridden by Bentham and Ludwig and the two pack-animals, which carried their baggage. In all the expedition consisted of five men and seven horses. He reached Bucharest on 26 December.

1786 Bentham continued his journey to Russia, leaving Bucharest on or about 2 January after about a week’s stay. Three days later he was at Jassy. After delays caused by the Greek Orthodox Christmas festivals, he got away from here on the 9th, crossed the Dniester into Polish territory near Soroka, and by 5/16 January had reached the Polish side of the Russian frontier at Bohopol, at the confluence of the Sinyuka and the Bug. Here he was held up first by the crossing of the Sinyuka and then by quarantine regulations at the Russian frontier town of Olviopol; but in a few days he was on his way, taking a roundabout route by Kremenchug to Krichëv, where he arrived on 10/21 February.

Bentham’s letters from Krichëv during the rest of 1786 give only a general impression of his life there. Early in the year Potëmkin gave his brother tenancy of a farm in the village of Zadobrast in a bend of the river Sozh about three miles from the township, and here Bentham spent much of his time busy writing in seclusion. Early in the spring a hint that their peace might be disturbed by a visit from their father was met by a superbly tactful intimation that circumstances might not then make this advisable. By the end of the year Bentham was well advanced with the drafts of what he described as ‘Essai sur les Recompenses’ (the basis of the Rationale of Reward) and had completed his work on the nature of civil law. At the same time he found energy to write his Panopticon Letters, describing his brother’s invention of a new form of industrial building described by him as an ‘inspection house’, which Bentham was quick to see also had other possibilities. At the end of December two copies of this work were dispatched to London, one to Jeremiah Bentham, the other, under cover of his agent, Richard King, to George Wilson, who was asked to see the work through the press.

Occasionally this existence was varied by a visit from one of Samuel’s Russian friends or still more rarely by a call on one of their neighbours. In August the brothers entertained the English member of parliament, Sir Richard Worsley, now on the last lap of an extended foreign tour, whom Bentham had already encountered at Smyrna and at Constantinople during his journey the previous autumn; and Bentham accompanied Worsley on a trial voyage some sixty miles down the Sozh on the prototype of his brother’s newly-invented articulated barge-train, which the brothers had christened the ‘vermicular’. Reports Worsley brought with him to the effect that the British government intended to impose new legislative restrictions on rates of interest set Bentham’s mind at work on the composition of the Defence of Usury. Now and again Bentham wrote business letters for Samuel, and at the end of the year a crisis in his brother’s affairs at a time when Potëmkin demanded Samuel’s attendance in the south occasioned for him a veritable flurry of correspondence.

1787 Although the Empress Catherine II passed through Krichëv early in February on the start of her great tour of south Russia and the recently annexed Crimean territory, Bentham remained secluded at Zadobrast. By this time he had carried his ‘Essai sur les Recompenses’ to such a state of completion as to send a copy to Wilson for his comments. He also wrote a long description of ‘vermicular’ to Wilson, in case there should be any way in which a provisional claim to a patent might be lodged. About the same time he was writing the Defence of Usury, which he sent off to Wilson for publication at the beginning of May. This was dispatched via St Petersburg, through the hands of Sergey Ivanovich Pleshcheyev, who, in accordance with Bentham’s request, made some minor corrections to references to rates of interest in Russia. Despite a refusal to undertake any more such editorial work, which had crossed this in the post, Wilson did in fact see this pamphlet through the press and it was published towards the end of the year. However, further action on the Panopticon Letters was postponed on Bentham’s instructions, chiefly, it seems, because of a temporary misunderstanding between him and his father due to interruption of mails. They were not to be published till 1791.

With the spring the settled life of the Bentham brothers at Zadobrast and Krichëv came to an end. At the beginning of May Samuel was called away to dance attendance on Potëmkin in the south, at least for so long as the Empress’s tour lasted. Three weeks later Bentham learned that Potëmkin had sold Krichëv in connection with his purchase of a new estate further to the south-east at Smolian lower down the Dnieper. This was soon seen to imply the transfer there of various undertakings with which Samuel had been concerned. During the early summer Bentham was conducting a slightly embarrassed correspondence with his father about the repayment of money which had been advanced by the elder Bentham in connection with some of Samuel’s projects. He was now anxious to set out for home, but his brother’s desire to see him once more before he left obliged him to give up the idea of taking ship from Riga and to plan an overland journey home in the autumn as soon as ice and snow had hardened the winter roads. However, a Turkish declaration of war on Russia on 5/16 August made a meeting between the brothers out of the question. Bentham had no wish to travel hundreds of miles further away from his homeward direction. Samuel was fully employed in the arming of a flotilla of light vessels in the Dnieper estuary. In Samuel’s absence Bentham found himself inevitably drawn into the task of settling up Samuel’s concerns and in particular seeing to the paying off of some of the British workmen for whom Samuel had no further employment. In consequence on the eve of his departure he became the victim of legal proceedings for the recovery of money claimed (unjustifiably Bentham thought) by one of his brother’s Russian creditors. Though the details are not available, he appears to have extricated himself successfully, and he left Krichëv on his way home on 19/30 November. He reached Warsaw on 16 December, after a gruelling journey, of which he left a detailed account; stayed there only forty-eight hours; and by 27 December was at Berlin.

1788 Bentham passed about a fortnight at Berlin, leaving on or soon after 9 January. He spent the next two weeks ‘crawling post from Berlin to Holland through vile roads’ and reached home early in February. For some time he idled, feeling ‘like a fish out of water’, and renewing old acquaintanceships. Lansdowne was affable, consulted him on legal points connected with the trial of Warren Hastings, and asked him what sort of office he would like if he, Lansdowne, got back into power. By early May he was ready to move into a new country lodging—a farm-house at Hendon—where he could have absolute peace to get on with his writings and amuse himself with a ‘superb’ harpsichord on which he decided to squander sixty guineas. Here he spent most of his time henceforth with occasional visits to his parents and his step-brother Farr, at Farr’s country house at Putney Heath. Save for one reference to affairs in France in a letter from Lansdowne, his correspondence up till the end of October reveals little but his absorbing interest in the Russian naval operations in the Liman of Ochakov, in which his brother (though he did not yet know this) was for a short time actively engaged.

MISSING LETTERS OF JEREMY BENTHAM REFERRED TO IN THE CORRESPONDENCE

January 1781 to October 1788

KEY TO SYMBOLS AND ABBREVIATIONS

SYMBOLS

ABBREVIATIONS

Apart from standard abbreviations, the following should be noted:

B.M. I, II, . . . etc.: refers to the main series of Bentham papers in the British Museum, Additional Mss. 33537–64, the volumes of which are numbered from I to XXVIII. Thus B.M. I = Add. Ms. 33537 and so on.

U.C.: refers to the Bentham papers in the Library of University College London. Roman numerals refer to the boxes in which the papers are placed, Arabic to the leaves in each box.

Bowring: refers to The Works of Jeremy Bentham, published under the superintendence of . . . John Bowring (11 vols.), Edinburgh, 1838–43. Volumes x and xi contain Bowring’s Memoirs of Bentham.

NOTE

Apart from sources cited in the notes, the following standard works of reference have been in frequent use and