Jeremy Bentham was an odd but eminently consistent man, in this life and beyond. Born in 1748, he died in 1832. Three days after his death on 6 June, and in accordance with his specific instructions, his corpse was dissected before an invited audience. Afterwards his chosen dissector, Dr Southwood Smith, a Unitarian minister and Edinburgh-educated physician, delivered a lecture on the uses of the dead to the living. It took some courage on the part of Bentham to associate his remains with the punishment of criminals or the fate of paupers. But not too much. He asserted that, if embalmed and clothed, his body might be his best representation, his ‘Auto-Icon’. So it was. After his public but privileged dissection, Bentham's skeleton was articulated in a sitting position, dressed as in life, his head – which had embarrassingly shrunk – was reconstructed in waxwork, and the whole artifice preserved in perpetuity, still on display in a glass case in University College London, not the fate of an ordinary dissectee.

But Bentham was no ordinary individual. He had a fastidious and orderly mind. He loved italics and the prefix ‘pan’. He had opinions on everything, and a philosophical overview that encompassed everything. As his public dissection demonstrated, he was utilitarian to the backbone. He not only proposed many legal and social reforms, but also expounded an underlying moral principle on which they should be based. His fundamental belief was that pain and pleasure are the ‘sovereign masters’ of mankind and ‘it is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do’.