In 1998 the 250th anniversary of Jeremy Bentham's birth was celebrated, and among the numerous events held at University College London to mark the occasion was an exhibition of paintings, drawings and prints of Bentham or in some way related to him. It was the first attempt to collect and exhibit, where possible, all known representations of Bentham, and these were gathered together in an exhibition with a catalogue entitled The Old Radical. When I first learned that this was going to be the title of the exhibition, I was somewhat puzzled, especially when told that this was a phrase that Bentham used to refer to himself.

The phrase would make perfect sense in a matter of fact way. When he wrote the words in 1823 at the age of seventy-five in a letter to Samuel Parr, he was both old and a radical. But did he mean this or was he referring to his being a radical for a long time? If the latter, the remark is more problematic. He publicly declared himself to be a radical only six years earlier in 1817 in Plan of Parliamentary Reform where he promised in the full title of the work to show The Necessity of Radical and the Inadequacy of Moderate Reform. But if he ‘came out’ as a radical in 1817, he wrote as a radical as early as 1809–10, as he clearly noted in Plan of Parliamentary Reform, and the manuscripts on radical reform bear these dates.