Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Abbreviations
- Foreword
- Introduction
- PART I IN THE BEGINNING, 600–1500
- PART II SQUALOR CARCERIS, 1500–1750
- PART III EXPERIMENTATION WITH IMPRISONMENT, 1750–1863
- 11 Diving into the Depths of Dungeons
- 12 Flotsam and Jetsam
- 13 Mr Bentham's Haunted House
- 14 The Angel of the Prisons
- 15 Mr Holford's Fattening House
- 16 Goodies and Noodles
- 17 Silence or Separation?
- 18 The ‘Model Prison’
- 19 The Universal Syllabub of Philanthropic Twaddle
- 20 Bleak House
- 21 Top Marks
- PART IV PUNISH AND BE DAMNED, 1863–1895
- PART V THE AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT, 1895–1965
- PART VI SAFE AND SECURE? 1965–2018
- Bibliography
- Index
13 - Mr Bentham's Haunted House
from PART III - EXPERIMENTATION WITH IMPRISONMENT, 1750–1863
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 September 2019
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Abbreviations
- Foreword
- Introduction
- PART I IN THE BEGINNING, 600–1500
- PART II SQUALOR CARCERIS, 1500–1750
- PART III EXPERIMENTATION WITH IMPRISONMENT, 1750–1863
- 11 Diving into the Depths of Dungeons
- 12 Flotsam and Jetsam
- 13 Mr Bentham's Haunted House
- 14 The Angel of the Prisons
- 15 Mr Holford's Fattening House
- 16 Goodies and Noodles
- 17 Silence or Separation?
- 18 The ‘Model Prison’
- 19 The Universal Syllabub of Philanthropic Twaddle
- 20 Bleak House
- 21 Top Marks
- PART IV PUNISH AND BE DAMNED, 1863–1895
- PART V THE AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT, 1895–1965
- PART VI SAFE AND SECURE? 1965–2018
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
If any offenders convicted of crimes for which transportation had been usually inflicted were ordered to solitary imprisonment, accompanied by well regulated hard labour, and religious instruction, it might be the means, under Providence, not only of deterring others, but also of reforming the individuals, and turning them to habits of industry.
Penitentiary Act 1779Never does the current of my thoughts alight upon the Panopticon and its fate, but my heart sinks within me … I do not like to look upon the Panopticon papers. It is like opening a drawer where devils are locked up – it is breaking into a haunted house.
Jeremy BenthamJeremy 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’.
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- Shades of the Prison HouseA History of Incarceration in the British Isles, pp. 152 - 166Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2019