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Bentham's Utopia: The National Charity Company

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2014

Gertrude Himmelfarb
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Extract

Bentham has been the subject of much controversy in recent years, a controversy which has illuminated an important area of English social history but has left obscure an essential part of Bentham himself. The main point at issue has been his influence as a social reformer — the extent to which he was personally or ideologically responsible for the reforms of the nineteenth-century, ultimately the extent to which any person or ideology was responsible for those reforms. But a prior issue has been largely ignored. This is the question of his character as a social reformer, the character and quality of the reforms which he proposed and which are presumed to have inspired, or not to have inspired, the reforms later adopted. The only aspect of this question which has been raised is the hoary one of whether he was primarily a laissez-fairist or government-interventionist. And even here his general pronouncements have been quoted more often than his actual proposals for reform. For the rest, it has been assumed that his reforms were humane, benevolent, philanthropic, enlightened, rational, progressive; the words recur with tedious predictability in one account after another. Even those critics who have found his philosophy unsatisfactory have been content, and more than content, with his practical efforts to promote the greatest happiness of the greatest number. But while we are often called upon to admire and emulate “the humble, rational, humanitarian spirit of this great man,” we are rarely shown the actual working and practical results of that spirit — the reforms themselves.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 10 , Issue 1 , November 1970 , pp. 80 - 125
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 1970

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References

1. Robbins, Lionel, Bentham hi the Twentieth Century (London, 1965), p. 15Google Scholar. Similar commendations of Bentham as a reformer, often joined with criticisms of him as a philosopher, may be found in Brinton, Crane, English Political Thought in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass., 1949), p. 15Google Scholar; Bowle, John, Politics and Opinion in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1954), pp. 53, 66Google Scholar; Plamenatz, John, The English Utilitarians (Oxford, 1958), p. 64Google Scholar; Gay, Peter, The Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Paganism (New York, 1966), p. 433Google Scholar. Other sources are cited in the course of this essay, and the list may be extended almost indefinitely.

2. Tawney, R. H., Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (New York, 1947), p. 222Google Scholar.

3. Bentham, Jeremy, The Works of Jeremy Bentham, ed. Bowring, John (London, 1838–1843), VIII, 358Google Scholar.

4. Zagday, M. I., “Bentham and the Poor Law,” in Jeremy Bentham and the Law, ed. Keeton, G. W. and Schwarzenberger, G. (London, 1948), pp. 64–65Google Scholar.

5. Everett, Charles W., “The Constitutional Code of Jeremy Bentham,” in Jeremy Bentham Bicentenary Celebrations (London, 1948), pp. 14–15Google Scholar.

6. Mack, Mary, Jeremy Bentham (New York, 1963), pp. 315, 212-13Google Scholar.

7. Robert J. Lampman, “The Anti-Poverty Program in Historical Perspective,” paper presented to the U.C.L.A. faculty seminar on poverty, February 25, 1965.

8. Bentham originally intended to publish two works: Pauper Systems Compared and Pauper Management Improved. The first was to have been based on information he hoped to receive from two questionnaires printed in an earlier issue of the Annals. He never wrote this work, perhaps because the questionnaires called for information that was obviously unavailable — that would probably be unavailable even today. (Some partial returns are in the Bentham MSS. University College, London, CXXXIII, 42-46, 48, 51-54, 58.) And he never completed the “outline” of the second, so that the later editions continued to bear the word “outline” in the title. That outline, however, in spite of references to sections that were never written, was far less tentative than it sounded. It came to something like 70,000 words, and the manuscripts attest to the amount of thought and labor that went into its composition. The text in the Works, cited here, is identical with that in the Annals.

9. Bentham's manuscripts include title pages for a new edition as well as new copies of the text. They are dated from January 1828 to March 1831. Some are in Bentham's hand, others in the hand of a copyist. British Museum MSS. 33, 550, ff. 372-97.

10. To keep clear this public dimension of the work, in every case where I cite the manuscripts I shall explicitly identify them as such, at the cost of some stylistic awkwardness. The point about public availability must be qualified in one respect: see page 120 above.

11. Bentham, , Works, IV, 39–172Google Scholar. I have described the Panopticon in “The Haunted House of Jeremy Bentham,” Victorian Minds (New York, 1968), pp. 32–81Google Scholar.

12. Bentham, , Works, VIII, 369, 373–74Google Scholar.

13. Ibid., pp. 369, 397.

14. Univ. Coll. MSS. CLIIIb, 309. In quoting from the manuscripts, where Bentham provided alternative words or phrases, as he habitually did, I have selected those which seem to represent his final choice, or, failing some indication of that, those which most clearly convey his meaning. I have also occasionally simplified his punctuation, which was erratic and awkward.

15. Ibid., CLI, 308. At one point Bentham conceded the possibility that in the distant future the government might be able to manage such an enterprise:

The present seems to be precisely the period for the establishment of an institution such as that proposed: the state of society and the progress made by political knowledge is up to the requisite pitch, and is not yet beyond it. The economy of the Joint Stock Company management is up to it, and the economy of Government management is not yet up to it. The rocks upon which Joint Stock Companys management was apt to split have been dis-covered and marked out by past calamities.…

Were the institution to wait for its establishment another century or even half century, it is possible that by that time the discipline of Government might have made such a progress, and to such a degree outgrown its present habitual disease of relaxation as that the business might be carried on in Government account instead of Company account. (Ibid., CLIVb, 547.)

16. Bentham, , Works, VIII, 386Google Scholar. In the first years of the company, the governors would be salaried employees, but thereafter they would be on a contractual basis.

17. Ibid., pp. 380-81.

18. Univ. Coll. MSS. CLIIb, 335, 336; CLI, 5.

19. Bentham, , Works, VIII, 381Google Scholar. The term “headmoney” was commonly used at the time in quite another sense, to refer to child allowances as provided under the Speenhamland system.

20. Ibid.

21. Ibid., p. 392. The term, “pitch of perfection,” familiar from the Panopticon (IV, 63–64)Google Scholar, appears frequently in the manuscripts as well: e.g., Univ. Coll. MSS. CLI, 296, 317; CLIVb, 541.

22. Bentham, , Works, VIII, 394Google Scholar. This “unexampled degree of protection” did not mean an exactly reciprocal relationship between pauper and official. A pauper could bring charges against an official of the house; but whereas the pauper would be punished for “groundless” complaints, the official would not. Similarly, in the Common (i.e., Pauper) Misbehaviour Book, the name of the offender would be cited, whereas in the Officer's Misbehaviour Book (“if there be one”), it would not. (Ibid., p. 393.)

23. Ibid., p. 386. Conversely: “The limits to power are the limits to responsibility.” Univ. Coll. MSS. CLIIb, 393.

24. Bentham, , Works, VIII, 391, 371, 387Google Scholar.

25. Ibid., p. 369.

26. Ibid., p. 383.

27. The word “pauper” will be used in this essay in the sense in which Bentham used it in the title of his book — to refer to all those coming within the jurisdiction of the company and therefore within the confines of an industry-house. The scheme was “monolithic” in the sense of substituting a single system and mode of relief in place of the prevailing varieties of relief. Within the industry-house, however, Bentham did distinguish among the several categories of paupers: old-stagers and newcomers, temporary and permanent stock, the indigenous and non-indigenous, etc. But even here, the different categories were, with only minor variations, subject to the same basic principles: self-liberation, maximum employment, etc. And more important than any distinctions within the house was the overriding fact of their all being in the house.

28. Bentham, , Works, VIII, 370Google Scholar.

29. Ibid.

30. Ibid., p. 401.

31. Ibid., p. 370.

32. Ibid., pp. 401-02.

33. Ibid., p. 403.

34. Ibid., pp. 403-04.

35. Ibid., p. 404.

36. Ibid.

37. Ibid.

38. Ibid., p. 405. In his manuscripts, Bentham made it clear that he anticipated a good deal of objection to such a register. The English, he complained, were a “cold and misgiving and shamefaced people, subdued by the terror of scoffing ignorance, preferring the most inveterate mischiefs to the most simple and efficient, if unaccustomed, remedies.” He himself preferred another mode of identification, but knowing how abhorrent it would be, he was loath to mention it even in the privacy of the manuscripts:

I refrain myself, and purposely withhold the mention of a remedy which … if proposed to be put to use would be shrunk from as horrible or laughed at as ridiculous — the utility of it as a moral preservative and political security of the very first order remaining all the while uncontested, because incontestible.

Only in a pencilled note in the margin was this described as an “identity wash.” (Univ. Coll. MSS. CLIVa, 242-43.) The interesting thing is that Bentham had once before, and publicly, proposed the use of an identity wash. This was twenty years earlier, in his View of the Hard Labour Bill, when he proposed that chemical washes be applied to the face of every prisoner spelling out his name and jail. (Bentham, , Works, IV, 20Google Scholar.) Perhaps it was because he was then severely criticized for this suggestion that he was now so reticent.

39. Ibid., VIII, 404.

40. Ibid., pp. 417–419. The manuscripts also provided for the commitment of “unchaste hands” — “prostitutes, mothers of bastards, loose women, procuresses.” Univ. Coll. MSS. CLI, 162.

41. Bentham, , Works, VIII, 405Google Scholar.

42. Univ. Coll. MSS. CLIVa, 223.

43. Ibid., f. 179.

44. Ibid., f. 216.

45. Ibid., CXXXIII, 17.

46. Ibid., CLIVa, 238.

47. Ibid., CLI, 157.

48. Ibid., CLIVa, 224.

49. Ibid., f. 181.

50. Bentham, , Works, VIII, 383, 369Google Scholar.

51. Ibid., p. 402.

52. Ibid., p. 384. One additional principle might serve as a “temporary” check on the other two. This was the “habit-respecting principle.” On the discretion of the company, “old-stagers” (paupers inherited from the existing profligate poor-houses) might receive somewhat better fare than the others if the rigors of the industry-house diet could not be borne by them. In order not to contaminate the rest, they would be separated from the others at meal-time.

53. Ibid., p. 388.

54. Ibid., p. 389.

55. Ibid., p. 376.

56. Ibid., pp. 376-77.

57. Univ. Coll. MSS. CLIIIa, 188.

58. Bentham, , Works, VIII, 382Google Scholar.

59. Ibid., pp. 382-84.

60. Ibid., pp. 397, 370, 383, 418.

61. Ibid., p. 370.

62. Ibid., p. 383.

63. Bentham, , Works, VIII, 398Google Scholar.

64. Univ. Coll. MSS. CLIVb, 385.

65. Bentham, , Works, VIII, 383Google Scholar.

66. Ibid., p. 370.

67. Ibid., p. 390.

68. Ibid., p. 404.

69. Ibid., p. 374.

70. Univ. Coll. MSS. CLIIa, 146.

71. Bentham, , Works, VIII, 369Google Scholar.

72. Ibid., p. 385. In his manuscripts, Bentham proposed another measure for “augmenting the stock of apprentices”: the admission of pregnant women, whether indigent or not, on condition that their infants be turned over to the company as apprentices. Univ. Coll. MSS. CLI. 290.

73. Bentham, , Works, VIII, 404–05Google Scholar.

74. Ibid., p. 390. a. Univ. Coll. MSS. CLI, 284:

In point of economy, as well as morality, the [?] relative to success is of the very essence of the plan. In this class consists the only sound as well as permanent strength of the establishment: the only part which can be depended upon: the only part on which calculations with regard to prudence can be grounded.

75. Bentham, , Works, VIII, pp. 397, 385Google Scholar.

76. Ibid., p. 390.

77. Univ. Coll. MSS. CLIIIa, 90.

78. Bentham, , Works, VIII, 390Google Scholar.

79. Univ. Coll. MSS. CLI, 348.

80. Ibid., f. 377.

81. Ibid., CLIIIa, 107. The age of parish apprenticeship was sometimes lower than fourteen, but Bentham, to judge by this and similar remarks, seems to have taken that as the norm.

82. Ibid., CLIVb, 317.

83. Bentham, , Works, VIII, 388Google Scholar.

84. Univ. Coll. MSS. CLIIa, 4; CLI, 397.

85. Bentham, , Works, VIII, 405Google Scholar.

86. Ibid., p. 373. The principle of separation, however, would not apply to working hours, the piece-work system making the principle of “aggregation” more desirable at those times. Ibid., p. 372. Nor would it apply to sleeping arrangements, as described above (p. 95).

87. Ibid., pp. 373, 385.

88. Univ. Coll. MSS. CLI, 133.

89. Bentham, , Works, VIII, 391Google Scholar.

90. Univ. Coll. MSS. CXXXIII, 14, 50.

91. Bentham, , Works, VIII, 395Google Scholar.

92. Ibid. Cf. Univ. Coll. MSS. CXLIX, 92:

The business of education includes the business of providing occupations of one kind or another for filling up in some way or another the time of the individual to be educated.

In saying the time, I mean the whole time, the portion allotted to sleep itself not excepted.

The idea of education as embracing the whole of life might have been taken almost verbatim from Helvetius. Indeed it is probable that Bentham, a great admirer of Helvétius, did adopt it from him. If he did not quote him in this context (as he did elsewhere), it may have been because Helvétius' conclusions were so different from Bentham's.

93. Bentham, , Works, VIII, 395Google Scholar.

94. Ibid., p. 396.

95. Ibid.

96. It might be thought odd that Bentham, who was notably lacking in respect for religion, should have been so solicitous of it in this connection. Here, as in the Panopticon, he was simply making his scheme conform to the existing law. He had once tried to modify that law, without success. In a tract written prior to the Panopticon, he had proposed that voluntary labor be permitted in prison on the Sabbath — a proposal that was rejected in the act subsequently passed. Himmelfarb, , Victorian Minds, p. 50Google Scholar.

97. Univ. Coll. MSS. CLI. 284.

98. Bentham, , Works, VIII, 397Google Scholar. In a memorandum on Irish Education written two years after Pauper Management, Bentham wrote: “At the public expense, men Ought to be taught nothing but what is really useful. What is agreeable they will, in proportion as it is agreeable, teach themselves.” Quoted by Ogden, C. K., Jeremy Bentham (London, 1934), p. 87Google Scholar.

99. Bentham, , Works, VIII, 437Google Scholar.

100. Univ. Coll. MSS. CXXXIII, 104.

101. Bentham, , Works, VIII, 396–97Google Scholar.

102. The education plan described in Bentham's Chrestomathia, published in 1816, has the pupils starting at the earliest possible age and continuing to the age of fourteen — this on a daily basis. But that plan, as was specified on the title page, was intended for the “middling and higher ranks in life” engaged in the “higher branches of learning.” (Ibid., p. 1)

103. Univ. Coll. MSS. CLIIIa, 85, 111; CXXXIII, 104; CXLIX, 71. Other studies were also proscribed by this calculus: geography because it was only an appendage of history; astronomy because it was useless; law because it was too difficult; and “Rights of Man” because in so far as they were not part of law, they were against the law and thus a sanction for “treason, murder, personal violence, robbery, etc. (CXXXIII, 104) It is ironic that for all of Bentham's contempt for “dead languages,” his much prized “Nomenclature” should have been so largely derived from them. Thus in defending the name “Panopticon,” he explained that it would be unintelligible to those “who have not some little intercourse with living science or with dead languages.” (Ibid., CLIVa 44.)

104. Ibid., CXXXIII, 105, 120-23; CLIIIa, 123; CXLIX, 74.

105. Ibid., CLIIIa, 123.

106. Ibid.

107. Ibid., f. 139.

108. Ibid., f. 140.

109. Ibid., f. 141.

110. Ibid., CXLIX, 54.

111. Ibid., CXXXIII, 104.

112. Ibid., CXLIX, 62.

113. Ibid., f. 64. He disputed the popular notion that there was a connection between singing and drunkenness; on the contrary, he said, singing discouraged not only drunkenness but all “solicitations of promiscuous pleasure.” (Ibid. CXXXIII, 100)

114. Bentham, , Works, VIII, 384Google Scholar.

115. Ibid., pp. 422-23.

116. Ibid., p. 388.

117. Ibid., pp. 430-31.

118. Ibid., pp. 431-32.

119. Bentham did not call attention to this deprivation; he merely omitted it from the list of comforts enjoyed by the young.

120. Bentham, , Works, VIII, pp. 435–36Google Scholar.

121. Univ. Coll. MSS. CLIIIa, 93.

122. Bentham, , Works, VIII, 437Google Scholar.

123. Ibid.

124. Ibid.

125. The apprenticeship principle stated that no relief would be given to a minor “but on the terms of being bound to the company till full age.” Ibid., p. 385. Since the apprentices's child also received relief, this principle applied to him as much as to any other child.

126. Univ. Coll. MSS. CXXXIII, 94.

127. Bentham, , Works, VIII, 436Google Scholar.

128. Ibid.

129. Ibid., p. 439. Cf. Univ. Coll. MSS. CLIIIb, 260:

It is by diminishing wants not by multiplying them that the capacity of population is increased. Of increasing wants there is no end. In with-holding the means of gratification there can be no hardship where there is no desire.

130. Bentham, , Works, VIII, 437Google Scholar.

131. Ibid., p. 362.

132. Univ. Coll. MSS. CLI, 400.

133. Letwin, Shirley, The Pursuit of Certainty (Cambridge, Eng., 1965), 183, 187–88Google Scholar. Jacob Viner has similarly described Bentham's plan as “comprehensive, radical and progressive without being visionary.” Viner, , The Long View and the Short (Glencoe, III., 1958), p. 309Google Scholar.

134. Pp. 80-81.

135. Bentham, , Works, VIII, 369Google Scholar. (Italics omitted.)

136. By Bentham's standards, the meals in the existing workhouses were indeed luxurious. Many seem to have served meat about three times a week. One, whose menu was quoted by Eden, served meat six times during the week. Frederic Eden, Frederic Morton, The State of the Poor (London, 1797), I, 286Google Scholar.

137. The term “poorhouse” is used in this last part of the essay to refer to all the existing houses, including those which were partly or ostensibly work-houses; none was a “workhouse” in Bentham's sense. It should also be noted that there were still remnants of the farming system at the end of the century, but only remnants, and few writers on the subject defended the practice.

138. 36 Geo. III c.23.

139. The expression was used by William Young and quoted approvingly by Eden, , State of the Poor, I, 403Google Scholar.

140. See above, pp. 93-94, 109-113.

141. Eden, , Stale of the Poor, I, 58–59Google Scholar. Cf. the often quoted remark of Joseph Townsend: “The terror of being sent to a workhouse acts like an abolition of the poor's tax on all who dread the loss of liberty.” Townsend, Joseph, A Dissertation on the Poor Laws (London, 1787), p. 71Google Scholar.

142. In 1802 a law was passed limiting the working hours of apprentices, in contrast to Bentham's proposal which would have lengthened them.

143. A bill of 1698, based upon the report of John Locke, provided for workhouses under the direction of joint-stock companies. Similarly the workhouses proposed by Thomas Firmin, Richard Dunning, John Bellars, Lawrence Braddon, and Charles Davenant were to have been privately owned and managed.

144. Hansard 32: 709-10 (12 Feb. 1796).

145. Bentham, , “Observations on the Poor Bill Introduced by the Right Honourable William Pitt,” Works, VIII, 443Google Scholar.

146. Ibid., XI, 102.

147. Ibid., V, 422.

148. Univ. Coll. MSS. CLIVb, 544-45.

149. No mention was made of the deletion. In the case of the 1812 edition this was particularly disingenuous, since the work was described as a reprint from the Annals and had every appearance of being just that, even down to a footnote referring to a section that was never written. Since the rest of the work appeared intact, with all its anti-Malthusian implications, one may assume that Bentham deleted the last section only to avoid giving offense to those who might be put off by this blantantly anti-Malthusian idyll. This last section was restored in the Collected Works, again without mention of its previous deletion. A careful reader of the latter might have had his suspicions aroused by the editorial note at the end giving the volume and page of the Annals where the final section had appeared. Bowring, it would seem, was well aware of the discrepancy between his version and the editions of 1802 and 1812. Later biographers and commentators, however, were evidently unaware of it. An exception is die recent work by Poynter, J. R., Society and Pauperism: English Ideas on Poor Relief, 1795–1834 (London, 1969), p. 138Google Scholar.

This discrepancy, incidentally, requires modification of a point made earlier in this paper: that Bentham's plan was available to contemporaries and historians. Those who had read the editions of 1802 and 1812 would not have known of the final section. But contemporary readers of the Annals and historians relying on the Works (as most have done) should have known of it.

150. As late as 1814, the Justices of the Peace of Cambridgeshire proposed the creation of an “Asylum for the Poor,” which they described as a “place of refuge or desirable resort to all, in the several parishes so uniting, whose mis-fortunes, infirmities, or indiscretions have reduced them to wants which their labour cannot supply.” Hampson, E. M., The Treatment of Poverty in Cambridgeshire, 1597–1834 (Camb., 1934), p. 117Google Scholar.

151. Webb, Sidney and , Beatrice, English Poor Law History (New York, 1963), Part I, p. 422Google Scholar. Of. Poynter, Society and Pauperism, and Cowherd, Raymond G., “The Humanitarian Reform of the English Poor Laws from 1782 to 1815,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, CIV (1960), 328–42Google Scholar.

152. E.g., Zagday, , in Bentham and the Law, pp. 60, 65–66Google Scholar; Hart, Jenifer, “Nineteenth-Century Social Reform: A Tory Interpretation of History,” Past and Present, no. 31 (1965), p. 43Google Scholar; Bruce, Maurice, The Coming of the Welfare State (New York, 1966), pp. 78–83Google Scholar; Ogden, C. K., Jeremy Bentham (London, 1934), p. 20Google Scholar; Everett, Charles W., Jeremy Bentham (New York, 1966), p. 11Google Scholar.

153. The Poor Law Report of 1834 explicitly repudiated the intention of deriving any profit from the workhouses: “Profit is not to be expected from work-house labour”: indeed even if such profit were possible it would not be desirable, “for every shilling thus earned in the house would be at the expense of a labourer out of doors.” Report from His Majesty's Commissioners for Inquiring into the Administration and Practical Operation of the Poor Laws (London, 1834), p. 270Google Scholar.

154. Some historians have derived the idea for such a board from Bentham's Constitutional Code, which was written towards the end of his life and published posthumously (published after the passage of the law but known in manuscript to Chadwick). The Webbs went so far as to see in the Code not only an anticipation of 1834 but also “a remarkable forecast of the twentieth-century machinery of government in a highly evolved state.” Webb, , English Poor Law History, Part II, vol. I, 29Google Scholar. The Code give responsibility for the execution of legislative ordinances and arrangements relating to relief to an “Indigence Relief Minister.” The Minister was specifically empowered

to exercise, in relation to all such institutions and establishments as, for this purpose, are or shall be on foot or in progress, at the expense or under the direction of any sublegislatures, individuals, or bodies of individuals, incorporated, or Otherwise associated for this purpose — the inspective, statistic, and melioration-suggestive functions.

It is evident that Bentham did not at all envisage the kind of central board administering a single system and policy of relief such as was provided for by the Act of 1834. On the contrary, he clearly expected a multiplicity of institutions to continue under the direction of parishes, individual contractors and companies, the role of the Minister in relation to these institutions being supervisory, informatory, and advisory. The Code was thus entirely consistent with the operation of a National Charity Company. (Bentham, , Works, IX, 441Google Scholar.)

155. Bentham, , Works, XI, 103Google Scholar.

156. Ibid., pp. 96-97. Elsewhere he worded the complaint somewhat differently: “But for him, all the paupers in the country, as well as all the prisoners in the country, would have been in my hands.” Ibid. X, 212.

157. Ibid., XI, 103.

158. Univ. Coll. MSS. CLI, 102-05.

159. Ibid., S. 394-95. Count Rumford's own plan, a workhouse in Munich, was not unlike Bentham's, although on a far more modest scale. Colquhoun's views on poor relief, on the other hand, were quite different from Bentham's; he was opposed to workhouses and to the idea of joint-stock company. Instead he favored the creation of a Board of Commissioners appointed by the government with supervisory powers over parish relief.

160. Ibid., CLIVa, 231.

161. Bentham, , Works, XI, 72Google Scholar.