Abstract
A revolutionary desire to overthrow unaccountable power shaped both attitudes to the dead and their literary representation in the 1790s; this chapter argues that a belief in the progressive potential of legislative change would do much the same a generation later, during the reformist decades of the early nineteenth century. Such a shift—moving away from a drive to remove the dead from society altogether, and towards a desire to reform and thereby ameliorate their relationship to the living—reflects the changed cultural and political dynamics in the era of social, sanitary, and political reform that emerged in the early nineteenth century. Many of these reformist measures were linked to the emergence of utilitarianism, and this chapter considers its impact on ways of imagining the dead by considering how two utilitarian thinkers—William Godwin and Jeremy Bentham—sought to apply the doctrines of utility to the disposal of the dead human body, in an attempt to undermine the ethical basis upon which the dead had traditionally been granted cultural authority by the living. Should the dead be buried, dissected, or, like Bentham, stuffed and mounted and made into ‘auto-icons’? Should their graves be marked with a simple wooden cross, along with the fictional graves of characters from novels, or should their heads be preserved in glass and used to build houses? This chapter examines these attempts to apply a consequentialist ethics to the dead, and argues that the more extreme schemes to reform their imagined presence foundered on the problem of emotion, which proved too difficult for Bentham to quantify in his utilitarian calculations: a problem that is exemplified here by paying careful attention to Bentham’s own deathbed scene and his subsequent dissection.
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Notes
- 1.
[Thomas James], ‘Cemeteries and Churchyards; Funerals and Funeral Expenses’, Quarterly Review 73 (March 1844): 451.
- 2.
‘The Climax of Cemeteries’, Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country, 5 (March 1832):144–154. Founded in 1830, Fraser’s pursued a Tory (and broadly anti-utilitarian) line in these, its early years, under the editorship of William Maginn.
- 3.
Thomas Southwood Smith, The Use of the Dead to the Living (London: Albany, 1827), 24.
- 4.
Jeremy Bentham, ‘Auto-icon; or, Farther Uses of the Dead to the Living’, in Bentham’s Auto-icon and Related Writings, ed. James E. Crimmins (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 2002), 3.
- 5.
Godwin, Essay on Sepulchres, 9.
- 6.
‘The Climax of Cemeteries’, 153.
- 7.
‘Dialogues of the Dead. On Sepulchral Rites and Rights’. Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country 6 (Dec. 1832): 730.
- 8.
David Collings, Monstrous Society: Reciprocity, Discipline, and the Political Uncanny at the End of Early Modern England (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 2009), 96.
- 9.
Paul Westover, Necromanticism: Travelling to Meet the Dead, 1750–1860 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 64; 65.
- 10.
Matthews, Poetical Remains, p. 4.
- 11.
Paul Westover, ‘William Godwin, Literary Tourism, and the Work of Necromanticism’, Studies in Romanticism 48.2 (2009), 317.
- 12.
Julie Carlson, ‘Fancy’s History’, European Romantic Review 14.2 (2003), 169.
- 13.
Thomas W. Laqueur, The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2015), 8.
- 14.
Thomas W. Laqueur, ‘The Deep Time of the Dead’, Social Research 78.3 (2011): 800.
- 15.
Although deontology is one of the major categories of ethical theory, it is a term that proves surprisingly difficult to define in positive terms; ethical theorists have typically found it easier to identify what it is not (consequentialism), than to state clearly what it is. In a pair of linked essays from 2001, Gerald Gaus identified ten competing uses of the term in current philosophical literature, although he manages to group these together under two broad headings. See Gerald F. Gaus, ‘What is Deontology? Part One: Orthodox Views’, Journal of Value Inquiry 35.1 (2001): 27–42; and ‘What is Deontology? Part Two: Reasons to Act’, Journal of Value Inquiry 35.2 (2001): 179–193.
- 16.
For more on the connection between eighteenth-century utilitarianism and nineteenth-century reforms, see J. H. Burns, ‘Utilitarianism and Reform: Social Theory and Social Change, 1750–1800’, Utilitas 1.2 (1989): 211–25.
- 17.
Jeremy Bentham, Memoirs of Bentham ed. John Bowring, The Works of Jeremy Bentham, vol. 10 (Edinburgh: William Tait, 1843), 54.
- 18.
‘Auto-icon; or, Farther Uses of the Dead to the Living’. The will, published in a footnote to Southwood Smith’s speech, states: ‘This my will and special request I make, not out of affectation of singularity, but to the intent and with the desire that mankind may reap some small benefit in and by my decease’. See Southwood Smith, A Lecture, 4. For more on the background to Bentham’s bequest, see Ruth Richardson and Brian Hurwitz, ‘Jeremy Bentham’s Self Image: An Exemplary Bequest for Dissection’, British Medical Journal 295 (18 July, 1987): 195–198.
- 19.
Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (London: 1789), i.
- 20.
Jeremy Bentham, ‘Offences Against the Dead’, Bentham Papers, University College London library, UC lxxi. 40.
- 21.
Ibid.
- 22.
Jeremy Bentham, ‘Panegyric on the Dead’, Bentham Papers, University College London library, UC, clxix. 4.
- 23.
Jeremy Bentham, The Book of Fallacies ed. by John Bowring. Vol. 2 in The Works of Jeremy Bentham (Edinburgh: William Tait, 1843): 399. Bentham wrote much of the material for the book between 1809 and 1811, although it remained unpublished until 1824; even then, it only appeared in an edited and translated text (Bowring’s, which I have used here) that discarded much of Bentham’s innovative structural framework and thereby lessened its practical utility.
- 24.
This section of the book was written in two stages in the summers of 1810 and 1811. See Philip Schofield’s Editorial Introduction to his edition of The Book of Fallacies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).
- 25.
Book of Fallacies, ed. Bowring, 399–400.
- 26.
‘Auto-icon’, 1.
- 27.
‘Rights, Representation, and Reform’, Bentham Papers, University College London library. UC cviii. 114.
- 28.
Book of Fallacies, ed. Bowring, 403. For more on Bentham’s attitude to Burke, Paine, and he French Revolution, see the chapter on ‘The French Revolution’ in Philip Schofield, Utility and Democracy: The Political Thought of Jeremy Bentham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 78–108.
- 29.
Two of the best discussions of this topic can be found in R. S. White, Natural Rights and the Birth of Romanticism in the 1790s (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005), and Robert Lamb, Thomas Paine and the Idea of Human Rights (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), p. 44.
- 30.
Jeremy Bentham, ‘Anarchical Fallacies’, ed. John Bowring, in Vol. 2 of The Works of Jeremy Bentham (Edinburgh: William Tait, 1843), p. 501.
- 31.
Bentham, ‘Anarchical Fallacies’, 501.
- 32.
John Stuart Mill, ‘Article XI’, The Westminster Review July 1838: 258.
- 33.
John Stuart Mill, Autobiography (London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1873), 49. For a useful discussion of emotional education from Bentham onwards, see Thomas Dixon, ‘Educating the Emotions from Gradgrind to Goleman’, Research Papers in Education 27.4 (2012): 481–495.
- 34.
Although there has been a longstanding belief that Godwin’s writings of the 1790s place him firmly in the utilitarian tradition, this has occasionally come under attack, most comprehensively, in Mark Philp’s Godwin’s Political Justice (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986). However, Robert Lamb has recently mounted a convincing defence of Godwin’s utilitarianism, which argues that the role played by the generation of happiness in Godwin’s thought marks him as a utilitarian even if he never adequately defines himself in those terms. See Robert Lamb, ‘Was William Godwin a Utilitarian?’ Journal of the History of Ideas 70, no. 1 (2009): 119–41.
- 35.
William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and its Influence on Morals and Happiness, in Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, ed. Mark Philp, vol. 3 (London: William Pickering, 1993), 49.
- 36.
Godwin, Enquiry, 50.
- 37.
See Lamb, ‘Was William Godwin a Utilitarian?’
- 38.
Julie Carlson suggests that the Essay contains ‘Godwin’s second attempt at public mourning, after the outcry at his extreme insensitivity in … the Memoirs of 1798’. Julie A. Carlson, England’s First Family of Writers (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press), 2007: 165.
- 39.
William Godwin, ‘Essay on Sepulchres; or, A Proposal for Erecting Some Memorial of the Illustrious Dead in All Ages on the Spot Where Their Remains Have Been Interred’, in Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, ed. by Mark Philp. Vol. 6 (London: William Pickering, 1993), 29.
- 40.
See Paradise Lost, Bk. I, ll. 84–5.
- 41.
Donald Winch, ‘Introduction’ to An Essay on the Principle of Population, by T.R. Malthus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. xii.
- 42.
This passage has often been quoted in both nineteenth-century writing on the subject of grief, and more recent critical analyses of material objects in the period. No one has yet noted its striking resemblance to a passage from the first volume of Dugald Stewart’s Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind (1792): ‘The influence of perceptible objects in reviving former thoughts and feelings, is more particularly remarkable. After time has, in some degree, reconciled us to the death of a friend, how wonderfully are we affected the first time we enter the house where he lived! Everything we see; the apartment where he studied; the chair upon which he sat, recal (sic) to us the happiness we have enjoyed together; and we should feel it a sort of violation of that respect we owe to his memory, to engage in any light or indifferent discourse when such objects are before us’. See Dugald Stewart, Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind (London: 1792), 275.
- 43.
Rowland Weston, ‘History, Memory, and Moral Knowledge: William Godwin’s Essay on Sepulchres (1809)’, The European Legacy 14:6 (2009), 653.
- 44.
William Godwin, a schedule of literary projects, Sept. 1798, Abinger Collection, Bodleian Library, Dep. b. 228/9.
- 45.
Thomas Southwood Smith, A Lecture, Delivered over the remains of Jeremy Bentham, Esq. (London: 1832), 60.
- 46.
Pat Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 24.
- 47.
Accounts of the death appeared in the following publications, among others: Monthly Repository (October, 1832), 705–713; The Athenaeum (15 September, 1832), 598–99; The Reasoner 7.4 (1850), 54–59; Progress Vol. 6 (1886), 40; William Jerdan, National Portrait Gallery of Illustrious and Eminent Personages of the Nineteenth Century (London: H. Fisher, P. Fisher, and R. Jackson, 1833), 12; George Cunninghame, Lives of Eminent and Illustrious Englishmen Vol. 8 (Glasgow: A Fullarton, 1837), 438.
- 48.
Memoirs of Bentham, 76.
- 49.
Alexander Cuthbert, The Christian’s Prospect; or, a Cursory Survey of the Revelations of Scripture respecting the Blessedness of the Righteous in the Future State (Aberdeen: George King, 1838), 299.
- 50.
Bentham was childless, so Lorimer does not compare like with like. John G. Lorimer, ‘Prefatory Essay on Modern Infidelity’, Campbell’s Summary of the Evidences (Glasgow: W.R. McPhun, 1859), 31.
- 51.
John Flowerdew Colls, Utilitarianism Unmasked (London: Richard Watts, 1844), 50.
- 52.
Southwood Smith, A Lecture, 60.
- 53.
Bentham, ‘Auto-icon’, 2.
- 54.
Colls, Utilitarianism Unmasked, 48. Italics in original.
- 55.
The auto-icon’s significance has been re-established in recent years by an increase in scholarly attention since the material turn of the past decade, and through the work of UCL’s Bentham Project, which is also in the process of digitising Bentham’s archive and editing an edition of his works. It seems at first, however, to have been seen as something of an embarrassment, despite Bentham’s influence on the University’s founders. William Munk reproduces a letter he received from Southwood Smith in 1857, which claims that ‘no publicity is given to the fact that Bentham reposes there in some back room’, although anyone who asked to see it was allowed access. ‘The authorities seem to be afraid or ashamed to own their possession’, he concludes. William Munk, The Roll of the Royal College of Physicians of London (London: the College, 1878), Vol. 2: 237. See also C. F. A. Marmoy, ‘The “Auto-icon” of Jeremy Bentham at University College, London’. Medical History 2 (1958), 77–86. Martin A Kayman has recently argued that until this work is completed, and ‘in the absence of a complete Benthamite constitution or a definitive edition’, the Auto-icon is not only the ‘best-known’, but also, ‘in many ways’, the ‘most appropriate monument to Bentham’. Martin A. Kayman, ‘Bodies of Law and Sculptural Bodies: Writing, Art, and the Real’, Textual Practice 24.5 (2010), 798.
- 56.
Tim Marshall, Murdering to Dissect: Grave-robbing, Frankenstein, and the Anatomy Literature (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 20.
- 57.
Southwood Smith, The Use of the Dead to the Living, 24.
- 58.
Southwood Smith, A Lecture, 71.
- 59.
Southwood Smith, A Lecture, 5.
- 60.
‘Dissection of Mr. Bentham’, The Morning Chronicle, Monday, 11 June, 1832.
- 61.
The lithograph is by Weld Taylor, from Pickersgill’s drawing. See James Crimmins’s introduction to Bentham, ‘Auto-icon’, xli.
- 62.
The Examiner, Sunday, 9 September, 1832.
- 63.
Bentham, ‘Auto-icon’, 2.
- 64.
Deborah Lutz, Relics of Death in Victorian Literature and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 2.
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McAllister, D. (2018). ‘The Feelings of the Living and the Rights of the Dead’: Ethics and Emotions; Bodies and Burial; Godwin and Bentham. In: Imagining the Dead in British Literature and Culture, 1790–1848. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97731-7_3
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