The Book of the Dead

by John Mitchinson

  Blake’s reputation, rather like St. Cuthbert’s body, had many adventures after his death. In contrast, the posthumous fate of Blake’s contemporary, the social philosopher and reformer Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), was planned down to the last detail. The father of utilitarianism (the philosophy of the greatest good for the greatest number) wanted to do something useful with his mortal remains. Instead of leaving them to molder in the ground, he chose to put them on permanent public display. In his will, Bentham left his body to his friend Dr. Thomas Southwood Smith with very precise instructions on how to turn it into what he called his Auto-Icon. It is still visible today, preserved in a glass-fronted wooden cabinet at University College, London.

  Bentham first toyed with the idea of preserving his own body while in his twenties, when he asked a doctor friend to get him a human head so that he could experiment with drying it in his oven. He explained that he wanted to leave his own body to science “with the desire that mankind may reap some small benefit by my decease, having had hitherto small opportunities to contribute while living.”

  Six decades later, Bentham got his wish. He had specified in his will that his body was to be offered up for public dissection, a useful thing in itself. At that time, because of the doctrine of the resurrection of the flesh (when Christ will supposedly return at the Last Judgment to open the graves of the dead), there was still a Christian taboo against not burying bodies. This meant there was a general shortage of specimens for pathologists to work on.

  Before the dissection began, at London’s Webb Street School of Anatomy, twenty-eight of Bentham’s friends gathered to say farewell. His corpse lay before them in a simple nightshirt. In a scene straight out of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (then just into its second edition), the funeral oration was dramatically accompanied “with thunder pealing overhead and lightning flashing through the gloom.” Once the eulogy had finished, Dr. Southwood Smith made sure, as Bentham’s will had specified, “to ascertain by appropriate experiment that no life remains.” He then carefully stripped the flesh from the bones and placed the internal organs and “the soft parts” in labeled glass containers “like wine decanters.” His cleaned bones were then pinned together with copper wire and the skeleton dressed in a suit of Bentham’s clothes, padded out with hay, straw, and cotton wool. A sachet of lavender and naphthalene was placed in the stomach cavity to discourage moths. Again adhering to the instructions in his will, the body was seated in “a Chair usually occupied by me when living in the attitude in which I am sitting when engaged in thought.” The whole ensemble was to be enhanced by the presence of Dapple, his favorite walking stick, and topped off with his actual head (well preserved and with a suitable hat on it).

  Dr. Southwood Smith succeeded in all save the preservation of the head. He later explained:

  I endeavored to preserve the head untouched, merely drawing away the fluids by placing it under an air pump over sulphuric acid. By this means the head was rendered as hard as the skulls of the New Zealanders; but all expression was of course gone. Seeing this would not do for exhibition, I had a model made in wax by a distinguished French artist.”

  Some of Bentham’s own hair was attached to the waxwork head, and (for some years) his actual (poorly mummified) head sat at his feet in the glass cabinet, out of which stared the disconcertingly blue glass eyes he had carried around in his pocket for six months before he died. The final flourish, also specified in the will, was the presentation to his close friends of signet rings containing his portrait in miniature, painted using a brush made from his own hair. He hoped that they would meet regularly on the anniversary of his death and that his Auto-Icon would be wheeled out to join them. His wish was fulfilled, and Bentham—dressed since 1939 in new, moth-resistant underwear—still occasionally graces university functions. The mummified head, once a victim of regular undergraduate pranks, is now locked away in storage.

  Jeremy Bentham was never in any danger of being described as conventional. The son of a solicitor, he was a child prodigy who began learning Latin at the age of three and by the age of five could play Handel sonatas on his violin. He was physically weedy, described as having a “dwarfish body coupled with a hawkish mind.” His mother died when he was eleven and his father sent him to study classics at Oxford soon afterward. The young Bentham was far from impressed: “I learned nothing,” he concluded. “We just went to the foolish lectures of tutors to learn something of logical jargon.” At seventeen he entered Lincoln’s Inn as a lawyer, but the self-serving complexity of English law led him to disparage it as “the Demon of Chikane.” What really interested him was the flood of Enlightenment ideas crossing the English Channel arguing for the reform of a society based on injustice and privilege. By the time he was twenty he had begun writing about the evolution of society and the rights of man. He described himself as “eeking and picking his way, getting the better of prejudice and non-sense, making a little bit of discovery here and there.”

  Bentham was gradually recognized by a small circle of London intellectuals; his first publication was A Fragment of Government (1776), a spirited attack on the English legal system. For some years, he relied on the patronage of members of the aristocracy, especially Lord Shelburne (1737–1805), the Whig home secretary and prime minister, who frequently invited him as a houseguest. In 1792 Bentham’s father died and his inheritance allowed him to move into a house in Queen Square Place, Westminster, where he lived for more than fifty years. In An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789), he was the first person ever to use the words “international” and “monetary,” and he defined “utility” as “the property in an object which tends to produce pleasure, good or happiness, or to prevent the happening of mischief, pain, evil or unhappiness.”

  In recognizing the “utility of things,” Bentham’s conclusion was that the law should be used to ensure “the greatest happiness of the greatest number of people.” This was revolutionary stuff: The idea that ordinary people were entitled to happiness struck at the heart of the entrenched rights of the aristocracy, the Crown, and the judicial system. In order to define happiness precisely, the ever-practical Bentham devised his own system for calculating it, which he called felicific calculus, listing fourteen pleasures and twelve pains—though even his closest allies thought it a bit complicated to apply in real life.

  The establishment saw Bentham as deeply dangerous. His “algebra of utility” seemed to eat like an acid through centuries of accumulated privilege and injustice. He opposed slavery and both capital and corporal punishment; he believed in equal rights for women and for animals; he called for the decriminalizing of homosexuality; he praised free trade and the freedom of the press; he supported the right to divorce and urged the separation of church and state. Most of what we now call liberalism can be traced back to Bentham. Many other people—not least William Blake—espoused the very same causes, but utilitarianism provided the legal and philosophical principles upon which liberal democracy would be founded. In his lifetime Bentham was much more influential outside Britain: In 1804 Napoleon transformed the European legal system with his Code Napoleon, based on Bentham’s ideas.

  In Bentham’s view, English case law, which was administered by judges, had a poor record in delivering justice. He pointed to the absurdity and viciousness of more than two hundred separate offenses being punishable by death, including “breaking and entering by a child under ten” and homosexuality.

  As well as intellectual acumen, Bentham’s other weapon was his work rate. He cultivated friendships—by letter, as he disliked meetings—with the great and the good: from Catherine the Great of Russia to Thomas Jefferson and James Madison in the newly independent United States; from Francisco da Miranda, the Latin American revolutionary, to Talleyrand, the French master statesman. His ideas were so admired in France that in 1792 he was made an honorary citizen.

  Nor did he confine his work to abstract theory. He designed a prison: the Panopticon (“see-everything�
��), whose revolutionary circular design gave prisoners a reasonable amount of space in their cells, but allowed both jailers and inmates to be seen from a central viewing area. This allowed one person, the prison warden, to keep an eye on everything that happened. The fact that everyone was under constant surveillance would, Bentham thought, allow the prison to function efficiently and peacefully and make its design applicable to lunatic asylums, schools, and hospitals. The Panopticon influenced the layout of penal institutions all over the world, including those at Pentonville in London and Joliet Prison in Illinois. Bentham also made practical suggestions for electoral reform, all later adopted, including universal suffrage and the secret ballot. In Defence of Usury (1787) he persuaded his friend Adam Smith to accept the charging of interest on loans. The writer G. K. Chesterton called this “the very beginning of the modern world.”

  Despite his relatively low profile in the Anglo-Saxon world at the time, Bentham could make a serious claim to being the most influential philosopher since Aristotle. And he may yet have more surprises in store for us. As he produced, without fail, fifteen to twenty pages of notes every day, he left an archive of more than 5 million manuscript pages behind him, fewer than half of which have ever been published. The Bentham Project at University College London, begun in 1968, is now up to twenty-five volumes.

  The regularity and sheer pace of his work life protected Bentham from social engagements, which he avoided as much as he could. He didn’t need company, describing himself as being “in a state of perpetual and unruffled gaiety.” This, and his personal fortune, meant he could pick and choose the people he associated with. He refused to see the French intellectual and writer Madame de Staël (1766–1817) when she asked to meet him, saying she was nothing more than a “trumpery magpie.” He once met Dr. Johnson but declared him to be “a pompous vamper of commonplace morality.” Apart from two early dalliances, he seemed to have no intimate dealings with women, although even at the end of his life, memories of his romantic youth would quickly move him to tears. “Take me forward, I entreat you, to the future,” he would beg his guests. “Do not let me go back to the past.” He did occasionally allow friends to dine with him, making lists of conversational topics beforehand. At ten o’clock, he took tea. At eleven, a nightcap of half a glass of Madeira, the only alcohol he ever drank. By twelve, his guests would find themselves unceremoniously ejected. He slept on a hard bed and suffered from bad dreams and loud snoring (“If a Bentham does not snore,” he said, “he’s not legitimate”). By day his favorite pastime was badminton—then known as battledore, where the players simply kept the shuttlecock in the air for the highest number of hits possible. In Bentham’s lifetime, a Somerset family set the record, managing 2,117. He was also one of the first joggers, startling people by suddenly taking off at high speed while walking in London parks or in his garden on what he called ante-prandial circumgyrations. He once confessed he couldn’t swim or whistle, but “saw no reason to complain.”

  As he got older, his eccentricities multiplied. He kept two walking sticks, Dapple and Dobbin. On meeting friends he would use one or other of these to tap them on the shoulders, in mock knighthoods. He also had a “sacred teapot” called Dickey, which he referred to as a pet. His (real) pet pig allegedly shared his bed for a time, and he was also fond of cats, in particular a tomcat called Langhorne that he referred to as “Sir John” for several years, before redesignating him a vicar to be addressed as “The Reverend John Langhorne.” His collection of mice ran wild in his office, destroying manuscripts and terrifying guests. “I love anything with four legs!” he proclaimed. Bentham’s house had once belonged to John Milton, to whom he erected a plaque in the garden calling him the Prince of Poets, though he personally found poetry a “misapplication of time.” “Prose,” he said, “is when all the lines except the last go on to the margin. Poetry is when some of them fall short of it.” It’s hard to know whether he was employing the same dry wit when he wrote to the London City Council asking if he could replace the shrubs beside his driveway with mummified corpses, which he said would be “more aesthetic than flowers.” This idea was developed further in his book Auto-Icon; or Farther Uses of the Dead to the Living, in which he proposed the wholesale transformation of corpses into varnished garden ornaments. On the basis that this suggestion was unlikely to enhance his reputation, his literary executors delayed its publication until a decade after his death.

  Bentham liked a joke, but his writing on the Auto-Icon can’t simply be dismissed as either a prank or the onset of dementia. His value as a philosopher was in his unswerving application of the principle of utility. Death, then as now, was a taboo, steeped in fear and religious superstition. Burying corpses and letting them rot in the ground seemed to him wasteful, repugnant, and unhygienic. Graveyards had been fearful places to him since childhood. He recalled going through one at night, his heart “going pit-a-pat all the while, and I fancied I saw a ghost perched on every tombstone.” The Auto-Icon solved both problems at once. It made death useful, offering the safe disposal of corpses, while providing a permanent memorial to the dead person. Bentham’s own Auto-Icon at University College is the perfect Enlightenment object, a triumph for rationalism, materialism, and utilitarianism, and a rejection of fear, superstition, and the tyranny of the Church. The fact that it is also very odd and faintly off-putting somehow seems entirely in character with its inventor:

  Twenty years after I am dead, I shall be a despot, sitting in my chair with Dapple in my hand, and wearing one of the coats I wear now.

  Bentham’s publicly displayed three-dimensional version of the afterlife might not shine with the mystic intensity of Blake’s, but starting from opposite ends of the spiritual spectrum, they both ended in the same place. Both had faith in the power of their own imaginations. Both used their imaginations to release themselves from the old myths of heaven and hell that had so tormented Ann Lee, and in the process, both made themselves feel a lot happier about dying.

  Practical philosophy and mystical visions come together neatly in the life of the American architect, inventor, poet, philosopher, author, teacher, entrepreneur, artist, and mathematician, Richard Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983). He was also preoccupied with salvation, both individual and collective. “We are not going to be able to operate our Spaceship Earth successfully, nor for much longer, unless we see it as a whole spaceship and our fate as common. It has to be everybody or nobody,” he wrote in 1969. Like each of the other lives in this chapter, his story is about having a vision and trusting it. “Faith,” he once remarked “is much better than belief. Belief is when someone else does the thinking.”

  The Fullers had always done their own thinking. They were New England nonconformists known as Transcendentalists, who rejected religious authority in favor of personal inspiration. Like Blake, the Transcendentalists saw both humanity and nature as manifestations of the Divine. They included among their number the philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82), the nature writer Henry David Thoreau (1817–62), and Fuller’s great-aunt, Margaret Fuller (1810–50), author of Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), the first major feminist work in the United States.

  The young “Bucky,” as he was called, was extremely shortsighted. Until he was fitted with glasses, he refused to believe that the world was not blurry. His father, like so many of the fathers in this book, died at a young age, but his family was well established and wealthy, and so, like four generations of his family before him, Bucky was sent to Harvard. It was there that his long battle with authority began. Halfway through his first year he withdrew his entire college allowance from the bank to romance a Manhattan chorus girl and was promptly expelled. He was readmitted the next year and thrown out a second time for “irresponsibility and lack of interest.” He would later write:

  What usually happens in the educational process is that the faculties are dulled, overloaded, stuffed and paralyzed so that by the time most people are mature they have lost their innate capabilities.


  In the end, the man who was to become the greatest architect of his age didn’t graduate. The only degrees he ever received were the forty-seven honorary doctorates he was awarded many years later.

  After brief stints in a textile mill and a meat-packing company, Fuller joined the navy during World War I. As a boy in Maine he had amused himself by making tools out of odds and ends, and he put this talent to good use by inventing a winchlike device for rescuing the pilots of navy airplanes, who often ended up head down underwater. Thanks to this, he was selected for officer training at the U.S. Naval Academy, where he studied engineering. Leaving the navy to marry his wife, Anne, in 1917, he started a business with her father making bricks out of wood shavings, his first environmentally aware project. Both the marriage and the business were very successful until 1922, when the Fullers’ four-year-old daughter, Alexandra, suddenly died from polio.

  This affected Fuller terribly. He was devoted to her, and he and Anne had already nursed her through the 1918 flu epidemic and a serious bout of meningitis. The day before she died she had asked him for a walking cane similar to the one he had used since he had damaged his knee playing football. He then left the family home on Long Island for an overnight trip to watch Harvard, his old college team, play. When Harvard won, Fuller spent the night carousing with his friends. By the time he rang Anne the following afternoon, Alexandra had fallen into a coma. He rushed back home, and when he arrived, she regained consciousness just long enough to ask if he had got the cane. He had forgotten all about it, and Alexandra died shortly afterward. Fuller was inconsolable, and his life began to fall apart. He started drinking heavily and neglecting the business. Eventually Anne’s father lost patience, bought him out, and then sold the company for a fraction of its potential value. Fuller began an intense affair with a teenage girl. When she ended it, his mental health deteriorated sharply. In 1927, aged thirty-two, he walked to Lake Michigan and stood at the water’s edge, contemplating suicide.