Beschreibung:

Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832)
14 autograph letters to [William Petty, 1st Marquess of Lansdowne], with enclosures, Lincoln's Inn, Hendon, Dover Street and Queen’s Square Place, 17 September 1779 - 10 June 1780, 24 February 1791 – 9 February 1796
The letters together approximately 45 pages, various sizes, the autograph enclosures including ‘Answers to the Questions relative to the Competition between Parliamentary and Military Duty under the English Law’, 11 pages, ‘Questions avec responses sur le rituel de la Chambre des Communes en Angleterre’, in French (the six ‘Questions’ in Lord Lansdowne’s hand), 14 pages, and copies of reports sent to Bentham by his brother Samuel from Russia; also a letter from Lansdowne to Bentham, [16 June 1788] and a letter to Lansdowne by Bentham’s father, Jeremiah, 24 November 1789, discussing a portrait of Jeremy in childhood (now at the National Portrait Gallery, NPG 196). Provenance: the Lansdowne letters and manuscripts from the Marquesses of Lansdowne; Bowood House sale, Christie’s, 12 October 1994, lot 1, 4, 5,6 and 8.
Letters to his patron, Lord Lansdowne discussing the English system of government, news from revolutionary France and prison reform. In a long letter with two equally long enclosures in February 1791 Bentham responds to an enquiry from the Diet of Poland to Lansdowne with a manuscript about the English system of government and thanks Lansdowne for offering to send his ‘Essay on Political Tactics’ for presentation to the King of Poland. Between December 1791 and September 1792 Bentham discusses news from revolutionary France including the ‘September massacres’ of 1792, his plans for prison reform including the design for a model prison, the Panopticon, and transportation to Australia, and the Russian invasion of Poland: ‘Poor France turned into a Bedlam! Yet I am almost tempted to take a peep into one of the cells … The next project I present to Administration either here or in Ireland, shall be a scheme for employing £120 a year a head in colonization instead of £60, or introducing into jails some vice that nobody as yet knows of, or destroying one half of the prisoners and letting the other half go loose … Melancholy news! my dear Lord— by and by there will not be a single honest man left in that accursed country [France]. Liancourt was to have dined here— instead of him comes a note from him that Rochefoucault is murdered. This is enough I doubt to spoil your dinner as it has ours’. In June 1794, Bentham mentions a sighting of Lansdowne’s prodigal son, Lord Wycombe, in December the same year he discusses purchases of books for his patron, and in February 1796 he asks Lansdowne to employ his French cook, whom he has been forced to let go for lack of funds. The earliest letters, dating from the beginning of the long relationship between Bentham and Lansdowne, discuss intelligence received from Bentham’s brother Samuel in Amsterdam, Hamburg and St Petersburg about naval matters in the North Sea and Baltic, enclosing copies of Samuel’s letters.