Bentham

The first five volumes of the Correspondence of Jeremy Bentham contain over 1,300 letters written both to and from Bentham over a 50-year period, beginning in 1752 (aged three) with his earliest surviving letter to his grandmother, and ending in 1797 with correspondence concerning his attempts to set up a national scheme for the provision of poor relief.

The fifth volume of Jeremy Bentham’s Correspondence was originally published, together with the fourth volume, in 1981, under the editorship of the late Alexander Taylor Milne and the General Editorship of the late J.R. Dinwiddy. The Correspondence volumes represent the ‘backbone’, so to speak, of the authoritative edition of The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham, giving scholars the orientation that enables them to begin to make sense of Bentham’s published works and the vast collection of his unpublished papers, consisting of around 60,000 folios in UCL Library and 12,500 folios in the British Library.

The first five volumes of the Correspondence of Jeremy Bentham contain over 1,300 letters written both to and from Bentham over a 50-year period, beginning in 1752 (aged three) with his earliest surviving letter to his grandmother, and ending in 1797 with correspondence concerning his attempts to set up a national scheme for the provision of poor relief. Against the background of the debates on the American Revolution of 1776 and the French Revolution of 1789, to which he made significant contributions, Bentham worked first on producing a complete penal code, which involved him in detailed explorations of fundamental legal ideas, and then on his panopticon prison scheme.

The third volume of Jeremy Bentham’s Correspondence was originally published in 1971, under the editorship of the late Ian R. Christie and the General Editorship of the late J.H. Burns. The Correspondence volumes represent the ‘backbone’, so to speak, of the authoritative edition of The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham, giving scholars the orientation that enables them to begin to make sense of Bentham’s published works and the vast collection of his unpublished papers, consisting of around 60,000 folios in UCL Library and 12,500 folios in the British Library.

The fourth volume of Jeremy Bentham’s Correspondence was originally published, together with the fifth volume, in 1981, under the editorship of the late Alexander Taylor Milne and the General Editorship of the late J.R. Dinwiddy. The Correspondence volumes represent the ‘backbone’, so to speak, of the authoritative edition of The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham, giving scholars the orientation that enables them to begin to make sense of Bentham’s published works and the vast collection of his unpublished papers, consisting of around 60,000 folios in UCL Library and 12,500 folios in the British Library.