QI The Book of the Dead

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 favourite 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 endeavoured 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 afterwards. 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 floodof 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 recognised 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 house guest. 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 over 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 recognising 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