University College London is the custodian of Jeremy Bentham’s corpse,
or at least some of it. It is also the custodian of Bentham’s corpus,
or at least most of it. UCL’s library has 60,000 folios written by Jeremy Bentham.
It is the purpose of the Bentham Project to edit these folios and produce for
posterity the collected works of Jeremy Bentham, aiming to
produce the volumes as Bentham would have intended.
Since Bentham destroyed the works that
he published himself,
the folios in the Bentham papers represent works that were either
never published by Bentham or were by editors, either in Bentham’s
lifetime or since. There are another 12,500 folios
by Bentham in the British Library. Bentham did not leave his corpus to UCL.
In his will, he appointed John Bowring as his literary executor
with instructions to produce an addition of his works.
Bowring farmed out this work to a variety of editors, and
between 1838 and 1843, an 11 volume edition of the works of Jeremy Bentham
was published in Edinburgh. In 1849,
one year before Bentham’s auto-icon arrived at UCL, Bowring
deposited Bentham’s manuscripts in the college library.
The Bowring edition is poorly edited and is far from complete.
Bowring decided, for instance, to exclude Bentham’s writing on religion,
feeling that they might offend too many potential readers. The Bentham papers
were generally neglected until the 20th century,
when it was decided that the Bowring edition was completely inadequate
for the needs of modern scholarship and that a new edition of Bentham’s works
should be prepared.
It was only in the late 1950s that
UCL established the Bentham Committee to oversee the publication
of a new edition of Bentham’s works. Professor J. H. Burns
was appointed the first general editor of the collected works of Jeremy Bentham
in 1961. The present general editor,
Professor Philip Schofield, is fourth. The Bentham Project is currently housed here,
in the appropriately-named Bentham House in UCL’s Faculty of Laws.
The project has published twenty-seven volumes of Bentham’s works
and work has begun on a further dozen volumes.
The collected works will eventually run into around seventy volumes.
The edition is divided into two parts,
we have the correspondence and the works. In the correspondence,
we reproduce all known letters both
to and from Bentham. In the works, we try and
reproduce Bentham’s writings as closely as possible to Bentham’s intentions.
And that means we’ve developed
a hierarchy of sources, from the most authoritative to the least authoritative.
So we consider the most authoritative to be those which Bentham published
himself in his lifetime.
After that we turn to Bentham’s manuscripts.
There’s a lot of his writings which he never published, though
he had an intention either that they should be published or they
should be
put into a readable form.
And finally, where there was not work published by Bentham himself or the
manuscripts don’t survive, there are works which were published by editors
and disciples in the 19th century,
and so if necessary we have to fall back to those editions.
But the bulk of the edition is based on the material published by Bentham himself
and also on the vast mass of manuscripts in the Bentham papers.
The key to editing Bentham is trying to understand
where he thought he was going with a work. At any stage
during its composition Bentham would write multiple drafts of
the same section,
he would insert new sections, he would delete
what he considered old material, he’d insert new material. In order
to produce the texts you really have to understand what he thought he was doing
with it.
Once we think we know what's going into a text,
we put everything in the Bentham template, which is a bespoke tool to assist
editors and typesetters, for instance
by distinguishing between Bentham’s footnotes, Bentham’s footnotes to his footnotes
and
editorial footnotes.
Thereafter, we move on to annotation, we try to explain
all Bentham’s allusions, either literary
or historic, after that
we write an editorial introduction which is emphatically not an
attempt to provide a commentary on the substance of the volume, but rather
an attempt to answer the ‘why’ and the ‘how’ of the volume.
The last job we have is to compile comprehensive name and
subject indices,
and when that’s done, effectively you have a Bentham volume.
The Bentham Project has recently launched a new initiative
whose aim is partly to aid the project in its task of
or producing the new edition of Bentham’s works. The Bentham Papers Transcription Initiatve, or
Transcribe Bentham for short, is an exciting new collaborative venture with
UCL’s new Centre for Digital Humanities. It is funded by a grant
from the Arts and Humanities Research Council and its aim is to digitise
Bentham’s paper, and to harness the power of crowd-sourcing to facilitate their
transcription.
Well I think the way that we got involved originally in Transcribe Bentham
was that Professor Philip Schofield, who’s the head of the project
came to talk to us and we were trying to think about some interesting ways in
which the material could be developed.
My colleague, Melissa Terras, who’s deputy-director of the centre then
thought about perhaps we could use crowdsourcing,
so I think that's the way that it came about but it's really great because it
means it
fits in particularly well with what we like to do, and it’s produced
such a fascinating project, it’s so great that we've had such a lot of interest from both
the digital humanities community and people who are working on Bentham himself.
There are 40,000 of Bentham’s papers
which have never been transcribed or studied.
By engaging the general public in the transcription of these papers,
the Bentham Project’s task of producing 70 volumes of Bentham’s works
will become much easier.
But the Transcribe Bentham initiative also has other aims.
A photographer from UCL’s Learning and Media Services is currently
photographing these Bentham papers.
These images will eventually be stored in an online digital repository.
A transcription tool has been developed with the assistance of the University of
London Computer Centre,
which allows users to login and access these images and transcribe their content.
The transcription tool has been developed as an open source software,
and it allows users from around the world to access Bentham’s manuscripts and
therefore his thoughts at source.
This will allow users to contribute to the labour involved in actually
producing the Collected Works.
To transcribe the manuscripts,
the user is presented on one side of the page with the photograph of the manuscript
and a text box on the other.
This text box allows the user to then enter the text of the
manuscript and encodes the material
using a very user-friendly tool bar, and at the click of a button you
can add
tacks for paragraphing, marginalia, paragraphing and so on, as Bentham’s
manuscripts are extremely complex and this reproduces it fairly faithfully.
Students can access reading lists and resources,
including a timeline, images and videos about Bentham.
They can also select manuscripts of particular relevance to their
course of study.
Users can chat to their friends online and they can gain points for their own
contributions,
moving up the progress ladders as they improve.
Participants will be the first to read and document ideas
which could be potentially intellectually profound.
Just for the launch of Transcribe Bentham, the Bentham project is bringing Bentham’s studies
into the digital age, aiming to make Bentham’s works
truly accessible to all. We’re ensuring
that not only Bentham’s corpse, but also his corpus
is preserved for future generations.