Jeremy Bentham

SIR JOHN BOWRING’S valuable but incomplete edition of Bentham s works contains some five thousand five hundred pages, closely printed in double columns. The diffuse Memoirs collected in the tenth and eleventh volumes cover, in addition, nearly eight hundred pages. By the reforms of the last seventy years several treatises have been deprived of the interest originally attached to them, while others are written in the involved and difficult style affected by Bentham in the later years of his life. In these circumstances, it is not surprising that the volumes so laboriously compiled by Bowring are rarely taken down from the shelves of our public libraries. Yet a great part of the collection is of deep and lasting interest; and throughout every volume there are scattered countless passages which admirers of Bentham s genius would not willingly let die. This sketch of his life and work has been published in the hope that it may supply the necessary information and induce readers to seek a closer acquaintance with his writings.