CFP: Jeremy Bentham, the Panopticon penitentiary scheme, and ‘A Picture of the Treasury’ Conference

The Bentham Project is hosting a two-day conference entitled ‘Jeremy Bentham, the Panopticon penitentiary scheme, and “A Picture of the Treasury”’, which will take place at Bentham House, Faculty of Laws, University College London, on 23 and 24 July 2025.

The aim of the conference is to discuss the forthcoming critical edition of ‘A Picture of the Treasury’ in The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham (UCL Press), publishing for the first time Bentham’s personal account of his dealings with the government, most notably the Treasury department, but also the Home Office, in his attempts to erect, and to become governor of, a panopticon penitentiary.

‘A Picture of the Treasury’ (written in 1802) contains Bentham’s highly detailed reflections on his dealings with and treatment by government officials between 1798 and 1802, and gives a unique insight into how he felt at this time. He exposes the individuals by whom, and administrative processes and malpractices by which, he believed his interests, and the public interest at large, had been thwarted. Bentham states, for instance, that his ‘adversary’, the British government, had all along sought to abandon the panopticon scheme by making things so drawn out that he might have been ‘provoked … beyond endurance’, give up through ‘weariness and despondency’, or simply die—die either ‘in the natural way of things’, as a result of ‘wear and tear of vexations and disappointments’, or even by him being driven to suicide.

The text consists of twenty-four sections, which are interspersed with over one hundred pieces of documentary evidence, including letters sent and unsent, extracts from official documents and third-party correspondence, alongside Bentham’s own commentary, all of which, Bentham says, might serve in prompting people to ask, ‘Well—and when this came out—what were your feelings?—and how did you endure it?’

A pre-publication version of 'A Picture of the Treasury' is available to download here: https://shorturl.at/EkIg3

Please send paper or panel proposals of approximately 300 words, and any enquiries, to [email protected], before 31 January 2025. (Individual papers should be around 20 minutes in duration, with 10 minutes for questions, and panels around 1 hr 30 minutes in total, accommodating three speakers).