Overlooked Britain Lucinda Lambton

I once spent an afternoon alone with Jeremy Bentham’s dried head. It was a grimly bewitching experience. There it was before me, once alive on the shoulders of one of the great heroes of humanity: the reformer par excellence, the social theorist, philosopher, abolitionist, utilitarian, economist and animal rights protestor.

Bentham founded the first preventative police force and wrote powerful diatribes against capital punishment. He promoted the decriminalisation of homosexuality, equal rights for women and animal rights; and all this in the 1700s. To name but a few more of his startlingly progressive achievements, he was one of the founders of utopian socialism and had a huge influence on the reform of prisons, schools, law courts and Parliament itself.

And, blow me down, there I was, with his head, in which these ideas had once fermented, now most surreally set down for me to photograph, amid modern office paraphernalia, on a Formica-top desk at University College London.

Among his many enthusiasms, he had been determined to show that the dead could be put to good use for the living and evinced the idea of the ‘Auto-icon’: a man whose image was preserved for the benefit of humanity.

So he left his body to his friend Dr Thomas Southwood Smith, with the instructions that it be used as ‘the means of illustrating a series of lectures to which scientific and literary men are invited… first to communicate curious and highly important knowledge, and secondly to show that the primitive horror of dissection originates in ignorance… and that the human body when dissected, instead of being an object of disgust, is as much more beautiful than any other piece of mechanism as it is more curious and wonderful.’

His wishes were carried out, with Southwood Smith delivering the lecture at the Webb Street School of Anatomy and Medicine in Southwark – during a violent thunderstorm – with a clear and unfaltering voice but ‘with a face’, said a contemporary account, ‘as white as the dead philosopher before him’.

Bentham’s skeleton was then preserved, attired in his favourite clothes. It was determined that his head should be kept untouched. Bentham and his friend had already experimented by slowly drying a human head in the oven at Bentham’s house in Westminster.

By placing it under an air pump over sulphuric acid, it was rendered, according to the great man’s researches, ‘as hard as the skulls of New Zealanders’ but it was discovered that ‘all expression was of course gone’. I beg to differ. It has a startlingly lively look.

The head was detached and kept separate from the body in a wooden box. A waxen likeness was then added to the headless skeleton. The wax bust was made for the embalmed Auto-icon by the distinguished French sculptor, anatomist and ceroplast Jules Talrich. Most importantly, it was to be affixed with some of Bentham’s real hair. According to Southwood Smith, it was ‘a most admirable likeness’. Bentham’s will decreed that his friend should put his skeleton together ‘in such a manner as the whole figure should be seated in a chair usually occupied by me when living, in the attitude in which I am sitting when engaged in thought in the course of time employed in writing’.

He was to be dressed in his best black suit, protectively padded round with hay, with his ‘staff’ (which he called ‘Dapple’) held in his hand. Bentham had decreed that this figure should join any gathering of his ‘personal friends and other Disciples, should they be disposed to meet together for the purpose of commemorating the Founder of the great happiness of system of morals and legislation’.

So it was that he was wheeled into meetings of the College Council, when he would be listed as ‘present but not voting’. In his work on ‘The Auto-icon or the Uses of the Dead to the Living’, written in 1831 and 1832, he declared that every man, if embalmed, might be his own statue. ‘If a country Gentleman has rows of trees leading to his dwelling, the auto-icons of his family might alternate with the trees: copal [tree resin] would protect the face from the effects of rain – caoutchouc [natural rubber that has not been vulcanised] the habiliments.’ Rare schemes indeed!

After seven years sitting in a cabinet in Southwood Smith’s house, the Auto-icon was moved to University College, where it has stayed ever since, to be relished by all who wish to pay their respects.

Bentham’s head, though, has been locked away in its own elegant box, giving a most unsettling rarity to the company I kept that day. I fear that staring at the bright-eyed skull did feel disturbingly intrusive. Several times I felt obliged to apologise to the great man out loud for my impertinent behaviour.

The living dead: Bentham’s Auto-icon, right, at University College London