Bentham, J;
(2018)
Writings on Australia, V. Third Letter to Lord Pelham.
[Digital scholarly resource].
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/bentham-project
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Abstract
‘Third Letter to Lord Pelham’, which is published here for the first time, sees Bentham take for his subject the ‘hulks and the “improved prisons”’. Disappointed at the government’s preference for these modes of punishment over the panopticon penitentiary, Bentham sought to demonstrate the failings of both in comparison to the panopticon, while being careful to maintain that New South Wales was inferior to both of them as an instrument of penal policy. In ‘Third Letter to Lord Pelham’ Bentham is especially sharp in his criticism of Pelham and his predecessor as Home Secretary the Duke of Portland for their having, for instance, not only ignored the high mortality among the convicts aboard the Portsmouth hulks but, also in having actively contributed to the conditions leading to that mortality. Bentham was, moreover, highly critical of Pelham’s appointment of Aaron Graham as Inspector of Hulks, which he regarded as an example of corrupt patronage, whereby the awful reality of the hulks would be obscured. In writing ‘Third Letter to Lord Pelham’, Bentham drew in particular upon information gleaned from the published works of, and correspondence and conversation with, the penal reformer and philanthropist James Neild.
| Type: | Digital scholarly resource |
|---|---|
| Title: | Writings on Australia, V. Third Letter to Lord Pelham |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| Publisher version: | http://www.ucl.ac.uk/bentham-project |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | This work is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial Non-derivative 4.0 International license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the work for personal and non-commercial use providing author and publisher attribution are clearly stated. Attribution should include the following information: Jeremy Bentham, Writings on Australia, I. New Wales, ed. T. Causer and P. Schofield, pre-publication version, The Bentham Project, 2018. Further details about CC BY licenses are available at http://creativecommoms.org/licenses/ This text is a preliminary version, in that the authoritative version will appear as part of Bentham’s Writings on Australia for The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham, with a full Editorial Introduction, name and subject indexes, finalized annotation, and working cross-references. The volume is due to be published in 2020 by the Clarendon Press. |
| Keywords: | Jeremy Bentham, New South Wales, prison hulks, history of crime and punishment, history of administration, corrupt patronage, Aaron Graham, Lord Pelham, Home Office |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Laws UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Laws > The Bentham Project |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10055302 |
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