If it’s 6 June, it must be 191 years to the day since Jeremy Bentham died, stipulating in his will that his body should be preserved at University College London so he could be wheeled in to attend every council meeting. Except most of the stories about his remains are complete balls.
Bentham left his body to his friend Dr Thomas Southwood Smith, so it could be dissected before an audience. His head would be dried and preserved, reunited with his skeleton, to be clothed and put on display.
There were two reasons for this. Firstly, after all the grave-robbing in the previous decade, anatomy had a bad reputation, and the only bodies available were those of hanged murderers. Bentham wanted to encourage people to donate their remains, so he set an example
Secondly, he wanted his leftovers
This would help his ideas to live on.
The idea for preserving the head apparently came from his knowledge of Maori culture, but Dr Smith put Bentham’s bonce in an air pump suspended over sulphuric acid. How authentically Maori this was, I don’t know, but its success was limited.
The head was dehydrated, but had no facial expression, and Smith decided “this would not do for exhibition” — so he asked French artist, Jacques Talrich, who specialised in this sort of thing, to make a wax head. He then
Smith kept the resulting ‘auto-icon’ (‘self-image’) in his consulting rooms, and presented it to UCL in 1850. They kept it in a cupboard (possibly a store room) until 1898, and eventually put him on display in a special cabinet, his dried head between his feet.
His presence at UCL gave rise to the rumour that he attended council meetings, and that, when a vote was evenly split, Bentham’s would be counted — in favour of the motion — to break the deadlock. Sadly, it’s not true – although he did go to a board meeting in 2013, as a special treat for someone who was retiring.
Another popular rumour is that students from King’s College London occasionally steal the head and play football with it, but apparently it would disintegrate if anyone tried — although they did kidnap it in 1975, returning it after the college gave £10 to Shelter. After that, the head was put away “in the Strong Room of the Records Department”. In 1990, then — in the interests of shenanigans — King’s students nicked the wax head.
Bentham has, otherwise, led a relatively uneventful afterlife, only suffering the occasional indignity of restoration. Here he is at Hampton Court in 1980 during just such an exercise:
He needed another round in the early 2000s after his underpants were discovered to be “full of ‘woolly bear’ insects and the waxwork head crawled with carpet beetles”.
The auto-icon now sits in the entrance to the UCL Student Centre, while his head — being actual human remains — lives in the Conservation Safe in their Institute of Archaeology, only allowed out “in exceptional circumstances”.
Given what it looks like, this is, perhaps, understandable.
Anyway, feel free to follow any of the links to find out more, and — as it’s Pride month — you can also read about how forward-thinking he was for his time, and feel free to photoshop a rainbow waistcoat onto his auto-icon.
In August 1832, just after his death, the Anatomy Act got royal assent, and “bodies from workhouses took the place of those from gallows and graves”. Nice. It was about another century before “bequests could again become a feasible source for dissection”.
