Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832)Provenance : Marquesses of Lansdowne; their sale, Christie’s, Bowood House sale, 12 October 1994, lot 5.A series of letters to the Marquess of Lansdowne on the French Revolution, prison reform and other matters. 1) 20 December 1791, 4 pages: asking to borrow the Moniteur Universel for news from France, for Bentham has heard of events in the National Assembly of 13 December, describing an unsatisfactory meeting with ?Robert Hobart [later 4th Earl of Buckinghamshire] to discuss the Panopticon, comprising false promises of its promulgation in Ireland and the manufacture of a model, as well as the extraordinary costs of transportation from Ireland to Botany Bay; 2) 4 April 1792, 2 pages: describing his financial arrangements with Lady Ashburton, who was going to lease his father’s house at Queen’s Square Place (‘an event of a nature so liable to produce disunion promises to insure an intimacy much closer than before between the two families’); 3) 9 August 1792, 4 pages: ‘Poor France turned into a Bedlam! Yet I am almost tempted to take a peep into one of the cells’, most notably on his plans for prison reform: ‘The next project I present to Administration either here or in Ireland, shall be a scheme for employing £120 a year a head in colonization instead of £60, or introducing into jails some vice that nobody as yet knows of, or destroying one half of the prisoners and letting the other half go loose’; 4) 12 August 1792, 5 pages: ‘It is all over with the poor Poles’, discussing King Stanislaw Poniatowski’s defence of Poland against the invasion of the Russian Empire under Catherine the Great, also his acquisition of a cottage at Christchurch; 5) 3 September 1792, 4 pages: ‘O the tyranny of Aristocracy! Give it a furlong, it will take a mile— a Veto kept me once from Brussels: and now comes a Lettre de Cachet ordering me to Paris’, presumably in response to a lost letter from Lansdowne suggesting that he might go to Paris as an envoy; 6) 5 September 1792, 2 pages: on events in Paris, referring to the condemnation in the National Assembly of the Commune and its Vigilance committee responsible for the September massacres; 7) 10 September 1792, one page: ‘Melancholy news! my dear Lord— by and by there will not be a single honest man left in that accursed country. Liancourt was to have dined here— instead of him comes a note from him that Rochefoucault is murdered. This is enough I doubt to spoil your dinner as it has ours’.Correspondence of Jeremy Bentham , vol. 4.