Friday has rolled round again and we’re here to let you know the latest stats. We are happy to report that transcription is pushing ahead at a great pace. We owe our transcribers a huge thanks for all their help this week.

16,374 manuscript pages have now been transcribed or partially-transcribed, which is an increase of 36 on last week’s total. Of these transcripts, 15,485 (94%) have been checked and approved by TB staff.

The more detailed progress chart is as follows:

Hi again. We’re back on the blog with just what you’ve been waiting for – the Transcribe Bentham stats from the past week! As ever, we are very grateful to all of our wonderful transcribers for their hard work.

While we’re here, we need to remind you of some big news from the Bentham Project. The Panopticon Pandemonium game has now been launched! Download the game for free and see how you fare running a digital recreation of Bentham’s notorious prison design.

Back to the stats. 16,338 manuscript pages have now been transcribed or partially-transcribed, which is an increase of 43 on last week’s total. Of these transcripts, 15,435 (94%) have been checked and approved by TB staff.

The more detailed progress chart is as follows:

We are delighted to announce that Panopticon Pandemonium—a chance to run Bentham’s never-realised prison—is now available to download for free!

For around a decade of his life until 1803, Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) lobbied the British government to build a ‘panopticon’ prison of his design. Bentham had envisaged an ‘Inspection House’—a circular building with the prisoners’ cells arranged around the outer wall and an inspection tower at the centre, from which the prison inspector could look into the cells at any time, though the inmates would be unable to see the inspector. The prisoners would have to assume that they were being watched, and Bentham expected that they would thus modify their behaviour in a positive manner in order to avoid the additional punishment which would inevitably follow for breaching the prison’s discipline.

The failure of the panopticon scheme was a crushing blow and the greatest disappointment of Bentham’s life. No prison which adhered to Bentham’s design has ever been built, and Panopticon Pandemonium sees the construction—virtually—of a working panopticon for the first time. The player, assisted by Bentham himself, acts as governor of the prison and has to balance economies of the social benefits of Bentham’s vision—happiness, rehabilitation, work—against the functions of discipline, punishment, and surveillance, while also ensuring that their panopticon is orderly and profitable. These conflicting functions, rooted in Bentham’s writings, are realised as game mechanics with the player managing economies of work and nutrition, the recruitment and deployment of staff, coping with riotous prisoners, and ensuring that visiting dignitaries come away from the Panopticon with a favourable impression. Fail in the task and prisoners will instead be transported to New South Wales!

Download the game now for PC! (a Mac version will follow soon)

Panopticon Pandemonium was funded by the UCL Grand Challenges Small Grant Activities scheme. It was developed by Duck Duck Zeus, in association with the UCL Bentham Project, DARE Collaborative, the UCL Knowledge Lab, and the UCL Centre for Digital Humanities. A press pack is also available .

Hello there. We’re here again with the latest round-up the pages which have been transcribed over the past week. A big thanks goes out to everyone who has transcribed this week!

For those who might have missed it, Dr Tim Causer has blogged this week about how he has been using volunteer transcripts in his work on Bentham’s writings on Australia. Why did Bentham rely upon a letter from an unnamed woman in his argument against convict transportation?

Back to the stats. 16,295 manuscript pages have now been transcribed or partially-transcribed, which is an increase of 33 on last week’s total. Of these transcripts, 15,385 (94%) have been checked and approved by TB staff.

The more detailed progress chart is as follows:

It’s been a few months since the last update about the ongoing editing of Bentham’s writings on Australia. In the intervening period I’ve mostly been researching and writing editorial notes for Panopticon versus New Wales and A Plea for the Constitution to illuminate Bentham’s various allusions throughout the texts.

In writing and researching the First Letter to Lord Pelham (one half of Panopticon versus New South Wales) in 1802, Bentham sought out as much information as possible about the convict colony of New South Wales. Though he relied in the main upon historical accounts and official correspondence among Bentham’s other acquisitions was a short letter dated 7 October 1800, ‘from a female pen, as well as to a female eye’, which he cited as evidence of the immorality supposedly prevalent in New South Wales (p. 19). He quoted a portion of the letter which described how the new Governor of New South Wales, Philip Gidley King, would have to ‘pay some attention to the morals and instruction of the rising generation, to which none has hitherto been given; for certainly, if we ever hope to see worth or honesty in this settlement, we must look to them for it, and not the present degenerate race.’

Bentham was oddly coy about the letter’s providence, noting that for ‘authentication sake, designation will (I suppose) be regarded as indispensable; but where that sex is concerned, the most reserved mode that can be thought of, is the most respectful and the best.’ There the authorship of the letter might have remained a mystery but, as ever when it comes to Bentham, his manuscripts are fortunately more revealing. In an unpublished draft of the First Letter to Lord Pelham, Bentham wrote that ‘the Lady’s Husband—a Soldier—[was] the first man in rank under the Governor’ (UCL Bentham Papers, Box xciv, f. 335v). The Lieutenant-Governor of New South Wales in October 1800 was Lieutenant-Colonel William Paterson (1755–1810), making the author of the letter his wife, Elizabeth (née Driver), one of the founders of the Sydney Orphans’ School and committee member of the Female Orphans’ Institution.

Elizabeth Paterson’s letter—or perhaps an extract from it— is held among the British Library’s Bentham Papers (Additional Manuscripts 33,453, folios 423–24) and a similar note to the quotation above about its authorship, in pencil and in Bentham’s hand, is written at the end of the letter. Furthermore, on the reverse of the letter it is stated that it was from ‘Mrs Patterson [sic] Port Jackson to Mrs B. Q.S.P.’—‘Mrs B’ being Maria Sophia Bentham (1765–1858), the wife of Jeremy’s younger brother, Samuel (1757–1831). This was not the only occasion that Jeremy tapped into Samuel and Maria Sophia’s network when writing Panopticon versus New South Wales: he also drew upon a letter dated 20 May 1799 from Samuel’s friend, John Hunter (1737–1821), Governor of New South Wales from 1795 to 1800.

As well as her remarks upon colonial morality (very much written from the point of view of the official class), Elizabeth Paterson’s letter also reveals anxiety about the security of the colony in the wake of several hundred convicts having arrived from Ireland, many of whom were apparently involved in the 1798 United Irishmen rising. In September 1800, a month before Paterson put pen to paper, a nebulous ‘plot’ had been uncovered in which some Irish convicts were supposed to have been ready to resort to armed revolt. Paterson wrote of how ‘for these last six months we have been under apprehensions’ of a rising, but as the rumours were unconfirmed ‘no steps [were taken] to prevent their designs’ until 28 September. This was the day apparently ‘fixed for the destruction of the Military and principal families at Parramatta, a considerable Settlement 15 Miles from [Sydney]’. Thirty ‘Ringleaders’ were arrested and questioned and ‘the greatest part confessed the horrid plot’ and, as a result, a number of men were ordered to be flogged and/or exiled to Norfolk Island. Even though the ‘plot’ had been prevented, Paterson remained concerned that the military force in the colony was insufficient and that even after ‘our critical situation’ became known back in London, there was still the prospect of more Irish prisoners being transported to New South Wales.

You can see the letter, and the page of the draft of Panopticon versus New South Wales below. In the meantime, the editorial work continues apace. The annotation of the printed versions of Panopticon versus New South Wales and A Plea for the Constitution is at quite an advanced stage, and transcripts of manuscripts from Box 116 , produced in the main by TB volunteers, are also being checked, and the quality is extraordinarily high. Once this checking is complete, we will begin to compare the draft versions of these two texts with the printed versions, and see just what Bentham decided to leave out from the final versions. But that is something for a future update…

Elizabeth Paterson to Maria Sophia Bentham, 7 Oct 1800 (p.1)
British Library Add. MS 33,453, fo. 423r

Elizabeth Paterson to Maria Sophia Bentham, 7 Oct 1800 (p.1)
British Library Add. MS 33,453, fo. 423v

Elizabeth Paterson to Maria Sophia Bentham, 7 Oct 1800 (p.1)
British Library Add. MS 33,453, fo. 424r

UCL Bentham Papers, Box xciv, fo. 335v