Project update – new material to transcribe! Bentham on Penal Code and Radicalism

Good afternoon and welcome back to the blog.  Transcribe Bentham is hitting a big milestone today – it’s our 7th birthday!  We first launched the website as a six-month experiment on 8 September 2010 and here we are all these years later.  If our volunteers keep transcribing at their current rate, we may hit 20,000 transcripts by the end of 2017.  What a huge achievement and a massive amount of groundwork for future Bentham scholarship. Our most sincere thanks go to everyone who has participated over the years.

We’re here with a nice birthday present for our transcribers – some new material from the Bentham collection!  Boxes 67, 68 and 137 have just been uploaded to the Transcription Desk.  This means that we now have 85 boxes and more than 42,000 pages of Bentham’s available online.

These new boxes contain Bentham’s writings on a penal or criminal code and drafts of a short work called Radicalism not dangerous.

Bentham strongly believed in the importance of clear legal codes and returned to this subject throughout his life.  His penal or criminal code would form one part of his intended pannomion, a complete body of utilitarian law.

Radicalism not Dangerous was a short tract written around 1819-20 in which Bentham put forward his own brand of liberal radicalism.  By this point, he was committed to the cause of political reform but felt that change should be slower and more linked to existing institutions than that which was desired by popular radicals of the early nineteenth century.

More information on the contents of each of these boxes and access to the manuscripts can be found on the following pages:

Box 67- penal code

Box 68 – penal code

Box 137 – Radicalism not dangerous

Users can also view pages from these boxes through the Untranscribed Manuscripts page.

We invite anyone to rifle through this new material – and we look forward to seeing what interesting bits and pieces might be uncovered!

Our thanks go to Chris Riley, a PhD student at the Bentham Project, who helped to research the content of these boxes.