The Correspondence of Jeremy Bentham Volume 5: 5 January 1794 to December 1797

The fifth volume of Jeremy Bentham’s Correspondence was originally published, together with the fourth volume, in 1981, under the editorship of the late Alexander Taylor Milne and the General Editorship of the late J.R. Dinwiddy. The Correspondence volumes represent the ‘backbone’, so to speak, of the authoritative edition of The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham, giving scholars the orientation that enables them to begin to make sense of Bentham’s published works and the vast collection of his unpublished papers, consisting of around 60,000 folios in UCL Library and 12,500 folios in the British Library.
The present volume has been attractively re-keyed in a typeface that is sympathetic to the original design, and crucially the exact pagination of the original volume has been retained, so that referencing remains stable. The opportunity has been taken to incorporate corrections identified by the Bentham Project. All these corrections are relatively minor, except for the removal of Letter 1279. This letter was included in the present volume in the mistaken belief that it was dated 2 May 1797, whereas it is in fact dated 2 May 1798, and appears in its correct place as Letter 1324 in the sixth volume of the Correspondence. Professor Guillaume Tusseau (Sciences Po, Paris) has kindly checked the accuracy of the reproduction of the French material according to the conventions currently adopted in the edition as a whole. Thanks are also due to my Bentham Project colleague Dr Louise Seaward for assistance with a variety of queries throughout all five volumes.