Jeremy Bentham spent his working life arguing that law and morals should serve the greatest happiness of the greatest number. He died in London on June 6, 1832, aged 84, at his home in Queen Square Place, Westminster. His will then put the principle to a very odd test: he wanted to be useful after death, and he wanted to be seen.
The Horror
Bentham’s wish was not a deathbed whim. According to Wikipedia, as early as 1769 he had left his body for dissection to a family friend, the physician George Fordyce. The fuller scheme was in a paper written in 1830 and attached to his last will, dated May 30, 1832. It instructed his friend and physician, Thomas Southwood Smith, to prepare what Bentham called his “auto-icon”. The word is usually taken to mean a self-image, though that gloss comes from a popular source and is not firmly sourced.
Southwood Smith carried it out in public. Invitations went out on June 8, and the next day he gave a long oration over the body at the Webb Street School of Anatomy and Medicine in Southwark. Why Bentham wanted the auto-icon at all is, by one account, “a mystery”. The sources only speculate that he wished to watch his ideas bear fruit.
The skeleton was dressed in one of his black suits, padded out with hay, and seated in a wooden cabinet. The head was the trouble. Southwood Smith tried to mummify it by placing it under an air pump over sulphuric acid. The method is said to have worked, in a technical sense, but the dried and darkened skin was unpleasant to look at, and the preserved head was judged unfit for display. One popular account says Bentham first wanted a Maori-style preservation, and that this “went disastrously wrong”. That rests on a single blog and is unconfirmed.
In its place the auto-icon was given a wax head, fitted with some of Bentham’s own hair. The real head was not thrown away. For many years it sat in the same case, on the floor between his legs, where it was a standing temptation to students.
From 1833, Southwood Smith kept the figure at his rooms in Finsbury Square. He moved it in 1849 or 1850 to Percy Street, and in 1850 he offered it to Henry Brougham, who accepted it for University College London. It has stayed in UCL’s care ever since.
The Legends
Several stories cling to the auto-icon, and they should be sorted by how well they stand up.
The glass eyes. The most repeated detail is that Bentham carried a pair of glass eyes in his pocket for years, meant for the mummified head, and showed them at dinners. Every source that tells it hedges it. One uses “the story goes”, one calls it a legend, and one adds that he carried them for ten years. No primary source has been found. It may be true. Treat it as tradition.
The stolen head. The best-attested version is that students from King’s College London stole the real head in 1975 and demanded £100 for the charity Shelter, and that UCL is “believed” to have paid £10. Even here the surviving accounts are secondary and use words such as “supposedly” and “reportedly”. They also disagree about the ransom: some say £100 was negotiated down to £10, others only that £10 was paid. The detail that the head turned up in a locker at Aberdeen station is, in the source that mentions it, plainly a rumour. The tale that students played football with it is told as “the story goes”. The fact that the head was repeatedly targeted by students and was eventually locked away is the part that is solid.
The council meetings. The popular claim is that the auto-icon is wheeled in to UCL’s council meetings and is minuted as “Present, but not voting”, and sometimes that it casts a vote in a tie. Wikipedia calls this a persistent myth. It records one documented attendance, at Sir Malcolm Grant’s final meeting as provost in 2013. No specific meeting in 1976 with that minute has been verified.
The Modern Relic
For most of its life at UCL, the auto-icon stood in a wooden cabinet in the South Cloisters of the Wilkins Building. The real head had its own odd journey there. It sat between the figure’s feet, then in 1948 went into a wooden box on a plinth above a Cloisters door, before being locked away.
In 2020 the auto-icon moved to a new glass case at the entrance of the UCL Student Centre on Gordon Street, in Bloomsbury, close to Gordon Square. One popular guide says there is no entry fee and no need to be a student, and asks visitors to remember that it is a working university. Students walk past him on their way to lectures.
What you see is a skeleton in Bentham’s black suit, padded with hay, with a wax head and some of his real hair. The preserved head that so disappointed Southwood Smith is not on view. Wikipedia says only that it was locked away, and where it is kept now is unverified.
The coordinates given for this story are approximate and point to the Student Centre entrance in Gordon Street, not to a surveyed point.
