Author: Jessica Leigh Hester / Source: Atlas Obscura
Like all the other passengers on a commercial flight from London to New York next Monday, Jeremy Bentham will be strapped in. But the moral philosopher will have markedly less legroom than his fellow travelers.
He’ll while away the 3,459 miles in the cargo hold, tipped on his back, padded with foam, legs bent in a sitting position. He’s bringing a bit of luggage, too. His wax head, chair, walking stick, and hat will be packed separately nearby.A few days before the journey, Emilia Kingham—Bentham’s transatlantic chaperone—is quick to point out that the word “he” isn’t quite right. That’s because Bentham is more of an assemblage than a person.
Before he died in 1832 at the age of 84, Bentham pledged his body to science and tasked his physician and friend, Thomas Southwood Smith, with preserving his corpse in a curious manner. On a paper affixed to his will, Bentham described his desire to be dissected in the name of anatomical knowledge, and then, “when all the soft parts have been disposed of, the bones are to be formed into a skeleton.” He then wanted to be outfitted in his clothes and “seated in a Chair usually occupied by me when living in the attitude in which I am sitting when engaged in thought.” In this way, he would be a perpetually curious intellectual.
Bentham’s “auto-icon,” as it is known, looks a bit like a figure in a wax museum, but there’s still a bit of Bentham inside.
Beneath the clothes and a bodystocking are layers of linen tow stuffing—and then his bones, wired together. A wax head sits on top (more on his real, mummified head, in a moment).The auto-icon is a hybrid sculpture and relic. University College London (UCL) acquired it in 1850, and today it usually sits in a secular shrine in the South Cloisters building, ready to receive visitors. It’s an oddity, to be sure, but the curators don’t consider it particularly lurid. It’s more of a provocation for discussions of life and death. For a while, the university produced a cheekily maudlin project nodding to the philosopher’s notion of the panopticon, a prison built around the idea of surveillance, by mounting a camera behind the auto-icon’s unblinking head to capture photographs of viewers.
The auto-icon’s trek to New York is by the invitation of the Met Breuer, where it will be…
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