The Museum of Other People by Adam Kuper

Author:Adam Kuper
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Profile Books
Published: 2022-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

The English Utilitarian philosopher, Jeremy Bentham, who died in 1832, invented an atheistic version of these saintly displays. Refusing burial, his will made alternative provision for the ‘disposal and preservation of the several parts of my bodily frame’. His skeleton was to be ‘put together in such a manner as that the whole figure may be seated in a chair usually occupied by me when living, in the attitude in which I am sitting when engaged in thought in the course of time employed in writing’. Then, ‘clad in one of the suits of black occasionally worn by me’, it would be exhibited in a glass-fronted case.

Bentham himself termed this an ‘Auto Icon’, and he sketched a ritual for it:

If it should so happen that my personal friends and other disciples should be disposed to meet together on some day or days of the year for the purpose of commemorating the founder of the greatest happiness system of morals and legislation my executor will from time to time cause to be conveyed to the room in which they meet the said box or case with the contents therein to be stationed in such part of the room as to the assembled company shall seem meet.94

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