Stuffed Shirt

At a dinner at the University of London last week the honored guest was a white-haired old fellow wearing tight-fitting trousers, a wide-brimmed straw hat, a loose white collar. He spoke to no one, ate no food. He did not even move during the whole dinner. Britishers are traditionally polite, impassive; the other dinner-guests ate their food and paid no attention to this funny old stuffed shirt.

A stuffed shirt was literally what they were honoring. When Jeremy Bentham, famed economist-philosopher, died at 84, he left to the University of London his body, to be dissected in the presence of friends. In his will he provided that "my skeleton will be caused to be put together in such a manner as that the whole figure may be seated in the chair usually occupied by me when living, in the attitude in which I was sitting when engaged in thought." Jeremy Bentham's bones were dressed up in his own garments, topped off with a wax effigy of his head. As guarded now in an old box in the Anatomical Museum of University College, London, Jeremy Bentham sits with his skull at his feet, his favorite stick, "Dapple," on his knee. Last week, at the dinner celebrating the 100th anniversary of his death, he was trotted out on show, for his will stipulated that at any commemorative gathering he should be "stationed in such a part of the room as to the assembled company shall seem meet."

Chief exponent of laissez-faire as a political doctrine, Bentham developed a philosophy of utilitarianism whose catchword became "the greatest happiness of the greatest number." Bashful, eccentric, fond of giving names to things, he spent his last year in a house he called "The Hermitage," whose dining room was to him "The Shop." A crusty personage, he might invite you to spend the day, not bother to give you a meal until 10 p.m. When Mme de Stael visited London she gushed: "Tell Bentham I will see nobody until I have seen him." Grunted Jeremy Bentham: "Sorry for it, for then she will never see anybody."

The present University of London includes some 37 institutions scattered about the city. Among these are King's College, founded in 1828, and University College which Scottish Poet Thomas Campbell. Lord Brougham, Philosopher Bentham and others established in Bloomsbury, near the British Museum, in 1826. Poet Robert Browning and Economist John Stuart Mill studied at University College. Though the University of London has 20,000 students (more than Oxford and Cambridge combined), it is little known to Londoners, had no athletic field until a year ago. It now has brave plans for an entirely new site, also in Bloomsbury, where -L-3,000,000 worth of buildings are to rise.

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