The Problem of the Picture: Catastrophe and Perspicuity in ‘A Picture of the Treasury’

This is an article in a forthcoming special issue of Journal of Bentham Studies entitled ‘Jeremy Bentham, the Panopticon penitentiary scheme, and A Picture of the Treasury’. to be published In 2026 and jointly edited by Professor Malcolm Quinn and Dr Chris Riley, who is Editor-in-Chief of JBS. The article is based on a keynote lecture delivered by Quinn at a conference at UCL on 24 July 2025. The conference was the outcome of AHRC funding for a critical edition of 'A Picture of the Treasury', which is Jeremy Bentham’s account of his negotiations with Treasury and Home Office officials between 1798 and 1802 to build a panopticon penitentiary. The critical edition is not yet published and the special issue is based on an online pre-publication text.

In ‘A Picture of the Treasury’, the panopticon project has been stopped in its tracks, and the larger project for ‘reformation in the moral’ that Bentham had proclaimed in A Fragment on Government (1776) is at risk. The focus of this article is on Bentham’s view that, within the Treasury, virtue was at a standstill. In rejecting the possibility of recreating his negotiations with the Treasury as a novel or a play that narrates a sequence of events, Bentham states that a more perspicuous form in which to present his picture is as a single entity that he calls ‘the catastrophe’. Similarly, virtue at a standstill can only be represented through the paradox of a moving image of stasis, which Bentham refers to as ‘nothingness in action’. In search of the mechanism of this moral stasis, Bentham compares the Treasury officials to automata, who constantly reproduce an identical picture. On the one hand, these officials consolidate a picture of the institution in which nothing can be clearly known. On the other hand, there is always the possibility for Bentham to translate the opaque image generated by the officials into a perspicuous form, notably through his description of the Treasury as ‘a half-law half-political rebus’.

• https://www.ucl.ac.uk/laws/events/2025/j...