- 1 For more detail see Wrobel 2022: 161-178.
- 2 Alternative titles included “A familiar view of Blackstone” and “Blackstone and Law familiarized”. (...)
1In the final years of his life, between 1828 and 1830, Jeremy Bentham picked up his pen again to add yet another instalment to his “lifetime’s dialectic” (Burns) against William Blackstone, the lawyer, judge and Oxford professor whose Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765-1769) were regarded as the authoritative source on English common law in the eighteenth century. After attending Blackstone’s lectures himself, Bentham had started his writing career with a text entitled A Fragment on Government (1776), which was initially a digression on Blackstone’s discussion of municipal law.1 The approach of this first work – which is strongly argumentative – differs from that adopted in the text which is the focus of this article, an unfinished treatise entitled “Blackstone Familiarized” (Bentham 1828), although a satiric vein runs through both.2 The latter text, which was intended for anonymous publication in three instalments in a periodical, presents a play transcribing a vision which Bentham states had appeared to him in a dream. Writing in 1828, he acknowledged the enduring influence of the Commentaries and even suggested that using Blackstone’s name in the title was a strategic marketing move to catch the attention of potential readers.
2Blackstone’s Commentaries were a key contribution to the “mythography” of common law as immemorial (Goodrich and Hayaert 5), imparting a “mythic continuity to legal practices that were, in point of fact, notable for their fluidity and adaptability” (Manderson 2015, 220). The myth of immemorial common law was also reinforced through legal images which borrowed from religious iconography which, like the representations of Lady Justice analysed by Wardle, endowed “human-made laws with the appearance of eternality and universality” and “colonis[ed] the potentially revolutionary ideal of justice” (239). In this context, “Blackstone Familiarized” may be regarded as an attempt to turn the weapons of myth and mythography against the discourse which ascribed divine origins to laws and political institutions and precluded the possibility of reform.
3Blackstone’s presence in the title should not eclipse the character who is arguably the real star of the show, i.e. the starry-maiden Astraea. While rewritings of her myth in pictures and poetry had often sought to legitimize political regimes, with the return of the goddess of justice symbolizing the inauguration of a new golden age, in “Blackstone Familiarized”, she embodies “universal jurisprudence”, and her role is to reveal to the audience the real state of English institutions as well as to introduce the utilitarian principles which could guide reform. After analysing the processes used to transcribe the vision by drawing on the “visual turn” recently taken in the field of Law and Literature, the article shows how Bentham’s rewriting leads us to reconsider the ideological functions of myth and seeks to account for the unexpected appearance of another allegorical figure, namely the goddess of fiction.
- 3 Likewise, the editors of the volume entitled The Art of Law observe a “clear rise in scholarship on (...)
4Bentham’s resort to allegories and theatricality may be usefully studied in the context of the “visual turn” in legal studies, which may be compared to “the ‘linguistic turn’ that dominated the critical movements of the last half-century” (Goodrich and Hayaert 2),3 and is one of the directions taken by the Law and Literature movement since its institutional rooting in US academia in the 1970s (Olson 28). The move goes against the law’s claim to be able to “close itself off from other discourses and practices, attain a condition of total self-presence and purity, and keep outside its domain the nonlegal, the extraneous, the other – in particular the aesthetic, the beautiful, and the image” (Douzinas and Nead 4). Conversely, the exploration of “the strong external link [which] connects political power, law, and the image” challenges art’s self-definition as “an autonomous realm for the judgment of beauty and the training of the eye” (Douzinas and Nead 6, 12). As Carolin Behrmann argues, the law “constantly deploys visual media for didactic purposes” and “[n]ormative orders […] are not simply represented but created through visualities, images, symbols, gestures, and performative actions” (40 ; see also Manderson 2018, 4-5). A broadened concept of visuality has emerged which connects the cognitive, the aesthetic and the normative – three dimensions which are interwoven in Bentham’s “Blackstone Familiarized”.
- 4 The other two are “legal aesthetics”, which describes how the law acts through aesthetics and repre (...)
5The first of the three branches Behrmann identifies, namely the analysis of “legal fictions or imaginations” that allegorize, symbolize, or narrate,4 seems particularly relevant for the text under scrutiny, which stages Astraea as well as her daughters. In Greek mythology, Themis and Zeus had a group of “golden daughters” who were associated with justice – Dikê (embodying “just retribution”), Eunomia (associated with “well ordering”) and Astraea (Dennis and Resnik 21). Themis and Dikê were collapsed into a single god, Justitia, by the ancient Romans (Dennis and Resnik 21). Later, Justice was often represented as part of a larger group of female allegories such as the Cardinal Virtues, where it featured alongside Prudence, Fortitude and Temperance (Dennis and Resnik 21). The eighteenth century is the period during which what has now become the standard representation of justice – alone, blindfolded, and holding a sword as well as a pair of scales – solidified. By staging a group of female allegorical figures, Bentham is therefore harking back to an older tradition.
- 5 Roman numerals refer to the box in which the papers are placed, and Arabic numerals to the folio wi (...)
6The preface explains that readers will find themselves in the company of “no fewer than four most important and busily active personages at once” (UC xxi.121).5 The goddess of Universal Jurisprudence (Astraea, who is also referred to as “Doctrina”) is the mother of the other three: Felicia (“Law as she ought to be”), Gubernia (“Law as she is”) and Dolosa (“Law as she pretends to be”) (121). Felicia will offer “deductions made from the greatest happiness principle” and, on that basis, explain “what the law ought to be”; Gubernia will present “what the law is, or at any rate is, by those who have the power, likely to be declared to be”; and Dolosa will expose what the law “is pretended to be” (201). The “Master of the Ceremonies” in this play is Sir William Blackstone, a “venerable personage” to whom Bentham gives due credit, but not without a touch of irony, introducing him as the “High-Priest, Interpreter, and Trumpeter” of the English common law (124).
7When perusing the preparatory material for “Blackstone Familiarized”, one cannot but be struck by the attention granted to the preface and the introduction – liminal textual spaces whose role it is to greet and seduce the reader: “At the very threshold”, Bentham writes, “the reader will find himself in the company [of] no fewer than four most important and busily active personages at once” (121). Bentham’s attention to the “threshold” of his text may be read in light of Goodrich and Hayaert’s comparison of the opening image to be found in law books, such as frontispiece emblems, to a “face”: “The book has to incite and seduce the lector [sic] into opening it. It needs a face that will beckon, entice, attract and move to action” (Goodrich and Hayaert 4, original emphasis). In Bentham’s vision, it is Astraea who greets the audience/readers, introducing herself as “that person of whom Ovid speaks under the name of Astraea – the Goddess of Justice” (201).
8“Blackstone Familiarized”, which is presented as a vision that came to Bentham in a dream, lies at the intersection of the visual and the discursive and displays affinities with what Anne Teissier-Ensminger calls “jusrisliterature”, a tradition which reached its peak with texts written between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries by jurists keen on making legal studies palatable to young people. Bentham, who hoped that the presence of “characters” would give “some little life” or “a little variety to the scene”, clearly hoped to seduce potential readers by means of such a device: “If in any part of the field, in the course of our progress, the sombre hue of [the truth] should be found in any degree enlivened, the more it can be so, the better: the greater the number of our readers, whom we can allow ourselves to hope, how faint so ever, of prevailing on to accompany us to the termination of our course” (121, 122, 125). Confirming the strategic importance of liminal spaces, the preludes, prefaces and introductions present in the three main legal genres – the introduction to Law, the argued debate, and the interpretative commentary – were meant to seduce readers harbouring negative visions of legal studies as unrewarding. Literary devices – such as fables, adages, proverbs and mythological references – furthermore served the educational and didactic dimensions of these texts.
- 6 For example, Ottavio Ferrari (1607-82) used such devices in De Nuptiis philologiae (1650). It would (...)
9By the eighteenth century, mythology had become a “worn literary medium, and therefore a double-edged discursive weapon”, the challenge being for authors to transfigure hackneyed rhetorical devices (Teissier-Ensminger 209, my translation). For instance, the device of the vision of the Goddess of Justice appearing in a dream was already a well-tested one.6 In some respects, Bentham seems to take readers to a mythical, ahistorical time, as when he writes, borrowing the standard opening of fairy tales: “Once upon a time – no matter when – it can not have been long ago – I – no matter who I am – dreamed a dream” (200). But the critical potential of the dream soon becomes apparent: “Statute law is in but too large a proportion a sad reality. Common law is from beginning to end, to him who sees it in it’s [sic] true light, a frightful dream. To each dreamer it is a separate dream – to but too many a golden one” (202a).
10Revealing the true state of the law and measuring the gap which separated it from its desirable form was precisely the purpose of the text, which was meant for the “People of England”, addressed by Astraea as her “beloved children” (206), but also ironically designated “learned Gentlemen” as well as “Noble and learned Lords” (23). The choice of a theatrical performance may be read as an attempt to reach a broader audience than the educated circles which were presumably already familiar with Bentham’s work, and to perhaps tap into the “popular passion for puppet theatre” (Crimmins xii). The text is indeed identified as a “little theatre”, a “Law drama” or a “Proverbe”, and its author compared to a puppet-master, speaking for his creations (121).
11The vision which Bentham describes as having come to him in a dream is located in a paradoxical space which is a “London University Lecture Room” and a “Westminster Hall Court” at the same time (200). The introduction describes a stage with “four desks or boxes” for Astraea and her daughters, and a seat for Blackstone. The actors then come into view: “four personages in female attire, each in a robe of ceremony” and a “Doctor of Law in the University of Oxford”, who is of course Blackstone (201). Prosopopeia, a “communicative device” characterized by a “cognitive form and function” (Melion and Ramakers 1), makes it possible to embody, contrast and confront opposed views on the law. Melion and Ramakers point out that the trope, “whether applied in print, theatre, or poetry, served humanist educational purposes perfectly” and that “[i]ts effects on stage even extended into the realm of the printed play text” (31).
12The didactic aspect of the text is repeatedly stressed. As the preface explains: “at every step, [the reader] will find himself receiving instruction from some one [sic] of [the goddesses] or some other” (121), which is illustrated when Astraea calls on the audience to “hear [her] instruction” (206):
You are come here for instruction. Each taking her part dividing our instruction amongst us we will give you that which, whether as you look for it or no, you all stand in need.
I will explain to you that which belongs to all the nations upon earth. It has been stiled Universal Jurisprudence: it consists of the language of law, and nothing more; To me it belongs to teach you the rudiments of it. I will be to you a faithful interpreter. I will be to you a living glossary. (201)
The glossary comprises what Bentham calls the “words of Jurisprudence”, namely obligation, duty, burden, right, service, power, benefit, possession (64).
13In addition to this expository mode, Bentham also takes advantage of the potential of his “proverbe” to stage and perform, rather than explain, what to him are the foundations of law, as in this dialogue between Astraea and Felicia:
Astraea: Felicia! Begin and inform your disciples what in this country law ought to be.
Felicia: Madam! You have commanded. I am obeying. This command of yours is a law to me.
Astraea: Daughter, you have answered well. Every law is either a command or an assemblage of commands, or a quantity of that matter of which laws are made. […] Law, taken in its totality, the whole assemblage of that matter of which laws are composed, is a system of means directed to an end, as was the law you have just heard me delivering to Felicia: it had your instruction for its end. (213, original emphasis)
The key mode of exposition, however, has to do with the above-mentioned ability of prosopopeia to offer fictional embodiments of conflicting points of view.
- 7 Bentham distinguished between the “subject many” (the disenfranchised productive classes) and the “ (...)
14The point of the “little drama” is indeed to debunk the vision of common law presented in Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, which, according to Bentham, was often understood to be an accurate description of the English legal system. As clearly stated by Astraea, while “[Blackstone’s] primary object was to recommend his work to the favour of the constituted authorities”, hers is “to instruct, and by the instruction serve and benefit, those for whose sake they have been or ought to have been so constituted” (220). Providing “a conception as clear as possible of the state of the law as it is in England” also entailed presenting “law as it ought to be” (75). Such contrast was intended to highlight the virtues of legal and political institutions based on the principle of utility. For instance, after contrasting views on the place that should be granted to happiness in the legal system have been presented through the various characters, Astraea tells the audience: “Disciples, you have heard: you will take your choice. Useful are the lights which may be struck [?] out from the collision of opinions” (215). “Blackstone Familiarized” takes up criticisms already made in earlier texts, but also displays “a striking development in terms of their being put to political use”, which Philip Schofield links to Bentham’s commitment to democracy (Schofield 2018, 25). The overall point in “Blackstone Familiarized” is to “demonstrate to the subject many that the laws of England [are] an instrument of oppression in the hands of the ruling few” (Schofield 2018, 28).7 While Bentham’s earlier texts identified the root of the problem in a “failure of the understanding”, later texts found it in “the corruption of the will” (Schofield 2018, 30). What “Blackstone Familiarized” draws our attention to, in this context, is the potential of myths to work as eye-openers, even a myth as overdetermined as Astraea’s was by the end of the eighteenth century. The next section examines in more detail how Bentham enlists Astraea on the side of radical reform, thereby highlighting the plasticity of myth, notably in connection with ideological implications.
15The myth of Astraea had already been the object of multiple interpretations when Bentham turned to it. The paradigms of her flight from the sinful earth and ascent to heaven were “very popular in European poetry and art” (Proskurina 50). When the goddess is first introduced in “Blackstone Familiarized”, Bentham assumes to be building on common knowledge: “as everybody knows”, he writes, “[o]n a certain occasion, she ascended into heaven. On the present occasion, she descended from heaven” (121). In Greek mythology, Astraea, who had lived amongst mankind as the goddess of Justice during Saturn’s golden age, had retired to the mountains during the Silver Age and was the last of the “immortals” to leave the earth during the Bronze Age, after which she had been placed by Zeus in the sky as the constellation Virgo.
- 8 See Strong, Yates, Wells, Tanner.
16The myth of Astraea’s return to earth was often used to legitimize political power. Thus, Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue (39-41 BCE), which – tellingly – is not mentioned by Bentham at all, contains a prophecy which announces the return of Saturn’s kingdom on earth, ending on the vision of the Virgin Astraea descending to earth with a sacred baby boy, a vision which is tightly connected to the politics of the time of emperor Augustus. This concept of Rome as a return of the golden age – with pax Romana and prosperity – set the terms of subsequent imperial mythologies such as Dante’s Monarchy (ca 1310). This political-theological manifesto advocated an absolute emperor who would suppress the power of the Church and establish a sacred empire. In the wake of Dante, Astraea became a symbol of said empire and her return was depicted in paintings, royal processions, acclamatory odes and sculptural ornaments as part of court ceremony. The clarity of the political symbol thus took over the cosmic connotations of the goddess.8
- 9 See the website of the Royal Collection Trust: https://www.rct.uk/collection/421029/queen-elizabeth (...)
- 10 See De Armas.
- 11 In France, each ascension to the throne was equated with a new return to the times of Astraea, impl (...)
17The cult of Astraea arguably reached its peak during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, especially in poetry, with for instance Sir John Davies’s Hymns of Astraea (1599), but also in iconographic representations, such as the famous portrait by Nicholas Hilliard which idealises the ageing monarch.9 Ideological rewritings continued on the seventeenth century, for example with John Dryden’s poem entitled Astraea Redux, which celebrated the return of Charles II in 1660, but one can also find examples of appropriations for legitimating purposes in Spain10 and in France.11 Thus, at the beginning of the 1640s, the French royal family commissioned Salvator Rosa to paint A Return of Astraea, which praised the end of the Thirty Years’ War and the supposed return of a peaceful golden age ushered in by the regent Anne of Austria (1573-98) and her young son, the future Louis XIV. In Bentham’s time, the myth of Astraea was used in the propaganda to buttress the empire of Catherine II in Russia, which is the focus of Proskurina’s study.
- 12 In Utility and Democracy, Philip Schofield identifies a turning point around the year 1804, corresp (...)
18It may seem a bit surprising to find Bentham in the company of poets and painters who sought to reinforce the power of queens and empresses by drawing on the myth of Astraea, especially as by the 1820s, as noted above, Bentham had fully embraced the cause of parliamentary reform and joined the side of radicals.12 As Schofield explains, the provenance and purpose of the text are specifically related to his efforts in the late 1820s to promote law reform and the work belongs to his attempt to undermine the whole establishment of the UK, and replace it with a representative democracy (Schofield 2018, 25-26). It is telling that Bentham should only refer to the first book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, leaving aside Virgil, Dante as well as later political appropriations, erasing the artistic and literary generations which followed the Latin poet. Although the introduction to “Blackstone Familiarized” states that Astraea’s voice “sounded as if it came from heaven”, thereby enacting the return of the goddess on earth, the goal of the reformer was not to try and restore a past golden age, or to declare that one had begun (201). The purpose was rather to educate the audience about the fact that they were living in a sort of bronze age and to offer the utilitarian bases for an alternative system geared towards achieving the greatest happiness of the greatest number.
- 13 In his 2015 article, Manderson argues that “[i]n times of transition and transformation, legal imag (...)
19Writing against Blackstone’s endorsement of the status quo, Bentham had come to give him the nickname of “everything-as-it-should-be-Blackstone”. As catching as the phrase may be, it may obscure the dual dynamics highlighted by Manderson in his article on the “mestastases” of myth.13 Myths and their visual manifestations are indeed not inherently conservative in the sense of promoting status quo. Rather, “myth is capable of facilitating social change by dressing it up in the frock of eternity” (Manderson 2015, 208). Under the influence notably of Roland Barthes’s analyses, one may envision myth as having the effect of “benumb[ing] critique, essentializing social inequality and tranquilizing social resistance” (Manderson 2015, 208). Indeed, “[m]yth speaks in the voice of eternity; it presents injustice as natural, as inevitable, as nothing more than how things are”, but Manderson argues that it should be regarded as a “gesture of stability” rather than as a “force of stability”, since “invoking the rhetoric of eternity and essence” may “surreptitiously advance the most dramatic of social changes”, which do not necessarily amount to social progress (208, original emphasis).
20In Bentham’s time, one could argue that the myth of immemorial common law covered up the social changes introduced by the Industrial Revolution, notably the growing numbers of disenfranchised workers, and deprived them of participation in the law-making process. On one level, Bentham, anticipating Barthes’s theorization of myths, sought to debunk the myths surrounding the common law because their effect was to prevent social consciousness and sabotage chances of social change. At the same time, his rewriting of the myth of Astraea, which is meant to be an eye-opener, destabilizes the seemingly natural alliance between myths and conservatism. As such it also departs from the examples analysed by Manderson, in which legal images act as a “security blanket” in the sense that they “accommodate individuals to evolving social structures, and invite their participation in them” (2015, 212). Bentham’s revisiting of Astraea thus highlights the plasticity of myth, whose components (such as the movement from the stars down to earth) can be inflected in radical ways.
21Although English common law does not seem to have found allegorical embodiments, Bentham introduces yet another goddess the better to highlight the idolatry of common lawyers, and the lack of substance of the object of their adoration:
The Common Lawyer is not able to produce his Goddess: no, nor ever will be. Yet still he says, Thus saith the Common Law. Tell him this is but sham law, and propose to him to substitute to it the only real law; he becomes frantic: and instead of a rational answer, tells every body that will hear him that you are an Atheist, and that to establish real law would be to subvert all law. (067)
Interestingly, and fittingly for a text centred on the starry-maiden, Bentham unfavourably compares common lawyers to astrologers who claim to be able to predict the future on the basis of “what the stars have determined”: astrologers, according to the reformer, are more “modest” than “Anti-Codifying Common Lawyer[s]” because they, at least, are able to point to the stars they claim to be reading from, whereas the goddess of common law is nowhere to be seen (067).
- 14 For more details see Wrobel 2024.
22Perhaps more surprisingly, another character enters the textual stage unannounced, in the shape of the goddess of fiction. Given Bentham’s well-known distrust of fictions, this point calls for an explanation. First, considering the polysemy of “fiction”, clarification may be in order. Bentham acknowledged the necessity of fictions in the sense of “fictitious entities”, i.e. terms such as “right”, whose existence is “feigned for the purpose of discourse” and without which the latter “could not be carried on” (Bentham 1843 iii, 218). Terms such as “right” but also “quality - property (in the sense in which it is nearly synonymous to quality) relation, power, obligation, duty” have “verbal reality” and are indispensable to thought, communication and discourse, including legal and political ones (Bentham 1843 viii, 126n, original emphasis). What Bentham exposed were the “procedural fictions” in law and “fallacies” in political discourse – such as the state of nature, natural rights, contract theory, or the idea that the Crown never dies – which were harmful because they contributed to perpetuating the established order.14 On this front too, Bentham found himself at odds with Blackstone.
23For instance, when commenting on the fictional trespass committed vi et armis, Blackstone claimed that legal fictions were “highly beneficial and useful” and that “no fiction shall extend to work an injury; its proper operation being to prevent a mischief, or remedy an inconvenience, that might result from the general rule of law” (28). This method of calculated falsehood made it possible to find fair solutions without changing the general rule of law. Such an approach on Blackstone’s part is not surprising, as he regarded fictions as a product of the English constitution, the integrity of which was to be preserved at any cost: legal fiction was “one of those troublesome, but not dangerous, evils which have their root in the frame of our constitution, and which therefore can never be cured, without hazarding everything that is dear to us” (Blackstone 177).
24It was precisely in response to a short passage in Blackstone’s introduction to his Commentaries that Bentham stated that English law was characterized by “Fiction, tautology, technicality, circuity, irregularity, [and] inconsistency”, adding that “the pestilential breath of Fiction poisons the sense of every instrument it comes near” (Bentham 1977, 411n). The common law system failed to provide “a complete body of law”, offering instead a “fictitious composition which has no known person for its author, no known assemblage of words for its substance” (Bentham 1970, 8) and was but “an assemblage of fictitious regulations feigned after the images of these real ones that compose the Statute Law” (Bentham 1977, 120). As Quinn explains, “Bentham’s core objection to common law was that it was a fictitious entity masquerading as law: a set of customary rules alterable at the will of judges, which did not satisfy the essential criteria for law, that is clarity, determinacy, authority and content” (66). At numerous points in his writings, Bentham stressed that legal fiction was a usurpation of legislative power, a “wilful falsehood, having for its object the stealing legislative power”, which furthermore had the perverse effect of accustoming the subject many to deception in politics (Bentham 1977, 509).
- 15 See Justice and Codification Petitions in Bentham 1843 v, 452 and 512.
25Even the choice of the word “fiction” was a misleading fallacy, since it tended to associate with that process the favourable connotations of poetic fiction, and therefore to ward off rational criticism.15 Indeed, as opposed to the fictions of the lawyer, the politician and the priest, literary fiction – or “the fictions of the poet” in Bentham's words – are described as “pure of insincerity”, devoted to amusement and therefore harmless:
The Fictions of the poet, whether in his character of historic fabulist or dramatic fabulist, putting or not putting the words of his discourse in metrical form, are pure of insincerity, and, neither for their object nor for their effect have anything but to amuse, unless it be in some cases to excite to action—to action in this or that particular direction for this or that particular purpose. (Bentham 1932, 58-60)
Bentham’s resort to myth and theatricality in the text under scrutiny may thus be explained by the author’s desire to both “amuse” and “excite to action”.
26In “Blackstone Familiarized”, Bentham observes that in order to “render [himself] intelligible” to the “learned gentlemen”, he has had to resort to what he calls “the Goddess of Fiction” (23). Writing fifty years after his first onslaught on the use of fiction in English law, he acknowledges the fact that fiction is still, for the “learned Gentlemen”, “a crutch on which they delight to lean on”, “every thing that is at once useful and agreeable”, or “an instrument with which they make their most favourite creations [?]” (23). His own resort to fiction thus seems motivated by a form of pragmatism which tries to make the most of the audience’s biases – as if the aging reformer had given up mending his contemporaries’ ways. In the preface which introduces the actresses, he thus writes:
[I]f in presenting them to the reader in such their character of persons, there be a spice of fiction, it is not at any rate for learned gentlemen to make any very strong objection on that score; Alas! if no worse use than is made here had ever been made of fiction in the field of law, the field of society would not be quite so full of human misery as it is seen and felt to be. (121)
When Bentham – again with a lot of irony – describes himself as a “half-starved strolling Player” forced to disguise his indignation and sadness at the true state of English institutions with a “dry laugh”, he comments that he is “relapsing into the sin of fiction” (125, original emphasis). He thus leaves it for readers to decide if his own use of fiction – in the staging and rewriting of the myth of Astraea – is simply a matter of adding a little bit of spice or an actual fall into sin. While careful distinctions between fictitious entities in discourse, procedural fictions in law, political fallacies and the “fictions of the poet” seem indispensable to make sense of Bentham’s theory of fictions, the author of “Blackstone Familiarized” is deliberately playing on the polysemy of the term. The text thus encourages us to take a more nuanced look at Bentham’s lifelong engagement with fictions, as the reformer, in the text under scrutiny, seems ready to make a pragmatic use of the resources it offers for his political project.
27The didactic aspect of the scripted play is indissociable from its satiric vein, as when, for instance, Gubernia (“Law as she is”), states that in some cases, she is so enraged at the wrongdoer that she “kill[s] the man: and if he has any money [she] can get at, [she] put[s] it into [her] own pocket”, the fictional Blackstone adding that “the satisfaction [she] give[s] to [herself] by seeing the other man suffer [is] so very great” (210). From this point of view, “Blackstone Familiarized” may be regarded as yet another instance of the “salient though often overlooked satiric strain in the Bentham corpus” and of a “satiric repertoire” which is “surprisingly broad, ranging from invective to epigrams, from squibs to anatomies” (Mulvihill, 13, 15, original emphasis). Indeed, Bentham made his entry in the Republic of letters with an anonymous translation of Voltaire’s anticlerical tale Le Taureau Blanc (Bentham 1774), to which he added a lengthy preface presenting his elaboration on Voltaire’s religious satire as well as attacks against the press and English common law. Examples of satiric texts may be taken from all stages of his writing career, ending perhaps with Lord Brougham Displayed (1832), the first part of which is entitled Boa Constrictor, alias Helluo Curiarum.
28The strategy which consists in staging a collision of opinions, as highlighted above, may also be found, for instance, in a much earlier text entitled “Truth versus Ashhurst, or, Law as it is, contrasted with what it is said to be” (Bentham 1843 v). This dialogic text was written after the delivery, in November 1792, of a charge to a Middlesex Grand Jury by Sir William Ashhurst, then a Puisne Judge of the King’s Bench. At the time, the fear of revolutionary contagion from the continent had led to the adoption and enforcement of anti-sedition laws that limited free speech, and the charge had been delivered in the context of a trial for sedition. The charges often provided opportunities to exalt the virtues of the British constitution. The layout of the text is binary, presenting first a sentence by Ashhurst (for instance the statement that “No man is so low as not to be within the law’s protection”) and then its refutation under the heading “Truth” (Bentham 1843 v, 233), a pattern which is repeated three more times, after which Bentham goes on to argue that the law, the preserve of “Mr. Justice Ashhurst & Co”, cannot be known by laypeople and that it is “dog-law” in the sense that only after breaking a law can people know what is prohibited (Bentham 1843 v, 235). “Blackstone Familiarized” relies on a similar strategy of juxtaposition, but its tone is less violent. While the satiric intent persists, theatricality and allegory introduce an element of seduction.
29Such consistent resort to satire and contrast has to do with the reformer’s “conviction not only that error must be corrected but that folly and deceit which encourage error be exposed and censured” so that the “positive work of reform” may begin (Mulvihill 13). This continuity may also lead one to reconsider the common “segmenting” of the “study of [Bentham’s] thought chronologically” and the distinction often made between the “younger Bentham – the writer of A Fragment on Government and An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation in the 1770s and 1780s” – and the English radical of later decades (De Champs 3).
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30Bentham's historical positioning means that he is concomitantly the heir of a classical age in which legal writing was pervaded by literary and visual culture – links which legal historians are currently revealing; an eighteenth-century writer who was quite aware of the cultural practices of his time, such as the taste for puppet-theatre; and a reformer looking towards the nineteenth century, who sought to mobilize these first two elements in order to serve the causes of institutional reform. He died in 1832, the day before the first Reform Bill received Royal Assent. “Blackstone Familiarized” may be read as evidence of his awareness of “law’s dependency on aesthetics to ensure faith in its ideals and procedures” (Wardle 239), and as an attempt to appropriate aesthetics to unsettle such faith. The text indeed offers a radical re-envisioning of the myth of Astraea to serve the needs of reform. This entails undoing the reading of Astraea’s return as ushering in a golden age and secularizing a myth whose religious connotations had often been mobilized to buttress the established order. As such, “Blackstone Familiarized” provides a welcome opportunity to reconsider myths, their political impact and ideological appropriations.
31Of course, given the editorial status of the text, which remains unfinished and unpublished and whose fragments include what may be competing versions of, for instance, the introduction and the preface, there are bound to be tensions and contradictions. There seems to remain uncertainty as to who the targeted audience was – the “subject many”, lawyers, the nobility, perhaps all at the same time? Also, instead of four goddesses, readers encounter six, with the invisible goddess of common law and the dangerous but seductive goddess of fiction. Bentham’s surprising mobilisation of a myth to expose things as they are and think a new social order may appear to be in conflict with his well-known distrust of fiction, but the text shows him deliberately playing with the polysemy of the term. Finally, from the point of view of the visual turn taken in Law and Literature, Bentham’s staging of the goddess of universal jurisprudence challenges the gendering essentialization of literature and art as feminine, morally superior and humane by opposition to masculine, insensitive and rationalist law – a dichotomy which sometimes persists in the scholarship (Olson 32).