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Kevin Sexton: Every month, a strange scene plays out in the student centre at University College London. A crowd gathers as a member of the staff gets ready to open up a large glass case.
Liz Blanks: It always gets a lot of excitement actually when we open the case because of its location, so centrally there’s inevitably always a lot of students around.
Kevin: They open it up and check the contents.
Liz: For any kind of creepy crawlies or anything like that, there’s pest traps.
Kevin: It’s a standard maintenance check, and it wouldn’t be all that exciting if it wasn’t for what’s inside that case.
Liz: First appearances, you would just think it’s a man sat in a chair wearing a straw hat, wearing gloves, wearing a dark suit as outfit. But actually underneath is an articulated skeleton, and it’s topped with a wax head.
Kevin: That’s right. There’s a man’s skeleton dressed in 19th century clothing with an extremely realistic wax head, just sitting there between some steps in the space where students hang out and do homework. And this isn’t just any skeleton. These are the bones of the well-known British philosopher Jeremy Bentham. Bentham thought people should make themselves as useful as possible. So nearly 200 years ago, he left his own body behind as his final gift to the world, to be made into this strange display that he called the “auto-icon.” He believed that these grisly statues would proliferate and make the world a better place. So he led by example. I’m Kevin Sexton, and this is Atlas Obscura, a celebration of the world’s strange, incredible, and wondrous places. Today, how did this philosopher’s dead body end up in a university student center?
This is an edited transcript of the Atlas Obscura Podcast: a celebration of the world’s strange, incredible, and wondrous places. Find the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major podcast apps.
Kevin: Jeremy Bentham started planning for his death at a young age. He wrote a will in 1769, at the age of 21, leaving his body to a family friend to be dissected.
Liz: He felt really strongly about being anatomized, so dissected by medical men at the time, so that he could be useful and could be studied.
Kevin: This is Liz Blanks, by the way.
Liz: I’m Liz Blanks. I’m the curator of UCL’s Science Collections, which includes Jeremy Bentham’s auto-icon.
Kevin: I’ll get into details about the auto-icon later, but basically it’s a skeleton with a preserved human head on top. Back when he was still alive, Bentham liked to find solutions to society’s problems. And one problem in 18th century England was that there was a shortage of cadavers for medical students to learn their craft on.
Liz: The only bodies that were anatomized were the bodies of murderers that had been hanged for their crime. But, you know, unfortunately for doctors and fortunately for the rest of us, there wasn’t enough murderers at the time. So there wasn’t enough bodies to fulfill that demand of the medical schools.
Kevin: So to fill the demand, people turned to grave robbing. And a bit later in history, even murders. So Bentham thought, let’s get people like me, non-murderers, to leave their bodies behind as science. He was an atheist, so he didn’t have any hangups about a religious burial or anything like that. And he figured this way he could be useful after death. This kind of thing wasn’t out of character for him. He’s best known today as the father of utilitarianism, the philosophy that we should do whatever leads to the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people. But he had all kinds of ideas that were radical at the time.
Liz: He had really brilliant early ideas around universal suffrage and really was a big proponent for the decriminalization of homosexuality, for example. And he was just a general iconoclast.
Kevin: Bentham also had some ideas that would be less popular today. For example, he was into phrenology, the idea that you could determine someone’s personality and mental abilities by studying the bumps on their head, which lent itself to all sorts of bigotry. And he spent years of his life trying to build the panopticon, this dystopian prison where the prisoners can’t tell if there’s a guard watching them or not. He was also just a weirdo. He really played the part of the eccentric rich guy. He had a walking stick that he named Dapple. It’s actually with the auto icon. His cat was called the Reverend Sir John Langbourne. He had an extremely regimented daily schedule, and he wrote incessantly. But if you ask Liz, among all his ideas …
Liz: His biggest legacy now is his choices around what should happen to his body after his death.
Kevin: Bentham lived to the age of 84. Weeks before he died, he wrote a new will. He still wanted to be dissected.
Liz: He wrote that his good friend, Dr. Thomas Southwood Smith, would be the one to dissect him.
Kevin: But he added some new instructions about what would come next.
Liz: “The skeleton he will cause 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 …”
Kevin: He goes into far more detail. That the skeleton will be topped by his own dried and preserved head. That it will be dressed in his clothing. The part about having his body dissected for science is easy enough to make sense of. Why did he do this other thing?
Liz: There’s a lot of theories around why he created the auto-icon. Not least, a practical joke, maybe.
Kevin: He liked being provocative. Maybe he was just messing with people.
Liz: He was challenging the kind of normative beliefs around religious sensibilities. So, the ideas particularly around what should happen in life and death.
Kevin: Whether or not he was trolling, he laid out his vision in great detail in a pamphlet called auto-icon. Auto-icon, he writes, is a word he made up, and he claims it’s self-explanatory. So your guess is as good as mine. In page after page, he gives the reasons why people should have their bodies preserved in this unusual way. Yes, dissections are useful for the medical community. That’s the first part. But he lists all kinds of other ways that preserving the leftovers like human scarecrows would benefit the world. It would eliminate the need to waste money on a burial. auto-icons could take the place of statues. A well-preserved human head, he notes, would make a better likeness than the work of any artist. He talks about commemorative societies. Who better to chair the Jeremy Bentham Memorial Club than Bentham’s own corpse? He invokes the image of a church wall where heads would take the place of stones. He imagines a country estate where bodies of ancestors would be lined along a path like trees, the faces varnished to protect them from the weather. And this is not just for great men like him. He wants everyone, rich and poor, to be able to do this. He imagines these auto-icons becoming so common that people need to sort out storage for their family. In some, he says you could fill a moderately-sized apartment. In others, a cupboard full of heads will do the trick. And of course, there’s another major possibility why he did all this. Maybe the whole auto-icon thing was just an expression of a big ego, and he came up with all these bizarre ideas to justify his own desire for some form of immortality. In any case, Dr. Southwood Smith complied with his friend’s wishes. He had Bentham’s body dissected in front of an audience, while delivering a lecture about the man’s legacy. Everything went just as Bentham planned. Almost.
Liz: What he didn’t expect, of course, is that the mummification of his head would go quite so wrong. He really wanted to reflect the New Zealand Maori way of head mummification, so mokomokai heads, which they would have seen many of at the time in London, as these were being brought back to the U.K. at a time where there was a lot of colonial imbalances of power. And these remains were removed, so …
Kevin: So yeah, 19th century rich guy stuff. But rather than following the Maori method of drying the head with smoke and sun, the doctor made some changes.
Liz: Southwood Smith used sulfuric acid, and unfortunately it went horribly wrong. And yeah, so the result is a disfigured, grisly head.
Kevin: So Bentham’s buddy had a French artist make a wax head. And I have to give him credit, because this is no Madame Tussauds bizarro world Tom Cruise head. This looks like a real man’s head. Dr. Southwood Smith called it, “One of the most admirable likenesses I’ve ever seen.” So the skeleton, dressed and posed, topped with a wax head, sat in a wooden box in Dr. Southwood Smith’s office for a couple of decades. But eventually he moved, and he didn’t have room for it. So he gave the auto-icon to University College London, which was a fairly new university that had been inspired by many of Bentham’s own ideas. Dr. Southwood Smith visited the school later, and was frustrated to find that the auto-icon was hidden away, only to be seen by request. He complained to a friend that the school seemed to be afraid or ashamed to have this dead philosopher’s body in their possession. They ended up putting it out for the public to see, complete with the original disfigured head sitting between its feet. It has stayed in the public eye ever since. Bentham’s adventures don’t end there. It’s been nearly 200 years since he died, which means there’s been a lot of opportunity for myths to build around this bizarre display. There’s one popular story about students stealing the head and playing soccer with it. It’s a funny image, but the university points out that if that had really happened, there wouldn’t be much of a head left. But there is a kernel of truth to it.
Liz: In 1975, students from the rival university in London called King’s College stole Bentham’s mummified head and ransomed it back.
Kevin: The ransom ended up being £10 for charity, and the head got moved to storage.
Liz: But also in the 1990s, students stole the wax head and actually took it to a bar. There’s a photo.
Kevin: And there are other stories, ones that have nothing to do with stealing Bentham’s head. Like how someone wheels his body into UCL council meetings, where he’s dutifully marked as present but not voting. Again, not true, but that one has a grain of truth to it too.
Liz: He was brought out on at least a couple of occasions for anniversaries, and certainly was in 2013 for the last council meeting attended by the provost at the time.
Kevin: More recently, Bentham was moved from his old wooden box to his current spot in the student centre in a climate-controlled case that’s better for preservation. Liz says Bentham gets visitors from all over the world. As for UCL’s students, some barely clock his presence at all, and others treat him with a sort of reverence.
Liz: They make a pilgrimage to the altar icon in some cases, and actually ask for good luck on their exams.
Kevin: Okay.
Liz: Sometimes we even find lipstick marks on the case as well, where people have kissed the case that he’s inside.
Kevin: I had one final question about working with Bentham’s remains. Is there a smell to the auto-icon?
Liz: Yeah, a little bit of a fusty old book kind of smell, I would say, that you get a lot with museum objects of kind of advanced age. Not unpleasant.
Kevin: I can’t help but wonder what Jeremy Bentham would think of all this. The stories, the kidnapping of the head, the fact that his body is on display by some student workstations. I asked Liz what she thought.
Liz: Because there was no small part of self-importance around making your own image, your own icon, I think he would be fascinated by it, actually.
Kevin: Bentham was the first and only auto-icon. His dream of preserving whole families and filling cupboards with desiccated heads never panned out. Still, I think about how many people have gotten joy and delight out of seeing this weird preserved body over the span of nearly 200 years. And when it comes to his fundamental worldview, the idea of creating the most possible happiness in the world, I think you could call that a success.
Listen and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major podcast apps.
Our podcast is a co-production of Atlas Obscura and Stitcher Studios. The people who make our show include Dylan Thuras, Doug Baldinger, Chris Naka, Kameel Stanley, Johanna Mayer, Manolo Morales, Baudelaire, Amanda McGowan, Alexa Lim, Casey Holford, and Luz Fleming. Our theme music is by Sam Tindall.