Jeremy Bentham and Edward Wakefield align on prison reform and convict transportation but not on democracy
London's Newgate Prison, where Edward Gibbon Wakefield worked out ideas on prison reform and alternatives for convict transportation.
Image by Philip Norman
The ideas of Jeremy Bentham and Edward Gibbon Wakefield merged on the subject of prison reform and the transporting of convicts from Britain to the colonies.
In Wakefield’s case, the ideas came while he was serving three years in Newgate Gaol on a charge relating to abducting and unlawfully marrying 15-year-old heiress Ellen Turner at Gretna Green in 1826. His Quaker family also was related to Elizabeth Fry, the famous prison reformer.
Bentham’s ideas about prison reform, among other social changes, were proposed in the wake of the American colonies’ declaring independence in the late 18th Century.
In the early 19th Century, Bentham argued for a panopticon, his ideal of a prison, against the concept of transporting convicts to the colonies.
In 1831, in a “Colonisation Society Proposal”, Bentham incorporated Wakefield’s ideas for systematic colonisation as a way to move away from convict settlement. In his proposal, Bentham argues for a free democratic colony with South Australia in mind.
The common commitment of Bentham and his followers was for democracy. In contrast, Wakefield has been described as a “social conservative” who saw democracy as a threat to stability. He “deplored the march to revolution” that could destroy society. His system was a “systematic, middle class colonisation” – a system where “Capitalists shall never suffer from an urgent want of Labourers, and that Labourers shall never want well-paid employment”.
Douglas Pike in his history of early South Australia, Paradise of Dissent, sees this as creating an inescapable agricultural serfdom. This becomes tangled into a policy belonging to Jeremy Bentham and his philosophical radical followers who are said to be “authoritarian reformers” who found experimenting with their ideas in “the colonies in tutelage” attractive. This seemed to overlook the strong part that Bentham’s ideas, through his followers, John Roebuck and Francis Place, played in England’s Chartist movement that stemmed from the working class and was eventually suppressed.
Chartist ideas would play out in the Australian colonies through episodes such as the Eureka stockade.
