Editor’s Notepg 52Editor’s Note2406To Étienne Dumont26 August 1817 (Aet 69)

Ford Abbey near Chard 26 Aug. 1817

Reced the day before yesterday, my dear Dumont, your letter dated the 12th² through a letter of Lady Romilly,³ who with her husband, daughter,⁴ and son Frederic⁵ are to visit this sacred place from Bowood some short time after their arrival at that profane place, the 10th of next month.

There is neither common honesty nor common sense in your backsliding: common honesty, because it is backsliding, and the proof is condensed into that single word: Common sense, because though you are a tolerably good boy, and in that quality have some pretensions to a chuck under the chin, yet still, so far as concerns grim gribber⁶ more particularly you are but a boy—I had almost said an infant, and unless you will come and sit in the lap of your old grey-headed master, you will be taken up by some of the harpies you speak of, and drowned, body and soul, in the Cloaca of their formalities.

What I allude to more particularly is the Code d'Instruction⁷—the body of Procedure in penali. For want of a compleat and Tabular View of the Cases capable of occurring and presenting a demand for regulation you will be sadly at a loss: and for want of such an instrument of operation and defence, the lawyers will ram down your throat their blind and ungrounded regulations, which being already in existence, will for that self sufficient cause be irresistible, and you will have nothing left but to stare.

For cases presenting a demand for regulation, all existing Codes are good: for the regulations themselves, none. For the Regulations we should be tolerably competent, so we need the Cases. For the Cases neither you, nor you and I together should be competent without the Books, for life would be at an end before imagination could present what Experience has presented.pg 53 For Books, your Code d'instruction Napoleon would of course be as to this matter the principal basis:⁸ to this we would add for England / English law / the latest book, for Austrian Banniza,⁹ for Prussia Boehmer,¹⁰ both are foundations for me, both detestable sprung out of the Carolinian Code,¹¹ under which Switzerland I suppose still governs: the superadded French Code might also be within reach:¹² it would do us no more harm than a dead rattlesnake. See in the tables to Scotch Reform 28 devices, for bad ends, actually in use enumerated¹³

A Code relative to the liberty of the Press I have at Q.S.P: it was designed for Miranda by whom it was taken (a Copy of it) I believe to Venezuela.¹⁴

• Come sit in my lap
• You shall feed on that pap,
• You young runaway chap.

But suppose I was to part with it, and trust you with it, what use would it be of to you? Every line would present a score of objections, each individual objection, for want of this or that explanation that might be given an insuperable one. No doubt that of all problems this is the most difficult to solve But forget not this. ☞ In the American United States without attempting to solve the knot, they have cut it, and by the cutting the solution is pretty well superadded. For private defamation, yes: law and civil action with damages (pecuniary satisfaction) a coarse and inadequate expedient: to be adequate, honorary should be applicable. But against State-libels, no law: and from the vacuum, no inconvenience felt in any shape. This from Quincy Adams, late Minister Plenipotentiary here, gone back to be Secretary of State: with whom I had long and many confabulatory ambulations.¹⁵

Don't be shocked at this paper: no other was at hand.¹⁶

pg 54Panopticon

A half one is pro tanto as good as a whole one. Where there is but sufficient harmony (I mean among ruling powers) economy can never be a bar to it. A house of detention for suspected persons antecedently to trial, a house of punishment for Convicts, a place of confinement for debtors even such as have concealed funds to force them to give them up for the satisfaction of Creditors (such as have been convicted of fraudulent obtainment rank with other Convicts) a place for the reception of the insane, a School on the Lancastrian plan, even a receptacle for infectious diseases—all these so widely distinct species of receptacles would be capable and even without mischief, for the sake of Economy, of being created under one roof, and subjected to one principal Inspector General. For if put into an upper storey, and made as towards the Center air-tight without being eye-tight a chamber full of the plague might exist in a Panopticon without being really a source of danger.

For cheapness the ground plan should be a semi polygon, not a semicircle. A problem by which my Brother and I were plagued to the last has lately been solved by my friend Place, of whom sooner or later you will hear much. How, without constant stink, to expose the temples of Cloacina to constant inspection? Solution. Consecrate to this office one of the sectors. By means of a religiously-impenetrable coating of putty applied to all the junctions between the glass and the sashes keep it constantly airtight as towards the center, with opening only at the circumference: a door going down into it a few steps by which means upon the opening of the door, the stream of air is carried upwards only without being carried either downwards or sideways. A curtain covers from, or exposes to view, the transactions within at pleasure.

A knot of pious numsculls who, not without a shew of countenance from Ld. Sidmouth¹⁷ are projecting a Panopticon for the prevention or cure of Juvenile Delinquency,¹⁸ are so sure of two things viz. that at night all the inhabitants would join in social impurity, and that sleep would suffice to ensure blindness to any number of appointed Inspectors, that for the mere prevention of this horror, they have destined for the Inhabitants a bedchamber a piece whereby they have more than doubled the necessary expence of the building, and secured to all the undisturbed enjoyment of the abomination in the solitary mode. In spite of all that Mill and Koe could say to them,¹⁹ or I think of them, such was the determination.

pg 55Your existing clumsy receptacles could not they be let or sold to individuals for Manufactures, or made to serve for other public purposes, to which inspection is not necessary?

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'Mon cher Philosophe'—ah, well, you have some excuse for thus calling me names, when the patience you brag of was broken by the hint which by way of encouragement I gave you, putting you in mind of the great man that you are. What? and did you seriously suppose me to suppose that I had a more correct conception of the situation you stand in than you yourself? Not I indeed: but that being the case, what, in the negligence of scribblation had for its object, if it had any object at all the making the good boy hold up his head a little, could not in any degree worth mentioning be productive of any such effect, and had therefore better have been left unsaid.

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Dumonts Visit to Ford Abbey

No; to be sure you must not run any risk of their taking upon themselves any such importance as that of doing any thing in your absence. But, considering that you were not brought up in the grimgribber line, and considering that false homage by which I am to be turned red as scarlet, would there be any thing absurd in your requesting a furlow, even if only not to speak of relief from fatigue for the express purpose of consultation? If you are Numa,²⁰ reprobate as you are, am not I the Nymph Egeria?²¹ Omne ignotum pro magnifico est:²² and Major ex longuinquo reverentia²³ speak of these two aphorisms! Full as I am of all those weaknesses which are visible to all who know me, think whether there are any of them that are visible from your Lake? Any such recourse would it really mismatch with that garb composed of real patience, and real or affected industry, in which it has been so necessary for you to cloathe yourself, and in which with so brilliant a success you have exhibited yourself?