Chapter 5 - New Worlds

Summary

The Spirit of the Age does not begin with a figure drawn from the front lines of parliamentary politics and popular radicalism, nor with a major presence from the literary world. Instead, William Hazlitt’s compendium of Romanticism’s last men commences with a portrait of Jeremy Bentham. As “one of those persons who verify the old adage, that ‘A prophet has most honour out of his own country,’” Hazlitt writes, Bentham’s reputation “lies at the circumference; and the lights of his understanding are reflected, with increasing lustre, on the other side of the globe.” His name is “little known in England, better in Europe, best of all in the plains of Chili [sic] and the mines of Mexico.”¹ The jurist, philosopher, and constitution-writer appears, in this portrait, at a pronounced remove from bookish concerns, with the focus instead on his democratic impulses. These features of his identity collide, spectacularly, in an example of his apparent disregard for literary tradition.