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John Bowring and Unitarianism*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 January 2009

R. K. Webb
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Extract

For those to whom John Bowring's name means anything, the most likely association with it is the complex and question-begging term ‘Benthamite’. Contemporaries certainly used the term, particularly when they wanted to suggest that his actions were narrowly ideological or theoretical. But to some of Bowring's contemporaries another association served hostile intent almost as well: his Unitarianism.

Type
Research Article
Information
Utilitas , Volume 4 , Issue 1 , May 1992 , pp. 43 - 79
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1992

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Footnotes

*

My earliest and most extensive research on John Bowring was done during two periods of leave in Britain in 1959–60 and 1966–67, made possible by the generosity of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies. I am also grateful to audiences who have heard and criticized my account of Bowring at the Victorian Studies Centre, University of Leicester, in the University Seminar on Political Thought at Columbia University, at the University of Exeter, at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and in the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University. My colleague Professor Ka-che Yip made valuable suggestions about the highly compressed section on China. For help at different times with securing sources, I also want to thank Dr J. M. Winter of Pembroke College, Cambridge, Dr Alan Seaburg of the library at the Harvard Divinity School, and Dr Joanna Parker, Mrs Barbara Smith, and Mrs Margaret Sarosi at Manchester College, Oxford.

References

1 Bolton Chronicle, 12 06 1841Google Scholar:

A sort of Boswell to Bentham, he lickspittled himself into the good graces of that softhearted and benevolent man, whose incomprehensible diction in his works most fortunately counteracted the propagation of his mistaken political sentiments. … What Bentham propounded freely and independently … Bowring took up … as a source of emolument.

The Bolton Free Press, 11 11 1846Google Scholar, quoted the Chronicle's praise of Bowring's Tory opponent by saying that he had never ‘translated Sclavonian poetry, read Bohemian ballads, or written “Benthamite balderdash”’; on 28 November, noting that its contemporary had referred to Bentham as Jeremy Diddler, the Free Press remarked that ‘it is always the little dog that is first to lay his leg on the dead lion’. The Friend of China and Hong Kong Gazette, 29 05 1857Google Scholar, urged Lord Elgin to dissociate himself from Bowring, ‘that superlucent Benthamite’, whose ‘soft platitudinal vanities’ and ‘artistically egotistical sentiments’ would proclaim him ‘the be all and end all of this present difficulty’. Even friendly commentators could express scepticism about the relevance of the Philosophical Radicals; thus the Daily News, 20 10 1860:Google Scholar

Its members were theorists rather than practical politicians. They cared far more for the logical accuracy of their reasonings than for positive results. … From living habitually in a region of speculation, the Philosophical Radicals contracted unconsciously a kind of prejudice against the real as the commonplace, the vulgar; and in proportion as any scheme they had espoused … advanced towards realization, they instinctively shrank away from it.

2 Danney of Appin, recalled by Burton, John Hill in a letter to Brougham, Lord, 22 02 1845, University College London, 20,016Google Scholar. Blackburn Gazette, 30 05 1832Google Scholar: ‘Strong complaints have been made of the conduct of a certain party, who have represented Dr. Bowring as an Infidel. … Dr. Bowring is not an Infidel, but an Unitarian’. Bolton Chronicle, 19 06 1841:Google Scholar

Referring to the parable … of the Good Samaritan, [Bowring] compared the Anti-corn law league … to that benevolent wayfarer. But not content with this alleged comparison, he proceeded, in the warmth of his Unitarian zeal, to pronounce the following words,—‘Jesus Christ is Free Trade, and Free Trade is Jesus Christ.’ The awful and impious declaration was loudly cheered by a batch of Unitarian heathens upon the stage, who manifestly delighted in the opportunity of applauding such audacious irreverence.

In reply, Bowring denied that he had spoken irreverently. Born of religious parents and religiously educated, he said, ‘if in the question of free trade he felt deeply interested, it was because he believed it to be intimately associated with religious truth and the exercise of religious principles’ (Bolton Free Press, 26 06 1841)Google Scholar. For Bowring's certainty about the role of Unitarianism in his defeat in 1837, a letter to Carpenter, R. L., extracted in the Inquirer, 18 10 1867Google Scholar, under the heading ‘Unitarianism in Scotland’.

3 Friend of China and Hong Kong Gazette, 23 05 1855Google Scholar. On 6 June, with exasperation clearly outrunning sense, the paper referred to Bowring's early decision ‘to support the Old Dynasty with its Unitarian system of government’.

4 Diary, Crabb Robinson, 31 12 1820Google Scholar; 4 May 1823; 29 May 1835; 5 June 1846; and 26 May 1847; Southern, to Robinson, , 6 04 1824, Dr Williams's Library.Google Scholar

5 Diary, Crabb Robinson, 14 12 1826, 12 03 1837CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Hunter's Diary, BL Add. MS 39,818, fos. 297b and 306. The Committee was certainly critical of the Commission, and Hunter had a number of embarrassing and awkward moments. But the questioning was dominated by the chairman, Charles Buller, and by Sir Robert Inglis, and the minutes of evidence contain only one question—on Danish record publications—from Bowring to Hunter. So, unless Bowling played some now undiscoverable role behind the scenes (Henry Cole appears to have been the principal coach of the Committee members), his mere association with what an increasingly paranoid Hunter saw as an inquisition must explain the breach, though Hunter would have had plenty of opportunities in London to observe Bowling's less appealing traits. Repon of the Select Committee on the Record Commission, Commons Sessional Papers (1836), xvi.Google Scholar

6 On her refusal to write for the Westminster Review, while Bowring was in charge, Martineau, Harriet to Fox, W. J., 7 10 1829, R. S. Speck Collection, Bancroft Library, University of California, BerkeleyGoogle Scholar; on the cause of the falling out, Harriet, to Martineau, James, 12 04 1830Google Scholar in James's shorthand abstract, Manchester College, Oxford. Harriet Martineau's letter to Bright, undated but c.1862, with instructions that the letter be burned, is in the Martineau Collection, Birmingham University Library. She repeated to Bright what someone who had known Bowring as a boy had told her sister, that, forbidden by his mother to have the silk handkerchief he wanted, he found one in the street, salvaged a presentable piece of it, and sewed it to a cotton handkerchief, allowing the silk corner to hang from his pocket.

7 Daily News, 2 01 1855Google Scholar (for the identity of the author, the handlist of her contributions to the Daily News, 1852–1866Google Scholar, compiled by R. K. Webb and available in the British Library newspaper library, Colindale, and in a few additional libraries); Friend of China, 28 03 1855Google Scholar. The point at issue was the sequestering of duties at Shanghai when the Taiping rebellion prevented the imperial authorities from collecting them or providing the reciprocal protection of merchants' interests. When the custom house was reopened, Bowring insisted on the payment of the back duties; the merchants resisted and were supported by the Foreign Office. Harriet Martineau's feelings fed her editorial opposition to China policy after the bombardment of Canton (see 26 March 1857—‘Blind as a bat in regard to the power and condition of public opinion in England’—and 14 11 1857Google Scholar), as did her hero-worship of Lord Elgin, who was sent out to deal with the situation created by Bowring's action at Canton. Clarendon had reason to know about Bowring's impulsiveness and stubbornness, for they had been colleagues on a mission to France in the 1830s, when Bowring was particularly bumptious. Villiers, to Auckland, Lord, 1 03 1834, BL Add. MS 34,459, fos. 23–7.Google Scholar

8 Extracts from Lewin's satirical account were inserted by Leader, R. E. in Ward, Thomas Asline, Peeps into the Past, London, 1909, pp. 276–7Google Scholar. For sheer malice, compounded by ingratitude, nothing matches the last appendix, ‘The Old Radical’, in Borrow, George's Romany Rye, London, 1857.Google Scholar

9 Fox, to Fox, Eliza, 08 1817, and 15 12 1817Google Scholar, Memoir of Mrs. Eliza Fox, London, 1869, pp. 154–5Google Scholar. A— is undoubtedly Robert Aspland, minister at the Gravel Pit Chapel, Hackney, who was at the party.

10 Inquirer, 30 11 1872CrossRefGoogle Scholar; the quotations are from the leading article on p. 765 and the obituary proper is on p. 776. Unitarian Herald, 29 11 1872.Google Scholar

11 Inquirer, 11 07 1846Google Scholar. Bowring, John, The Press … and other Poetry, Wortley, 1846Google Scholar. The book was printed on Barker's press, of course.

12 Hennell, Sara S., Memoir of Charles Christian Hennell, n.s., 1899, pp. 111–12Google Scholar. Autobiographical Recollections of Sir John Bowring, ed. Bowring, L. B., London, 1877, pp. 388–9.Google Scholar

13 For the Non-Con Club, Mineka, Francis E., The Dissidence of Dissent: The Monthly Repository, 1806–1838, Chapel Hill, 1944, p. 136Google Scholar and the listing of the papers (printed in the Repository) on pp. 398–400. On the BFUA, Short, H. L., ‘The Founding of the British and Foreign Unitarian Association’, Transactions of the Unitarian Historical Society, supplement to vol. xvi, no. 1 (10 1975).Google Scholar

14 Bowling's reports in accounts of the annual meetings of the BFUA are in the Monthly Repository down to 1831 and for the two years following in the Unitarian Chronicle. There are many letters to the Revd E. S. Gannett and others in the letter-books of the American Unitarian Association in the library of the Harvard Divinity School. A good example is the letter to Gannett, , 29 12 1829CrossRefGoogle Scholar, asking that tracts be sent to Don Francisco Diaz Morales, a former member of the Cortes, whose conversion to Unitarianism gave Bowring hopes for southern Europe; but, given the circumstances, he warned, Diaz's name must not be mentioned publicly. See also Lavan, Spencer, Unitarians and India: A Study in Encounter and Response, Boston, 1977.Google Scholar

15 Davis, V. D., The London Domestic Mission Society: Record of a Hundred Years, London, 1935Google Scholar. Tuckerman, 's letter about the Manchester mission is in Unitarian Chronicle, ii (1833), 239–41Google Scholar. See also Holt, Anne, A Ministry to the Poor, being the History of the Liverpool Domestic Mission Society, 1836–1936, Liverpool, 1936Google Scholar. On Tuckerman, McColgan, Daniel T., Joseph Tuckerman, Pioneer in American Social Work, Washington, DC, 1940Google Scholar. Bowring's involvement in the prehistory of the London Domestic Mission is clear from Tuckerman, 's reports printed in the Monthly RepositoryGoogle Scholar. See also Bowring's clearly impressed account of a service at the new Devonport Unitarian congregation, made up almost entirely of workingmen's families, in the Monthly Repository, n.s. iii (09 1829), 667Google Scholar. There are Bowring letters to Tuckerman in the Massachusetts Historical Society, but I have not been able, so far, to trace the large collection of Tuckerman papers used by McColgan.

16 Hennell, S. S., Memoir, pp. 111–12Google Scholar. Channing was not so much admired among older Unitarians, in good part because of his criticism of Joseph Priestley, but for singular praise for Channing from the leaders of the two bitterly opposed sides in the mid-century struggle within English Unitarianism, see Martineau, James, ‘William Ellery Channing’, Prospective Review, xv (08 1848), 351–90Google Scholar, and ‘Life of Channing’, Westminster Review, i (01 1849), 317–49Google Scholar, combined into ‘Memoir and Papers of Dr Channing’, in Martineau, 's Essays, Reviews, and Addresses, London, 1891, i. 81–148Google Scholar, and Tagart, Edward, A Tribute to the Memory of the Rev. William Ellery Channing, London, 1842Google Scholar. It cannot be said that Channing returned the compliment. He had visited England in 1822, as part of a European tour. He had preached to a few congregations, but was rather stand-offish towards the Unitarians generally—it was hinted that he had been too captivated by Robert Southey. He kept well abreast of English Unitarian affairs, but was contemptuous of the Priestleyan school, as he was about much of English society, but hoped that James Martineau's initiatives would do much to improve the denomination. Instances of all this can be readily found in LeBreton, Anna Letitia, ed., Correspondence of William Ellery Channing, D. D. and Lucy Aikin, from 1826 to 1842, Boston, 1874.Google Scholar

17 Bowling hoped that Channing would come to England ‘as the instrument of saying to the world some of those ennobling truths which it has been your great privilege to defend,—proclaim & develop’. Or, again, having referred to Channing's ‘mighty & majestic’ work and his eloquent voice: ‘We hear it & we echo it back. … And we say to you “Speak on”—“speak & we are listening”.’ Bowring, to Channing, , 23 12 1828 and 28 08 1835Google Scholar, Channing Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society. For a public tribute, Monthly Repository, n.s., iii (07 1829), 516–17.Google Scholar

18 Stephenson, H. W., Unitarian Hymn-Writers, London, 1931, pp. 21–2Google Scholar. He continues: ‘Such writing was a form of pleasurable recreation rather than a direct result of some inspiration which must find utterance. But, even so, sometimes in the act of writing, the inspiration did come, and with it the words that bodied it forth not unworthily.’

19 Autobiographical Recollections, p. 31.Google Scholar

20 Barbauld, Anna Laetitia, Devotional Pieces compiled from the Psalms of David, with Thoughts on the Devotional Taste and on Sects and Establishments, London, 1775Google Scholar. Mrs Barbauld's niece Aikin, Lucy (The Works of Anna Laetitia Barbauld, with a Memoir, London, 1826)Google Scholar suggests that the essay did not escape ‘without some animadversion’. Priestley's blast is in a letter to MrsBarbauld, , 20 12 1775Google Scholar, in Memoirs of Dr Priestley, in Rutt, J. T., ed., The Theological and Miscellaneous Works of Dr. Joseph Priestley, 25 vols., London, 1817–1832, i, pt. 1, 278–86Google Scholar. But Priestley's differences with his friend did not mean that he rejected expressions of personal piety, far from it: see ‘A Discourse on Habitual Devotion’ (1780)Google Scholar, in ibid., xxv. 104–21. Bowring, , in his Autobiographical Recollections (pp. 352–3)Google Scholar, wrote: ‘Mrs Barbauld's prose hymns, which I heard from the lips of my parents, appeared to my childish imagination the perfection of pathos and poetry, and I deemed it a great privilege afterwards to be in close intimacy with her, while I was much flattered by some complimentary verses which she addressed to me’.

21 On the change in dedication, see the letters to Carpenter, Lant, 25 and 31 12 1823Google Scholar, Manchester College, Oxford, and the review in the Christian Observer, xxiii (11 1823), 697–708Google Scholar (which Bowring thought was by Wilberforce). See also Eclectic Review, n.s., xx (08 1823), 162–71Google Scholar. Neither reviewer thought Bowring's work (for which there was much praise) could qualify as piety because of the familiarity of address to God and the failure to adore the Saviour. Bowring was unhappy with the favourable review in the Monthly Repository, which he felt had to strain to compensate for the orthodox attacks. Another instance of Unitarian devotional literature is Wellbeloved, Charles, Devotional Exercises, for the Use of Young Persons, London, 1801Google Scholar. In 1823, Harriet Martineau, just beginning her literary career, anonymously published Devotional Exercises: consisting of Reflections and Prayers, for the Use of Young Persons, which reached a third edition in 1832. She intended her little book as a substitute for the long-promised second volume of Wellbeloved, which he did not produce until the eighth edition of Devotional Exercises in 1832Google Scholar. A Memorial Volume of Sacred Poetry by the late Sir John Bowring was published by his widow in 1873.Google Scholar

22 In the Monthly Repository: ‘Ultra-Catholicism in France’, xv (06 1820), 325–32Google Scholar; ‘State of Religion in Sweden’, xix (1824), 193–200Google Scholar—both papers given at the Non-Con Club; ‘Mr. Bowring on Religion in Holland and Germany’, n.s., ii (03 1828), 150–1Google Scholar and the ensuing exchange with Dr C. F. Wurm in Hamburg about a possible misinterpretation of the position of Professor Paulus on Catholic Emancipation in Britain, , n.s., ii (09 1828), 602–5Google Scholar and n.s., ii (October 1828), 712.

23 A Unitarian mission was established in Paris during the Revolutionary years by Israel Worsley, whose son took up the cause. On the Germans, the French, and the Americans, Bowring, to Carpenter, Lant, 7 07 1828, Manchester College, OxfordGoogle Scholar. Monthly Repository, n.s., ii (03 1828), 150–1Google Scholar, and (September 1828), 602–5.

24 Bowring, to Beard, J. R., 16 02 1846 and 8 10 1863Google Scholar, Woodhouse Collection, Unitarian College MSS, John Rylands University Library of Manchester. Hennell, , Memoir, p. 110Google Scholar. Bowring wrote to the Monthly Repository (u.s., vi. 555)Google Scholar about Lant Carpenter's elucidation of the term atonement not as sacrifice but as reconciliation, at-one-ment, by offering two literary instances—from As You Like It (‘Then is there mirth in Heaven/When earthly things made even/Atone together’) and from Beaumont, and Fletcher, (‘I have been atoning two most wrangling neighbours’).Google Scholar

25 When the new Manchester Academy was opened in 1786, Barnes, Thomas, the minister of Cross Street Chapel, proclaimed ‘Truth, Liberty, Religion’ as the motto of the College, and when the new buildings were erected in Oxford in 1893Google Scholar, those words were inscribed over its main entrance. On the origins and uses of the phrase, Webb, R. K., ‘And the Greatest of These is Liberty: The Manchester College Motto in its Setting’, Faith and Freedom, xl (1987), 3–20.Google Scholar

26 The Importance and Extent of Free Inquiry in Matters of Religion, 1785Google Scholar, in Rutt, J. T., ed., The Theological and Miscellaneous Works of Joseph Priestley, xv. 70–82.Google Scholar

27 A good example of this orientation in a contemporary is offered by William Hincks, tutor in mathematics and natural, mental, and moral philosophy at Manchester College from 1827 to 1839, founder of the Inquirer, the Unitarian weekly newspaper, in 1842, and later professor of natural history at Cork and Toronto. His Manchester College students thought him more interested in politics and reform than in science, but he never ceased to insist that science and religion could not be in contradiction and that apparent contradiction would be resolved in the advance of knowledge. See The Importance of Religious Truth, and the Certainty of an Universal Diffusion, London, 1821Google Scholar and Illustrations of Unitarian Christianity, London, 1845Google Scholar. Such confidence in the identity of religious and scientific truth helps to explain why Unitarians generally welcomed the scientific advances of the nineteenth century and found little occasion to suffer from a ‘crisis of faith’. See Webb, R. K., ‘The Faith of Nineteenth-Century Unitarians: A Curious Incident’, in Helmstadter, Richard J. and Lightman, Bernard, ed., Victorian Faith in Crisis: Essays on Continuity and Change in Nineteenth-Century Religious Belief, London, 1990, pp. 126–49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

28 Bowring, to Babbage, , 4 08 1865Google Scholar, BL Add. MS 37,199, fo. 247. Bowring, to SirHooker, William, director of Kew Gardens, 23 03 1854Google Scholar, Rylands 1230 (35). Bowring, to Worcester, J. E., 29 05 1841Google Scholar, thanking him for his election as a foreign member of the American Statistical Society, Massachusetts Historical Society.

29 Bowring, to Babbage, , 4 08 1865Google Scholar, BL Add. MS 37,199, fo. 247. Bowring, , The Influence of Knowledge on Domestic and Social Happiness, London, 1846Google Scholar. Inquirer, 29 05 1847 and 30 08 1862.Google Scholar

30 On Religious Progress beyond the Christian Pale, London, 1866Google Scholar. The positivist resonances in that address echo even more clearly in a poem, ‘Law Universal’, in the Inquirer, 5 06 1869Google Scholar: ‘Our varied musings lead us to/Some general law that all explains./Thro' fictions and thro' fancies rude,/One safe conclusion we may draw;/That all, when rightly understood,/All,—all is order,—all is law.’

31 Autobiographical Recollections, pp. 337–44Google Scholar. Bowring, to Bowring, F. H., 19 11 1845Google Scholar, John Rylands Library. The arrangement was one of mutual benefit. Bowring told Hobhouse (4 October 1827, BL Add. MS 36,464, fo. 64) at the time of his business failure (when Bowring went to live in Queen Square Place) that Bentham's ‘delicacy & kindness are something more than paternal’. Bentham's recommendations of Bowring for the chair of literature at London University and his stern rebuke for the rejection are in letters to Brougham, , 13 and 20 09 1827, and 1 06 1828Google Scholar, Brougham MSS, University College London. Conceding that he could not make a judgment of the younger man on grounds of taste, Bentham cited Bowring's linguistic attainments and suggested that Bowring could serve as foreign correspondent for the University and also ‘preach the gospel of Utilitarianism’.

32 ‘The Transmission of Benthamite Ideas, 1820–1850’, a paper given in 1959 and printed in Sutherland, Gillian, ed., Studies in the Growth of Nineteenth-Century Government, London, 1972, pp. 11–32Google Scholar. Finer does not deal with Bowring, but there is no question about his belonging to the ‘circle of intimates’, where, indeed, he was one of what Sarah Austin called the ‘low radicals’ who in the last years of Bentham's life largely displaced the Benthamites with whom Finer and most other scholars have been primarily concerned.

33 When a new prison was in prospect in Westminster, Bowling wrote to Hobhouse (23 February 1826, BL Add. MS 36,461, fo. 505) that the bill offered a splendid opportunity to introduce the Panopticon project; as a justice of the peace in Devon in 1865 Bowling published a pamphlet, On Remunerative Prison Labour, as an Instrument for Promoting the Reformation and Diminishing the Cost of Offenders, in which, though most of his figures were drawn from the Continent or later English reformers, the central idea of a managed discipline that pays for itself is specifically ascribed to Bentham. He told Francis Place in 1828 (18 July, BL Add. MS 37,950, fo. 26) that he was putting him in touch with Dr Wurm in Hamburg, ‘one of the men on whom I calculate most for the spread of Utilitarian philosophy’; on Wurm, see above n. 22. When Lord John Russell wrote to Bowring for advice at the request of the Select Committee on Public Documents, he told Place that ‘I am sending him a document à la Bentham’ (25 February 1833, BL Add. MS 37,949, fos. 300–1). Second Report of the Select Committee on Public Documents, Commons Sessional Papers (1833), xii. 53 and 58Google Scholar. Bowring, to Hobhouse, , 23 02 1826, BL Add. MS 36,461, fo. 505.Google Scholar

34 The Bowring-Chadwick correspondence is in University College London. Bowring, , Observations on the Oriental Plague and on Quarantine, as a Means of Arresting its Progress, Edinburgh, 1838Google Scholar; much space in Bowring's reports on Egypt and Syria in the 1830s is given over to anti-contagionist argument; see Report on the Commercial Statistics of Syria, Commons Sessional Papers (1840), xxi. 183, 96ff.Google Scholar, and Report on Egypt and Candia, Commons Sessional Papers (1840), xxi. 103ff.Google Scholar, and his article on quarantines in Howitt's Journal, ii (4 and 11 12 1847), 362–5 and 376–9Google Scholar. Bowring hedged on the New Poor Law while campaigning in Bolton: ‘He had no affection for the commissioners, and he must say that the little faith he had in them had been shaken by what had just transpired … in this borough. … Still, he was bound to say, he had known them to exercise their powers to protect the poor, and … he should be inclined to continue them … [with] their powers defined by law, and … as little margin as possible for their caprices' (Bolton Free Press, 23 10 1841Google Scholar). Nevertheless, the Bolton Chronicle, 3 07 1841Google Scholar, called him the Chartist candidate.

35 Unitarian Chronicle, ii (07 1832), 105–6.Google Scholar

36 De Morgan, S. E., Memoir of Augustus De Morgan, London, 1882, p. 373Google Scholar; Bellot, H. H., University College London, 1826–1926, London, 1929, pp. 57–8 and 108Google Scholar. Bowring and Smith were not the only Unitarians in Bentham's circle; Southern and Coulson were others. Excluded from the older universities, young Unitarians flocked to London University, or University College as it became.

37 The very radical Dr John Elliotson was appointed, but resigned in 1842 after the Council of the College had ordered him to cease his mesmeric experiments in the hospital. Williams, J. H. Harley, Doctors Differ, London, 1946.Google Scholar

39 Webb, R. K., Harriet Martineau, a Radical Victorian, London, 1960, pp. 88–90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

39 Armstrong, to Martineau, , 5 03 1835Google Scholar, Manchester College, Oxford. Elliott, to Ward, T. A., 1 01 1832Google Scholar, [a misdating for 1833,] in Ward, , Peeps into the Past, p. 301Google Scholar. Charles Babbage was the famous mathematician; Thomas Asline Ward was a Sheffield businessman, editor, and intellectual; Samuel Bailey a Sheffield merchant and philosopher; all of them were Unitarians or closely associated with Unitarians. The identity of Whiteley has so far eluded me. In the Blackburn election in 1832, which Bowring lost, he makes no mention of Bentham nor is there any definable Benthamite rhetoric in any of the speeches or addresses I have seen. What was congenial to him was unadulterated radical tub-thumping:

Reformers know too well what they have to expect from those whom Tories call ‘thorough bred Britons.’ Murdering Magistrates, flogging Captains, renegade Lawyers, vile Boroughmongers, persecuting Parsons, liberty-loathing Peers, haters of light, haters of truth, haters of knowledge, are their ‘thorough bred Britons’. … Aye, of thorough bred baseness (Blackburn Gazette, 18 07 1832).Google Scholar

His programme was put succinctly in an address to the electors: good and economical government, relieving industry from its burdens and giving honourable labour a full share in prosperity, peace, the rights of the many over the rights of the few, accountability in the financial system, the separation of church and state, ending slavery at home and abroad, cheap bread, cheap justice, the diffusion of knowledge and giving to improvement ‘a multitudinous voice’, efficient control of expenditure at all levels of government, the reorganization of local government, and the extension of the suffrage (ibid., 31 October 1832). In Bolton in 1841, he concluded an address by saying ‘In a word, Gentlemen, “the greatest happiness of the greatest number” represents the end and object of my political creed’ (Bolton Free Press, 19 06 1841)Google Scholar, but the great theme of his campaign was free trade.

40 Bowring had been helped in revising the proofs by Mary Hennell, one of C. C. Hennell's sisters who was soon to marry Charles Bray, a Coventry ribbon manufacturer and necessarian philosopher. Bowring expressed his appreciation by giving her a medallion of himself (Hennell, , Memoir, p. 13).Google Scholar

41 Monthly Repository, n.s., viii (09 1834), 612–14Google Scholar. Mill gave his favourable view in a letter to Nichol, J. P., 14 10 1834Google Scholar, The Earlier Letters of John Stuart Mill, 1812–1848, ed. Mineka, Francis E., 2 vols., Toronto, 1963Google Scholar, Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, xii. 236Google Scholar. Mill's partial abandonment of Bentham following his ‘mental crisis’ in the late twenties and his brilliantly perceptive essay of 1836 was remarkably paralleled by Martineau's detaching himself from Priestley in an essay in MR in 1833, also much admired by Mill.

42 Bowring says that Hartley perceived ‘the true meaning of happiness’ and ‘translated … the language of felicity into the language of pain and pleasure’, but saw not the bearing of the whole on the Greatest Happiness Principle, nor referred to it under that name, nor under any other name, as ‘the all-directing guide in the work of public and private life. He advanced beyond his forerunners, and there stopped short in sight of the shore, upon which he never landed.’ In the long version of Bentham, 's ‘Article on Utilitarianism’ in 1829Google Scholar, the relevant passage dismisses Hartley's Observations on Man as ‘far from being all-comprehensive; far, widely far from being adequate to the demand which the application of this branch of art and science to the purpose of giving direction to human conduct in the several walks of life, public as well as private, is continually presenting’. The short version, on which Bowring chiefly relied, after referring to the ‘translation … of the language … of happiness into the language of pain and pleasure’, reads: ‘But neither by the name of the greatest happiness principle, nor by that of the principle of utility, nor in short by any other name, is any express mention made of the principle in question in the character of all-directing guide in the walks of public as well as private life.’ Bentham appended a note asking Bowring, if it seemed worth while, to consult the Observations ‘for the purpose of security against misrepresentation’. The fine, if unhistorical metaphor is, then, Bowling's, but it is not impossible that it arose, and was savoured, in conversation between the two men. Bowring, , Deontology, i. 295Google Scholar; Deontology, together with A Table of the Springs of Actions and the Article on Utilitarianism, ed. Goldworth, Amnon, Oxford, 1983 (The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham), pp. xxxiii–xxxv, 290–1 and 324–5.Google Scholar

43 Christian Reformer, n.s., ii (1835), 185–92, 703–12, 784–91 and 846–58Google Scholar. I have not been able to discover the authorship.

44 Deontology (CW), pp. xxxii–xxxiiiGoogle Scholar. Bentham wrote (p. 131):

But under the guidance of religion men have made to themselves an almighty being, whose delight is in human misery, and who, to prevent a man's escaping from whatsoever misery he may be threatened with in the present life, has without having denounced it formed a determination, in the event of any such escape, to plunge him into infinitely greater misery in a life to come. Bowring's version on p. 79 reads in full:

True it is, and melancholy as true, that the name of religion has been employed to introduce an Almighty being, whose delight is in human misery. Men have been found, who, shutting their eyes to all the evidence around them—the unbounded evidence of goodness and of power—have introduced final misery—hopeless, interminable misery, as the consummation of his awful dispensations. The dreadful dogma is not to be found in Christianity. It is a most vain, most pernicious, most groundless conceit. The Christian Scripture lies open to every eye. In no one part of it is intimation given of any such doom.

45 Bowring thought the relative failure of the second and third volumes was owing to the publisher's neglect, but he was in negotiation with Bohn in 1854 for republishing the whole in one volume. Bowring, to Bohn, , 28 02 1854Google Scholar, John Eylands Library.

46 Monthly Repository, n.s., viii (1834), 531; ix (1835), 688–90.Google Scholar

47 Christian Teacher, i (1835), 677–84.Google Scholar

48 On the chapel's importance in Dissenting history, Brockett, Allan, Nonconformity in Exeter, 1660–1875, Manchester, 1962Google Scholar. Students at the Exeter Academy had surreptitiously read The Scripture-Doctrine of the Trinity, London, 1712Google Scholar, in which the great Anglican theologician Samuel Clarke had mustered the biblical evidence to conclude that the divinity of Jesus was subordinate to that of God the Father, the so-called Arian position. Discovery of the students' dalliance with heterodoxy called into question the orthodoxy of the ministers of the Dissenting meetings in Exeter, and the whole question was referred, as was customary, to the London ministers, who met in Salter's Hall in 1719, to send advices to their provincial colleagues. The majority, by a vote of four, refused to append a declaration of belief in the Trinity, thus declaring the self-sufficiency of the Bible, individually interpreted.

49 Autobiographical Recollections, pp. 31–2 and 39–41.Google Scholar

50 On all this, Bowring, 's Autobiographical Recollections, pp. 31–49Google Scholar. Charles Bowring's letter to Bransby is in the Bransby Collection, Unitarian College MSS, John Rylands Library. On Bransby, Alexander Gordon's candid sketch in DNB. See also Seed, John, ‘Unitarian Ministers as Schoolmasters, 1780–1850: Some Notes’, Transactions of the Unitarian Historical Society, xvii (1982), 170–6.Google Scholar

51 Shepherd, W., Joyce, J., and Carpenter, Lant, Systematic Education; or Elementary Instruction in the various departments of Literature and Science, with Practical Rules for Studying each Branch of Useful Knowledge, London, 1815 (2nd edn., 1817, and 3rd edn., 1823)Google Scholar; I have used the second edition. Carpenter, Lant, Principles of Education, Intellectual, Moral, and Physical, London, 1820.Google Scholar An omitted section concerns the education of the poor, which Carpenter saw as so entirely accepted by the time of the book's publication that the defence of it in the original article was no longer necessary.

52 Webb, , Martineau, pp. 91–3.Google Scholar

53 ‘Gentlemen, our business is to rejoice in the happiness of other nations, as they are now rejoicing in ours. The interests of peace are the same as the interests of liberty. Liberty is the sister of peace, and happiness will be the children of both of them’ (Blackburn Gazette, 6 06 1832).Google Scholar

If he did not believe that his opinions would lead, if adopted, to the happiness of the many, he would not intrude them upon the people of Blackburn. … While there was a man who loved truth and liberty, he would receive as a friend and a brother the man whom he knew to be an advocate of truth and liberty (Ibid., 8 August 1832).

54 To Thomas Asline Ward, quoted in Ward, to Hunter, Joseph, 27 12 1821Google Scholar, Sheffield Public Library. Bowring's pamphlet Observations on the State of Religion and Literature in Spain made during a Journey through the Peninsula in 1819, London, 1819Google Scholar, was a lever in forming the connection with Bentham at a time when Bentham was consumed with interest in Spanish affairs—the copy in the British Library is the presentation copy. In 1821 Bowling brought out Bentham, 's Observations on the Restrictive and Prohibitory Commercial System; especially with a Reference to the Decree of the Spanish Cortes of July 1820.CrossRefGoogle Scholar For all his sporting of court dress, Bowring was certainly not awed by aristocrats. The Hon. Emily Eden found her first impression hard to get over:

He began by flinging himself at full length upon the sofa, saying—‘Well! what have you been doing in the sketching line?’ I was actually awed by his audacity into giving him my book. ‘Ah—very good—very good. Well now, this is the result of travelling. I like a result. Always look for the result!’ I really believe I must be a fierce aristocrate by nature; however, I behaved no worse to Bowring than by contradicting every assertion he made—on subjects of which I knew nothing. … However, I must say that, barring his detestable manner … there is a great deal to like in him. He is so intelligent and quick; and then, with such a fund of vanity that it must be mortified ten times a day, he never lets the mortification fall on his temper, but is always good-humoured and obliging They say the first day he dined with Leopold he tripped lightly across the circle of ladies up to the Queen, and, hanging negligently over her chair, asked her how she liked the thought of ‘leaving her little boy’! (SirMaxwell, Herbert, The Life and Letters of George William Frederick, Fourth Earl of Clarendon, 2 vols., London, 1913, i. 80).Google Scholar

55 Again Harriet Martineau may be pressed into service with her reiterated emphasis on the ‘publication of opinion’. On the general context, Lewis, George Cornewall, An Essay on the Influence of Authority in Matters of Opinion, London, 1849.Google Scholar

56 Bowring, to Auckland, , 10 03 and 12 04 1834Google Scholar; Granville, to Auckland, , 14 04 1834Google Scholar; Thomson, to Auckland, , 4 04 1834Google Scholar, BL Add. MS 34,460, fos. 41–2, 117–18, 8–11 and 89–90.

57 8 April 1835, Manchester College, Oxford.

58 Hennell, , Memoir, pp. 111–12.Google Scholar

59 On 6 January 1840, for example, he spoke at a public dinner in Nottingham to enthusiastic applause and then acquitted himself with admirable debating skills in a public meeting in which there was a strong Chartist presence; he expressed his entire agreement with their goals but argued for the priority of repeal (Nottingham Review, 10 01 1840Google Scholar). The Inquirer, 10 10 1844Google Scholar, contains an extended description of the scene in the Isle of Man, noting that ‘the people were with difficulty restrained from taking the horses from the carriage, and themselves drawing the liberator of their trade’. Mona's Herald commented that ‘greater honour—from the highest to the lowest—could not have been bestowed on the Sovereign of these realms, had she visited our shores’.

60 Bowring, to Worcester, Noah, 15 07 1822 and 4 01 1823Google Scholar, Massachusetts Historical Society. Bowring, , ‘Living Poets of the Magyars’, Westminster Review, xi (07 1829), 29–30.Google Scholar See also ‘War’ and ‘Songs of the People’, Minor Morals for Young People, 3 vols., London, 1834–1839, ii. 123–33, 255–64Google Scholar, and Conway, Stephen, ‘John Bowring and the Nineteenth-Century Peace Movement’, Historical Research, lxiv (1991), 344–58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

61 To Bowring, F. H., 28 11 1840Google Scholar, John Rylands Library. Compare ‘War’, in Minor Morals, ii. 132Google Scholar: ‘War of all plagues the most pestilential—the most prolific! War, compared to which all other crimes are small—all other follies trifling! War, the opprobrium of humanity—the scandal of religion! War, the perpetual insult to man's brotherhood and God's paternity!’

62 The two missions, in 1792–4 and 1816, were concerned, futilely, with efforts to establish regular diplomatic relations and to redress mistreatment of British nationals in China. Macartney's Journal of the Embassy to China was printed in the second volume of SirBarrow, John, Some Account of the Public Life … of the Earl of Macartney, London, 1807Google Scholar; Lord Amherst's mission is recounted in Ellis, Henry, Journal of the Proceedings of the Late Embassy to China, London, 1817.Google Scholar Both embassies were vexed throughout by the problem of the ritual kowtow, the striking of the forehead nine times on the ground before the Emperor; Macartney agreed only to the British gesture of kneeling on one knee, though Chinese officials told Amherst that he had prostrated himself. Amherst called the mission to an end rather than risk being forced to such abasement—an incident that must have recurred to Bowling's mind forty years on. In the chapter on war in Minor Morals, ii. 127–9Google Scholar, there is a terrible and graphic indictment of the Chinese for an addiction to cruelty that would have been impossible ‘if men had any sentiment of the value of pain and pleasure!’

63 Autobiographical Recolkctions, pp. 216–17.Google Scholar

64 Endacott, G. B., A History of Hong Kong, London, 2nd edn., 1973, pp. 87–105.Google Scholar See also the interestingly detailed account, on the whole favourable to Bowring, by Eitel, E. J., Europe in China: The History of Hong Kong from the Beginning to 1882, London, 1895 (reprinted 1983), ch. 17.Google Scholar

65 Autobiographical Recollections, pp. 57–8.Google Scholar

66 Bowring sought a government post after the Llynvi Iron Company, in which he had invested heavily and of which he was chairman, failed in the depression of the mid-forties, and Palmerston had not forgotten his old associate. Bowring saw the post as financial salvation: ‘My head is somewhat giddy & my heart troubled’, he wrote to his sons on 28 October 1848, when the appointment came through, ‘but my anxieties about the futurity of all of you will be wholly removed’ (to Frederick, and Bowring, Charles, 28 10 1848Google Scholar, John Rylands Library). He was sometimes understandably depressed about the possibility of his ever seeing England again (to Carpenter, R. L., 10 10 1856Google Scholar, N Manchester College, Oxford)—a possibility that threatened to become reality in the abortive attempt by a Hong Kong baker early in 1857 to poison the leaders of the British community. The dose of arsenic was too strong and induced vomiting, but Bowring and others were seriously ill, and the complications from the illness appear to have contributed to Lady Bowring's death.

67 The Bowring papers in the Rylands Library are full of these complaints, but see especially 16 April 1850 and 6 May 1851. On 15 October 1854, he wrote that Bonham had ‘all the rancorous distrust which belongs to the ancient Tory school both of Yankees & Frenchmen’, while Bowring thought that he had ‘restored perfect harmony & unity of action’. On the bleak future of Hong Kong, see 1–20 June and 13 September 1850. It is sobering to find Bowring similarly sceptical about the prospects for the Suez Canal.

68 26 March 1849; 10 October, 16 February and 13 September 1850. The degree of LL D had been conferred on Bowring in 1828 by the University of Groningen in the Netherlands for his services to literature. He carried his doctoral gown to China, finding that it delighted King Mongkut of Siam, but the mandarins found it ridiculous (Eitel, , Europe in China, p. 301).Google Scholar

69 6 June 1851, 3 March, 26 May, 6 June and 23 July 1852. The curious constitutional arrangements that came into force in 1843, whereby one man was responsible to the Colonial Office as governor and to the Foreign Office as plenipotentiary and superintendent, suggested division of the posts, which turned out to be illegal, so, partly for economy, the effective power in the colony was put into the hands of the lieutenant-governor. But an ambitious Bowring would not be a nominal governor, and the matter was resolved in Bowling's favour by Palmerston's intervention (Endacott, , Hong Kong, ch. 10).Google Scholar

70 Friend of China, 18 03 1854.Google Scholar It is suggestive that these remarks prefaced a speech to the Manchester Chamber of Commerce on decimalization, of which Bowring was a leading advocate and which he believed was a response to a universal human instinct.

71 To Russell Laht Carpenter (the son of Lant Carpenter), 10 October 1856, Manchester College, Oxford. On 20 December during the ‘phony war’ that followed the bombardment, he wrote again to Carpenter:

Our poet laureate may be right in fancying that a year with you is worth a cycle here. Perhaps it is, & yet China with a third of the human race … is worthy of more attention than it has hitherto met with. I have been gathering a large family, the Siamese, into the field of commercial intercourse. I hope my life & strength will enable me to extend that good work to other peoples [See Bowling, 's The Kingdom and People of Siam, 2 vols., London, 1857, reprinted 1969].Google Scholar

As plenipotentiary after 1854, Bowling was accredited to China, Siam, Vietnam, Korea, and Japan. He was particularly eager to bring about the opening of Japan, which he raised as early as 1850, though by 1855 he knew the ground had been pulled from under him by a ‘foolish convention’ negotiated by an admiral and subscribed to the home government (20 October 1850 and 26 May 1855). He travelled to the Philippines in 1859 and after his retirement wrote a book on that visit, while serving as unofficial envoy of the islands in Britain. Aspects of Bowring's mission civisilatrice appear in many writings, e.g. an article proposing the Hebrew name of God, Jah, as an appropriate monosyllabic word to furnish the Chinese language, lacking in the basis for a true conception of God, with a word for the God of the Bible, ‘an invisible, immaterial, inapproachable Spirit, self-existent, all-creating, all-knowing, all-loving, all-pervading, all-directing, to whom past, present and future are an infinite now’ (Christian Reformer, n.s., vi (1850), 232–5)Google Scholar; or a letter to the Revd J. R. Beard on the pernicious effect of the educational system in China, so admirable in its structure but directed only to maintain obedience to authority and in which maintaining that the present is wiser than the past ‘would proclaim the most damning and unforgiveable heresy’ (ibid., 700). When Joseph Hume died in 1855, Bowring was deeply affected by the loss of an old and valued friend—who had put Bowring up for the Blackburn seat in 1832; shortly before he died, Hume had written to Bowring advising him to submit to the government's decisions, as a government servant must do, but hoping that the minor disagreements would not prevent Bowring from using his best efforts ‘in promoting the cause of civilization & enlightenment in China’ (10 May 1855 and 23 January 1855). In the first of a series of sketches of Mohammedan and other oriental religions in the Christian Reformer (n.s., vi. (1839), 8)Google Scholar, Bowring pointed to the melioration of Mohammedan barbarism by the inroads of European civilization.

72 Friend of China, 10 03 1849.Google Scholar It should be said that the paper was also glad to see the last of Sir George Bonham and refused to have anything to do with the farewell address for him (8 April 1854).

73 10 May 1856: ‘The praya was to be built “on the Benthamite doctrine of the greatest good for the greatest number” at the sacrifice of private rights.’ Confusing their tsars, the editors wrote ‘Shades of Nicholas—radical turned tyrant’.

74 On Bowring's governorship, Endacott, History of Hong Kong, ch. 10, and his delightful radio talk (one of a series devoted to the early governors) printed in the China Mail, 24 04 1965.Google Scholar Friend of China, 11 07 1855.Google Scholar On Bowring's role in forcing the creation of an effective China Service, Platt, D. C. M., The Cinderella Service: British Consuls since 1825, London, 1971, p. 183.Google Scholar

75 Mill, to Chadwick, Edwin, 13 03, [1857,]Google Scholar The Later Letters of John Stuart Mill, 1849–1873, ed. Mineka, F. E. and Lindley, Dwight L., 3 vols., Toronto, 1972, CW, ii. 528.Google Scholar Chadwick may have written the article supporting Bowring's action in the Examiner, 14 03 1857, 163–4.Google Scholar Kurd, Douglas, The Arrow War: An Anglo-Chinese Confusion, 1856–1860, London, 1967Google Scholar, is a clear and persuasive account, though his reliance on the Elgin papers means that Bowring does not cut a particularly impressive figure. Wakeman, Frederic Jr., Strangers at the Gate: Social Disorder in South China, 1839–1861, London, 1966Google Scholar, recounts the chaotic situation into which the British were trying to force themselves.

76 Bowring, to Bowring, F. H., 8 07 1857, John Rylands Library.Google Scholar

77 Victorian England: Portrait of an Age, ed. Clark, G. Kitson, London, 1977, pp. 91–2.Google Scholar Friend of China, 20 01 1855Google Scholar: ‘A little bird whispered to us from Paris, when Dr. Bowring was there, that, from the way he was talking, though as M. P. he had been a Democrat—as Plenipo he would be found an Autocrat.’

78 To Bowring, Charles, 10 10 1822Google Scholar, and to Carpenter, Lant, 25 10 1822Google Scholar, Manchester College, Oxford. Lewin's sour comment is in Ward, , Peeps into the Past, p. 276.Google Scholar

79 Quoted in Seaver, Paul, The Puritan Lectureships: The Politics of Religious Dissent, 1560–1662, Stanford, 1970, p. 8.Google Scholar

80 Williams, John, Memoirs of the late Rev. Thomas Belsham, London, 1833, pp. 459–67.Google Scholar

81 9 November and 8 October 1821. The letters, in Manchester College, Oxford, are in shorthand and were transcribed for me by the late Mr William S. Coloe. The persisting regret in Dissenting circles over Napoleon's fall from grace is worthy of note.

82 Autobiographical Recollections, pp. 217–18.Google Scholar

83 Morley, , Recollections, London, 1917, i. 218.Google Scholar