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1 The owners of Forde Abbey have kindly given permission for the reproduction, on this website, of the images taken during the visit of the Bentham Project. For the official Forde Abbey website click here.
2 In Bentham's day there was no final 'e' in the spelling of Forde, and at that time it was in the county of Devon.
3 For Bentham's
enthusiatic and, at times, detailed descriptions of life and work at Forde
Abbey see: The
Correspondence of Jeremy Bentham, vols. viii
and ix, ed. S. Conway, Oxford, 1988 and 1989, (Collected Works).
Bentham was at Forde Abbey during the following periods:
1) From 17th July 1814 to mid-March 1815. See Correspondence,
vol. viii.
2) From 6th July 1815 to 23rd February 1816. Ibid.
3) Bentham was again in Devon by 26 July 1816 and he returned to Queen
Square Place, his London home, at the beginning of February 1817. See
ibid., and Correspondence, vol. ix.
4) From the end of July 1817 to mid-February 1818. See The Correspondence,
vol. ix.
4
See Correspondence, vol. viii, pp. 404-05.
a
The Mortlake tapestries at Forde Abbey depicting the lives of St Peter and St
Paul after the cartoons by Raffaelo Sanzio (1483-1520), the celebrated Italian
painter.
The tapestries are said to have been given to Francis Gwyn (1648?-1734), the
owner of Forde Abbey at the time, by Queen Anne. See Royal Commission on Historical
Monuments,
An
Inventory
of
the
Historical
Monuments in Dorset, 5 vols., London, 1952-75, i. 244.
b A tapestry made at the factory in Paris named after Jean Gobelin (d.
1476). The works were purchased by Louis XIV and run by the state from the seventeenth
century.
5 See Correspondence, vol. viii, p. 407.
6 See Correspondence, vol. viii, p. 543.
7 See John Flowerdew Colls, Utilitarianism Unmasked, London, 1844, p.13.