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SECTION VII.: CLOTHING. - Jeremy Bentham, The Works of Jeremy Bentham, vol. 4 [1843]

Edition used:

The Works of Jeremy Bentham, published under the Superintendence of his Executor, John Bowring (Edinburgh: William Tait, 1838-1843). 11 vols. Vol. 4.

Part of: The Works of Jeremy Bentham, 11 vols.

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SECTION VII.

CLOTHING.

A few words under the head of clothing, and but few.

Health, comfort, and decency, prescribe the limits on one side: economy on the other. Fashion, the supreme arbiter everywhere else, the cottage not excepted, has no jurisdiction here.

The penitentiary act points out two other objects as proper to be kept in view: humiliation, and safe custody. So much for generals: happily, under this head, it keeps clear of specifications.

Two hints I will venture to offer to my contractor in this view:—

i. For men, coat and shirt-sleeves of unequal length: the left as usual—the right no longer than that of a woman’s gown.

Economy is served by this contrivance in a small degree: safe custody in a greater. The difference of appearance in the skin of the two arms will be an essential mark. In point of duration, nothing can be more happily suited to the purpose; it is a permanent distinction, without being a perpetual stigma.

Exclusive of this pledge, I look upon escape out of a Panopticon—I have said so over and over—as an event morally impossible. But suppose it otherwise: how great the additional security which an expedient thus simple would afford!

A man escapes. Minute personal description, signalement, as the French call it, is almost needless: one simple trait fixes him beyond possibility of mistake. His two arms wear a different appearance: one, like other men’s—the other, red and rough, like that of a female of the working-class. No innocent man can be arrested by mistake. He bares his two arms:—“Observe they are alike; I am not the man—you see it is impossible.”

The common expedient is, one sleeve of a different colour. This costs something—it saves nothing; and when the coat is off, the security is gone.

Hardship there can be none: the tenderer sex, even in its tenderest and most elevated classes, has both arms bare. Among the Romans, even the most luxurious and effeminate, not the fore-arm only, but the whole arm, was bare, up to the very shoulder.

ii. In both sexes, on working days, shoes wooden; stockings, none: on Sundays, stockings and slippers.

Shoes wooden, for several reasons:—

1. They are cheaper than leather.

2. Among the common people in England, they are known as a sort of emblem of servitude.

3. By the noise they make on the iron bars, of which the floors of the cell-galleries are composed, they give notice whenever a prisoner is on the march. Putting them off, in order to prevent this, and escape observation, is an act which, if forbidden, will not be practised, where non-discovery will be so perfectly hopeless. Besides that the bars would give pain to bare feet not accustomed to tread on them.

4. Were the prisoners to go bare-foot, the bars which form the floor of the galleries must be so much the closer, consequently the more numerous and expensive.

5. In climbing, with a view to escape, it would be impossible to make use of the feet, either with the wooden shoes on, or with naked feet kept tender by the use of shoes. Common leather shoes, especially when stout and coarse, are of great assistance in climbing, and bare feet, hardened by treading on iron and on the bare ground, might find no great difficulty. Bare feet, that were accustomed to shoes, would serve as indifferently for running as for climbing; and a fugitive would hardly carry about with him so palpable a mark of his condition as a pair of wooden shoes.

Neither in this privation, fashion apart, is there any real hardship. Not to mention antiquity, or foreign nations, in Ireland, shoes and stockings are rare among the common people in the country.* In Scotland, these habiliments are not generally worn by servant-maids, even in creditable families.

It is on account of fashion, and the notions of decorum dependent on fashion, and to avoid giving disgust to the chapel-visitors, that I propose stockings and slippers for Sundays. Slippers in preference to shoes, as helping to keep up the distinction, and being less expensive. Slippers, according to our customs, suit very well the condition of those who it is not intended should ever be absent from home. But in the East, they are worn at all times in preference to shoes.

As to the rest, see the title of Health and Cleanliness.

[* ]Young’s Ireland, p. 121.