A Romantic technologist and Britain's Little Black Boys

Wordsworth Circle, Wntr, 2002 by Tim Fulford

The children in the House of Industry at Munich, who, being placed upon elevated seats round the halls where other children worked, were made to be idle spectators of that amusing scene, cried most bitterly when the request to be permitted to descend from their places and mix in that busy crowd was refused; but they would, most probably, have cried still more, had they been taken abruptly from their play and forced to work.

'Men are but children of a larger growth;' and those who undertake to direct them ought ever to bear in mind that important truth. (Rumford V, 127)

Here Rumford introduces a system which produces discipline by a process of organized mental torture which turns leisure into solitary spectatorship. Children are offered only different kinds of regimentation--the voyeuristic isolation of those excluded, or the mass labor of those allowed to work.

Rumford's ideas influenced Jeremy Bentham's plan to adopt a similar supervisory and voyeuristic scheme in prisons, schools, factories and workhouses. This regime of inspection was represented architecturally by the Panopticon, a building in which a central supervisor commanded a view of all the inmates in their separate cells. According to Foucault and to Ignatieff, Bentham's Panopticon heralded--and acts as a symbol of--the bureaucratic and disciplinary state that capitalism produced in nineteenth-century Europe, a state that enforced conformity by inspection. If so, then Rumford stood behind Bentham, for the latter's Poor Panopticon was a system of workhouses designed on Rumford's lines. Such reformed workhouses would use the Rumford stove and the Rumford diet (see below), would give the laboring inmates the incentive of piecework pay, and would feature a director, able to view from his central position all the activities of each institution. The director, wrote Bentham, should be a man "beyond all example fitted for the conduct of a business of this nature ... a man in whose [character?] genius and benevolence contend with each other ... the man I am speaking of is Count Rumford" (Bentham qtd. Poynter 133).

The British government never adopted Bentham's model because evangelical Christians argued that its mechanistic understanding of humans controlled by inspection left too little role for religious conscience. Rumford's model, on the other hand, was adopted--not by the government as such, but in the new monitorial school systems that Joseph Lancaster and Andrew Bell spread across the country. These reformers introduced versions of inspection and surveillance closer to Rumford's Munich system than to Bentham's. In the Panopticon a warder commanded, from a central point, all the prisoners. In the Munich workhouse the punished were the watchers not the watched. Unwilling children were excluded from the work of their peers: their punishment was to watch in isolation, to wish to join in but be forced to remain voyeurs. Rumford, that is to say, produced discipline through a more subtle understanding of social dynamics than Bentham showed. By linking surveillance with exclusion and ostracism, he opposed watching to do ing, individual to group, making labor desirable because it was the only route to social acceptance.