Abstract
All the literary texts discussed in this and in subsequent chapters are, in some important respect, driven by the problem of what Bentham calls ‘disposition’. Bentham states in the epigraph that personal ‘disposition’ is a ‘fictitious entity’.³ We posit its existence based on the observation and analysis of human actions, but have no reliable (that is, empirically verifiable) way to account for that existence. In the increasingly utilitarian culture of the reform era, several writers struggle with this same basic problem. On one level, their texts entertain the possibility that character may have no existence except as the inferred product