Malthus, Thomas Robert

Malthus, Thomas Robert (1766–1834). Though Malthus's views were extremely controversial, his character was pleasant and his life uneventful. He was born near Guildford, his father having private means. After attending Jesus College, Cambridge, he was elected to a fellowship (1793), took holy orders, and became a curate in Surrey, and from 1805 taught at the East India Company College at Haileybury. His most celebrated work, the Essay on Population (1798), was directed at the facile optimism of Condorcet and Godwin. Malthus argued that while population, unchecked, would increase geometrically, subsistence would increase only arithmetically. Consequently any improvement in the standard of living would soon be wiped out. This, Malthus admitted in his preface, had a ‘melancholy hue’. He produced a revised and much enlarged edition in 1803, and appealed for ‘restraint’—by which he meant late marriage—to prevent population outstripping support. His theory was seized upon by those who wished to argue that progress or amelioration must be an illusion, and his condemnation of the Poor Laws for encouraging breeding had important consequences. But the simplicity of Malthus's basic proposition reveals its naïvety, and it had little statistical support. As the standard of living improved, people did not breed to the maximum but took steps to limit the number of their children.

J. A. Cannon