Thomas Robert Malthus, the sixth of seven…
1798 CE
Thomas Robert Malthus, the sixth of seven children of Daniel and Henrietta Malthus, had grown up in The Rookery, a country house near Westcott in Surrey.
William Petersen describes Daniel Malthus as "a gentleman of good family and independent means... [and] a friend of David Hume and Jean-Jacques Rousseau". (Petersen, William. 1979. Malthus. Heinemann, London. 2nd ed 1999. p. 21)
The young Malthus had received his education at home in Bramcote, Nottinghamshire, and then at the Dissenting Warrington Academy.
In 1784, he had entered Jesus College, Cambridge, where he had taken prizes in English declamation, Latin and Greek, and graduated with honors, Ninth Wrangler in mathematics.
Taking the MA degree in 1791, he was elected a Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge two years later.
Taking orders in 1797, he became in 1798 an Anglican country curate at Okewood near Albury in Surrey.
He begins to warn the world against unlimited population, writing in reaction to the optimism of his father and his father's associates (notably Jean-Jacques Rousseau) regarding the future improvement of society.
Malthus also constructs his case as a specific response to writings of William Godwin and of the late Marquis de Condorcet.
He first publishes anonymously, in 1798, An Essay on the Principle of Population, as it affects the future improvement of society with remarks on the speculations of Mr. Godwin, M. Condorcet, and other writers.
Malthus argues that two types of checks hold population within resource limits: positive checks, which raise the death rate; and preventive ones, which lower the birth rate.
The positive checks include hunger, disease and war; the preventive checks, abortion, birth control, prostitution, postponement of marriage and celibacy.
Regarding possibilities for freeing man from these limits, Malthus argues against a variety of imaginable solutions.
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