Since I first published a web page on Thomas Robert Malthus, most of the feedback has been from students seeking more biographical detail about him. This is it.
My main sources are "The Travel Diaries of T.R. Malthus," edited by Patricia James (published by the Cambridge University Press for the Royal Economic Society, 1966) and "Collections for a History of the Family of Malthus", by John Orlebar Payne (privately printed, London, 1890).
Other biographical sources, not directly consulted by me, include "Memoir of Robert Malthus," written by his friend William Otter and printed as an anonymous introduction to the "Principles of Political Economy" (London, 1836); "Malthus and His Work" by James Bonar, (London, 1924); and J.M.Keynes "Essays in Biography," (London, 1951).
Thomas Robert Malthus was born on February 13, 1766, to Daniel and Henrietta Malthus, who already had five children: Sydenham, 12, Henrietta Sarah (Harriet), 9, Eliza Maria, 4, Anne Catherine Lucy, 3, and Mary Catherine Charlotte, 19 months. Later came a younger sister, Mary Anne Catherine, born 1771.
Patricia James, in a chapter entitled "Biographical Sketches", draws heavily on the memoirs of Louisa Bray, TRM's niece (daughter of the last mentioned, Mary Anne Catherine).
Miss Bray described her grandfather Daniel as a difficult and eccentric man, an admirer of Rousseau "which no doubt contributed to his eccentricities. He would not allow his wife to wear her wedding ring." The children, however, took after their mother, "for never was there a set of more amiable and unselfish beings than my uncles and aunts."
Encyclopaedia Brittanica, quoted by Payne, is kinder to Daniel Malthus: "...he was a gentleman of a good family and independent fortune, a man of considerable culture both in literature and philosophy, the friend and correspondent of Rousseau and one of his executors, one, too, who showed no little interest in those social problems in which his son was to be an original enquirer."
From 1776 to 1782 the young Robert ('Thomas' was never used) was schooled by Richard Graves, Rector of Claverton, near Bath, then went up to Jesus College, Cambridge.
His letters to his family (quoted by Otter, Bonar, and Keynes but since lost) suggest he worked hard at school and university, and enjoyed cricket, swimming, skating, and shooting. Otter describes his taste for humour, "often a source of infinite delight and pleasantry to his companions", and "wont to set the table in a roar." Louisa Bray wrote that her Uncle Robert must have been a handsome young man: "I have heard that when at Cambridge he let his fair hair, which curled naturally, hang in ringlets on his neck, which in those days of powder and pigtails must have looked singular."
Leaving Cambridge in 1788, TRM entered the Church, although the Master of Jesus College, Dr Beadon, had voiced misgivings about his speech defect holding him back.
Dr Beadon "thought it a pity that a young man of some some abilities should enter a profession without at least some hope of being at the top of it," TRM wrote in a letter to his father in 1786. "When, however, I told him that the utmost of my wishes was a retired living in the country, he said he did not imagine that my speech would be much objection in that case, that, for his own part, when I read or declaimed in chapel he scarcely ever lost a single word."
TRM found his quiet country living, as curate of the small Okewood Chapel, a few miles from his parents' home at Albury, in Surrey.
Thomas Robert Malthus:
This is an 1833 portrait by John Linnell, the original of which is at Haileybury College, Haileybury, England, formerly the East India College and now a co-educational boarding school. The painting is reproduced here by kind permission of the Master. It may well be the only portrait done of TRM, or the only surviving one; all other pictures I have seen (popping up around the internet, usually) appear to be copies of this, usually cropped to head and shoulders. Patricia James's book has a version as its frontispiece, attributed "from an engraving, after the portrait by Linnell..." which suggests there may be second- and third generation efforts about. Jesus College, Cambridge, has a copy executed in 1905.
What can be seen in the Linnell portrait is a twist to his mouth, apparently caused by a hare-lip.
His own writings do not confirm his hare-lip in so many words, although he mentioned "the defect in my speech." However, Harriet Martineau wrote in her autobiography of being nervous of meeting him (in 1832) because she was deaf and feared that his hare-lip would prevent her offering him her ear-trumpet.
In the event, she found she didn't need the trumpet: "Of all the people in the world, Malthus was the one whom I heard quite easily without it - Malthus, whose speech was hopelessly imperfect, from defect in the palate."
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Perhaps it was during his time at Okewood that it became obvious to TRM that much of what was then said about the stout country folk of England was romantic nonsense; that life for the poor was a constant battle for the necessities of life. As he wrote in his Essay on Population: "It cannot fail to be remarked by those who live much in the country, that the sons of labourers are very apt to be stunted in their growth, and are a long while arriving at maturity. Boys that you would guess to be fourteen or fifteen, are upon enquiry, frequently found to be eighteen or nineteen."
On June 10, 1793, he was appointed to a fellowship at Jesus College, which he held until he forfeited it by marriage in 1804. He resided at Cambridge only rarely, however. Exactly where he spent most of his time between 1794 and 1804 - the crucial decade in which he wrote the first (1798) and second (1803) editions of his Essay - is not known, but it was probably at Albury, with his parents.
Payne, without offering a source, states: "It is interesting to know that his Essay originated in a discussion which he held with his father, Daniel, on the 'perfectibility of society,' and that the parent, struck by the arguments and observations of his son, recommended him to commit them to paper, and afterwards to give them publication."
Between the two editions, TRM travelled extensively, mainly in Scandinavia, gathering much material for the second edition. The diaries he kept of his travels, edited by Patricia James and published in 1966, are a painstaking record of his observations of life in foreign lands: the health and wealth - or lack thereof - of the people, and the prices of various commodities and services, and how they may have been affected by laws, wars, climate, and so on.
Lord Robbins, in the foreword to "The Travel Diaries of T. R. Malthus," describes the first Essay as "a brilliant a priori polemic," and the second edition as "a weighty empirical treatise" bolstered by those careful observations.
In 1805, his fame now assured, TRM was appointed Professor of History and Political Economy at the East India College at Haileybury, a post he held until his death.
He also retained a living in the Church. It is not known when he left Okewood, but he was Rector of Walsby, near Market Rasen, Lincolnshire, from 1803 till his death. He rarely officiated and the parish was mostly served by curates. These were days when non-residence was quite common, for both ecclesiastic livings and university fellowships.
He married his first cousin once removed, Harriet Eckersall, on April 12, 1804.
They had three children, the first, Henry, born prematurely on December 16, 1804. In a letter to a publishing firm written on that date, TRM writes that he had had little time to read a manuscript sent to him because of a number of engagements, in addition to which "I have been in a state of considerable anxiety about Mrs Malthus, who was brought to bed this morning before her time, but is now happily pretty well."
Two daughters followed: Emily, on July 5, 1806, and Lucy, in December 1807.
TRM seems to have settled comfortably into life at Haileybury. Although never again creating such a stir as with his Essay, he continued to publish, his works including An Inquiry into the Nature and Progress of Rent (1815), and Principles of Political Economy (1820).
And stir it was. Patricia James wrote that the publication of the Essay had brought on the head of a young, gentle and possibly shy young man (aged 32 in 1798 and as yet unmarried) "an unprecedented eruption of fury and prejudice."
Not only had he attacked the current romantic notions about the perfectibility of man, he was widely misunderstood in his criticism of the Poor Laws, a system of poor relief that had been in practice for two hundred years. TRM believed that while they might have alleviated immediate suffering, they acted to the long-term detriment of the poor. Although he was at pains to state that his purpose was to improve their lot, his call for the abolition of the Poor Laws attracted the perhaps predictable vitriolic response.
However, he was to tell Harriet Martineau, years later, that the reaction upset him "only just at first" and that he lost no sleep over it "after the first fortnight."
Professor William Empson, of Haileybury, wrote an account of him, published in the Edinburgh Review in 1837: "Mr Malthus was a clergyman - a most conscientious one, pure and pious. We never knew one of this description so entirely free from the vices of his caste... "Mr Malthus owed the discovery, which will immortalise his name, mainly to his benevolence. Instead of his speculations on population having hardened his heart against the interests of the poor, it was the earnestness and the perseverance with which he set himself to work in behalf of those very interests, that first fixed his attention upon these particular speculations." (As quoted by James.)
Thomas Robert Malthus died on December 29, 1834, after taking suddenly ill during a Christmas visit to his parents-in-law at Bath. He was buried in the north aisle of Bath Abbey on January 6, 1835. The grave has since been covered over by pews and the memorial tablet is now in the north porch.
Patricia James writes that the memorial tablet is "a far better summing-up than epitaphs usually are, of 'a serene and happy life... supported by a calm but firm conviction of the usefulness of his labours'. The inscription may contain a 'mistake' about his birth, but it is the truth about the man." (The mistake being that it records his birth date as February 14, which was actually the date he was baptised.)
Another mistake which students might still come across is that contributed by Professor Fogarty in the introduction to a 1958 edition of TRM's second Essay, in which Fogarty writes that TRM "married in 1805 and practised the principle of population to the extent of eleven girls." In fact, the author of "An Essay in the Principle of Population" has no living descendants. The youngest of his three children, Lucy, died of "a rapid decline" at the age of 17. Henry and Emily both married after their father's death, but neither had children.
The last word, again from Mrs James - and a nice contrast to those who, disagreeing with TRM's theories, denounce the man: "All who met Malthus are unanimous in agreeing with his niece Louisa Bray, that no one could know him without loving him, and something of this seems to have continued since his death, as has also the opprobrium of those who have never tried to know him. No editor or biographer could have had his way opened up before him with more warm interest and hospitality than I have had: talking about Malthus, even now, (1966) seems to generate the cheerful serenity and kindliness of the man himself."
Page revision date Aug 16, 2002.
This is how Okewood looks today.
If you do not get lost - as I did, trudging a couple of kilometres in the wrong direction up the A29 in a thunderstorm, with sodden feet in unsuitable shoes - then you reach Okewood by a quarter-hour walk up a pretty country lane from the village of Ockley. The lane winds past a couple of farms and into a wood, where it ends in a shady hollow with a stream running through it. From here the church is out of sight and you might think you have literally and figuratively reached the end of the road but for the sign and rustic footbridge inviting you to cross the stream and climb the path beyond. At the top, the church appears, set in its clearing much as Patricia James described it 40 years ago.
The church is still in use, comments in the visitors' book proof that its peaceful isolation is what attracts many of its regular congregation. You might wonder what a church is doing in what passes, in heavily-populated southern England, for the middle of nowhere. Legend has it that a man and his son were walking in the forest when the boy was attacked by a wild boar. The unarmed man was helpless to intervene but suddenly the boar dropped dead, felled by a stray arrow that came from, well, God knows where. To give thanks for the miracle that saved his son, the man then had a chapel built at the site. As you do.
Christchurch, New Zealand.