------------ EH.NET BOOK REVIEW --------------
Published by EH.NET (January 2008)

Brian Cooper, _Family Fictions and Family Facts: Harriet Martineau, 
Adolphe Quetelet and the Population Question in England, 1798-1859_. 
London: Routledge, 2007. xiv + 294 pp. $130 (cloth), ISBN: 
978-0-415-15058-3.

Reviewed for EH.NET by Evelyn L. Forget, Department of Community 
Health Sciences, University of Manitoba.


T.R. Malthus's _An Essay on the Principle of Population_ challenged 
social commentators in the first half of the nineteenth century with 
its claim that the capacity of the world to feed itself could not 
keep pace with population growth. What role did "family" play in the 
operation of the Malthusian population mechanism? Brian P. Cooper, 
currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Economics at Gettysburg 
College in Pennsylvania, places the ensuing debate over the 
definition and role of family in the context of social reforms 
including changes in the English marriage laws and the New Poor Law 
of 1834. Understanding the causes of social ills and formulating 
appropriate policy responses required an understanding of the concept 
of family, but Cooper shows that contemporaries were ultimately 
unable to agree upon the definition of a concept that embodies both 
observed attributes and normative beliefs about gender, class, race 
and national identity.

This insightful and well-written book uses literary theory and ideas 
from the history of science to survey the representation of family in 
a range of texts including travel literature, novels, educational 
treatises, books of conduct, parliamentary papers and statistical 
accounts. The centerpiece of the analysis consists of three case 
studies: Harriet Martineau's _Illustrations of Political Economy_, 
Adolphe Quetelet's _A Treatise on Man_, and the commentary 
surrounding the British censuses of the early nineteenth century, 
especially the 1851 Census under the direction of population health 
expert and sanitary reformer William Farr. The visceral appeal of the 
book lies in Cooper's seamless juxtaposition of Martineau's "Cousin 
Marshall," _Moll Flanders_ and commentary on the data collection for 
the Census.

Cooper follows three main ideas throughout his analysis. First, he 
traces attempts to classify different kinds of families in order to 
illuminate the relationships between individuals, families and 
populations. Contemporaries used two main methods. Martineau, on the 
one hand, created "representative types" -- fictions designed to 
emphasize the different behaviors and outcomes of the deserving and 
undeserving poor. Quetelet, by contrast, invented the concept of 
"average man" -- a statistical aggregate no less a fiction than 
Martineau's "Cousin Marshall." Martineau's figurative language and 
cavalier attitude towards what she represents as "fact" make us 
immediately aware that she is writing fiction, but Quetelet's 
"average man, while a 'fictitious being,' represents 'the facts and 
the phenomena which affect [man]'" (p. 155). Quetelet's readers, 
however, did recognize that his categories were somewhat less 
natural, and a good deal less stable, than they might appear. Applied 
statisticians are still enamored with Quetelet's "average man," much 
as economic theorists continue to develop Harriet Martineau's 
representative types.

Second, Cooper traces the role of education in these texts. 
Categories help to produce data to describe the social state, but 
they also help to generate policy responses. Quetelet, Martineau and 
Farr all saw a role for education. Martineau advocated moral 
education and education in political economy to help teach the poor 
their role in population growth. Quetelet challenged unseemly 
population heterogeneity by suggesting his subjects be educated to 
become more like "average man" -- "the true, the good, and the 
beautiful" (p. 156). Farr, however, advocates a much more interesting 
and subtle role for education. He, like most of the sanitary 
reformers, believed that social ills were not primarily the result of 
individual behavior but rather the consequence of environmental or 
ecologic causes that were not readily apparent to individuals. It was 
for the social reformers to investigate and, ultimately, to rectify 
the social causes of disease and excessive population growth. 
Nevertheless, he did not deny individuals agency; education could 
help individuals and families to understand and, perhaps, to 
counteract the social causes of their distress. I will return to this 
theme of agency below.

Cooper's third theme is the development of ways to observe, represent 
and, ultimately, to reform social conditions. The concept of family, 
he argues, is central to the development of the social sciences and 
we can see in the different approaches adopted by Martineau and 
Quetelet on the one hand, and Farr on the other, the divergence 
between political economy and sociology that would grow over the next 
century.

This third theme is intimately related to the idea of agency. Family 
is a concept that gave, and continues to give, social scientists 
difficulty because it highlights the question of agency. The 
representations of individuals and families in the work of Martineau 
and Quetelet are consistent with the central idea of individual 
agency that was fundamental to political economy. Both Quetelet and 
Martineau created fictional families and fictional individuals that, 
no matter how well or how badly they conformed to the social "facts," 
were designed to underscore the agency of the individual. If 
individual circumstances are to change, then individuals have to 
change and, perhaps more importantly, individuals have it within 
their capacity to change. Farr, by contrast, downplayed the idea of 
individual agency and suggested that individuals and families are who 
they are and do what they do because of the circumstances that govern 
their lives, including where they live and how much money they have. 
To change the individual, one must change the environment -- fix the 
water supply, build the sewers, clean up the housing and the streets, 
and provide adequate subsistence so that individuals and families can 
make better decisions. The central problem, in Farr's estimation, was 
how one could intervene in a way that improved the capacity of 
families to make better choices without creating disincentives for 
individuals and families to work and to strive to better their own 
conditions. It is not a surprise to learn that Farr was no more 
successful at solving this problem than the social scientists that 
followed him.

Defining family is at the heart of the divergence between Martineau 
and Quetelet on the one hand, and Farr on the other. Do we aggregate 
the representative individuals of Martineau or the average men (and 
women and boys and girls) of Quetelet into equally fictional families 
that embody our conceptions of the ideal? Or do we begin by imagining 
we can collect data that reflect how people really live in the world 
as Farr would have it? And if the latter, can we escape from imposing 
our notions of how the family ought to be as we choose how we will 
collect and categorize data? Both approaches ultimately leave the 
concept of the family a mixture of observed attributes and normative 
beliefs about gender, class, race, ethnicity and national identity.

Cooper's book ends with a recognition that the problem of defining 
family is one that still bedevils us, whether we are considering 
reproductive law or gay marriage. Defining what a family "is" depends 
very much on what one believes a family "should be." No social 
scientist who attempts to understand the world of real flesh and 
blood people can ignore the classification difficulties that the 
concept of family continues to place in our path. Brian Cooper has 
written a fine book, based on his Harvard Ph.D. dissertation, which 
will give all of us plenty to think about, whether we are primarily 
interested in the representation of gender and family in the early 
nineteenth century, or whether our interests tend to epistemological 
and methodological matters.


Evelyn L. Forget is Professor of Economics in the Department of 
Community Health Sciences at the University of Manitoba, Canada. She 
has published a number of books, papers and articles in the history 
of economic thought and in population health, and is currently 
working on a study of the North American Guaranteed Annual Income 
social experiments of the 1960s and 1970s.

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