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The Talk of the Town in 1798 
 
Henk W. Plasmeijer 
State University of Groningen, The Netherlands 
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In June 1798 the anonymously published _Essay on the Principle of  
Population_ gave occasion to a polemic which made Malthus both famous and  
notorious. In order to explain the dazzling success of Malthus's first  
appearance it is often stressed that the book was politically hot stuff.  
There can be no doubt it was. Malthus became in a twinkling extraordinary  
influential: in 1800 William Pitt the younger stated in the House of  
Commons that he would not introduce a promised amendment to the Poor Laws  
which would favour large families, on which occasion he referred to  
Malthus. However, many questions about the book's immediate success  
remain. 
 
Malthus's success in economic thought is perhaps even more puzzling. Within 
twenty years the Principle of Population became an essential part of 
Ricardian economics. It was not meticulously proven to be true. Even at 
contemporary standards the Principle is one-sided. Retrospectively we may 
conclude that at the time it was not the best theory around. In fact, many 
subtleties put forward in earlier debates about supply reactions in the 
labour market were driven into oblivion by Malthus's Principle. 
 
What happened? The next story is about the events in 1798. In that year the 
Essay was neither the first bestseller, nor the first book which made 
feelings run high. In June a real scandal was going on. Malthus's book is 
about the main issues in that scandal. In January 1798 William Godwin had 
published his Memoirs of the Author of the Vindication of the Rights of 
Woman. In the popular press the 'chilly' philosopher became the object of 
slander. Godwin and (posthumously) Mary Wollstonecraft were disreputed. 
Their feminist ideals of freedom were ridiculed and put aside as immoral. 
And before anybody could recover their breath Malthus came along. The title 
page of the Essay promises 'remarks on the speculations of Mr. Godwin'. In 
the book the harmful social consequences of feminist ideals are discussed. 
The Essay connects these ideals, of which the main representative was Mary 
Wollstonecraft, with the immoral behaviour of the labouring poor. And at 
the time Mary Wollstonecraft's highly unusual conduct in life had got 
about. 
 
Why tell this story? Obviously, when the subjects of scientific inquiry and 
public debate are so close to one another as they were then, the story of 
the talk of the town in 1798 can help to understand why an idea which 
normally would have raised many questions, could spread that rapidly. 
 
Classical wage theory and population 
 
The Essay ought to have raised many questions, particularly concerning its 
main economic points. Malthus was not the first to stress a positive 
relation between real income and population growth. Striking about the 
Essay is that this relationship is stripped of the many subtleties with 
which it was qualified in the populationist debates. The 'passion between 
the sexes' is made the only governing principle. The essentials of 
Malthus's Principle are well known. Food production increases 
arithmetically and population geometrically. Without checks population 
doubles every 25 year. Two kinds of checks are mentioned. The positive 
checks (war, famine and pestilence) diminish relatively all of a sudden the 
population with respect to food supply. These disasters can be modelled as 
a discontinuous move in time of the origins of the two series. The 
preventive checks (contraception, abortion and active stoicism, which in 
the second Essay becomes moral restraint) shift the growth path of 
population. For any given level of real income a labourer of high moral 
standing decides to start a smaller family than the one living in the 
rabbit colony in the slums of London. 
 
For contemporary economic theory, and in particular Ricardian economics, 
neither the priapic governing principle nor the 'private vices make public 
disaster' proposition was relevant. For the then economists the 'passion 
between the sexes' was something like a macro-economic production function 
for the labour market, i.e. a black box with which for obvious reasons 
nobody wants to be intellectually occupied. The Principle of Population is 
just another way of looking at the familiar but questionable positive 
relation between real income and labour supply. It added one figure to it: 
at high levels of the real wage rate the growth of the labour force is 
about 2.8% per year. As in earlier populationist views the supply of labour 
was supposed to be negative at very low levels of the real wage rate. 
Assuming continuity the classical economists jumped to the conclusion that 
a 'natural' wage rate exists for which the growth of the labour supply is 
zero. In order to get to the economic argument, no Malthusian Principle is 
needed. 
 
[The web version of the editorial includes here a figure illustrating the  
effect of moral restraint on the natural wage rate.] 
 
In 1798 the idea of a positive relation between real income and population 
growth was very old. It was the main argument of the populationists, 
according to whom the power of a nation depends on the number of its 
citizens. But also in the Netherlands, where it was believed that the power 
of the Republic depends on economic strength, the relation between income 
and population was thoroughly discussed. E.g. a distinction was made 
between the temporary effects (increasing life expectations) and lasting 
effects, mainly immigration. So when in 1740 the forefather of all Dutch 
people with the family name of Plasmeijer came in from Westphalia, Willem 
Kersseboom (1690-1771), a founding father of demography and a follower of 
William Petty, tried to investigate the financial consequences of many 
demographic changes for the town of Utrecht. In France the Physiocrat and 
populationist Francois Quesnay explained in an article, which he probably 
read aloud in the salon of the King's mistress, that his package of 
measures (a unique tax, laissez faire) would restore the power of the 
kingdom by means of enhancing living standards and attracting immigration. 
It did not occur to him, and neither did it to his audience, that 
population growth could be related to loose morals. 
 
It should be noted that the incidentally very modern immigration mechanism 
produces the same result economically as the Malthusian Principle. Labour 
supply is a strictly increasing function of national differences in living 
standards. Also Adam Smith held the opinion that population would increase 
with rising living standards. Smith's approach, however, is rather subtle 
and embedded in many qualifications. E.g. when introducing the 'eligible' 
American widow in the economic literature, he stresses an economic 
incentive for having children: 
 
     A young widow with four or five young children, who, among the 
     middling or inferior ranks of people in Europe, would have so little 
     chance for a second husband, is there frequently courted as a sort of 
     fortune. The value of children is the greatest of all encouragements 
     to marriage. (Wealth of Nations, Book I, chapter 8)  
 
In the long run Smith's suggestion has proven to be more relevant than the 
Malthusian Principle. And more heuristic. Any modern economist not knowing 
anything about demography would say when reading Smith: "Well, this means 
that at very low levels of the real wage rate we can get the positive 
relationship between living standards and population growth, but since the 
marginal disutility of raising children is increasing and the marginal 
utility of money is decreasing, the relation is surely negative for high 
living standards." It seems that Adam Smith's suggestion brings us back to 
the very old idea which had to be rediscovered by Jevons: the backward 
bending labour supply curve. 
 
The scandal in 1798 
 
In 1798 the talk of the town was not population pressure. It is often 
reported that at the time it was believed that the population was growing 
slowly. Three years later, when the results of the first census after many 
years were published, it was brought out that this was wrong. The 
population had grown explosively. 
 
What occupied British public opinion in 1798 was among others Godwin's 
book. The story is well documented (see Holmes 1988), although it is not in 
our books on the history of economic thought. On September 10, 1797 Mary 
Wollstonecraft had died, eleven days after having given birth to Mary 
Godwin, later Mary Shelly. Within a couple of weeks William Godwin wrote 
the Memoirs, which were published in January 1798. For a person who was 
known as the 'chilly' philosopher the book is extraordinary emotional. It 
is an incredible love story. Its audience was shocked, even Godwin's 
allies. Godwin wrote very straightforwardly about Mary Wollstonecraft's 
intentions to live the life of an independent woman, but also about the 
difficulties she encountered, her love affairs, her love child, her suicide 
attempts and so on. He also wrote about the way in which he and Mary had 
organized their lives after they had fallen in love and why her pregnancy 
was the reason to get married. In 1798 this was a very unusual book. 
 
For conservative England Memoirs was the perfect occasion to attack 
feminist and egalitarian ideals of freedom. Godwin's book was too 
vulnerable. It bears witness to unbounded sorrow. The conservatives took 
advantage of the situation and started throwing dirt. The fuss was pretty 
nasty. The Anti-Jacobin made noise about almost every immorality 
Wollstonecraft was supposed to represent, from unorthodox sexual behaviour 
to the non-payment of creditors. The noise lasted years and obscenities 
were not eschewed. As late as 1801 a 'poet' thought that Godwin had not 
suffered enough. 
 
     William hath penn'd a waggon-load of stuff 
     and Mary's life at last he needs must write, 
     Thinking her whoredoms were not known enough, 
     Till fairly printed off in black and white. 
     With wondrous glee and pride, this simple wight 
     Her brothel feats of wantonness sets down; 
     Being her spouse, he tells, with huge delight, 
     How oft she cuckolded the silly clown, 
     And lent, O lovely piece!, herself to half the town. 
 
The title of the poem, the "Vision of liberty," indicates clearly what the 
fuss was about. By destroying Godwin's and Wollstonecraft's intellectual 
and moral reputation conservative England tried to discredit the ideals of 
the French revolution. 
 
Wollstonecraft and Godwin were the perfect targets. Although definitely 
opposed to revolutions or any other kind of violence, they were the main 
English representatives of the ideals of the French Revolution. 
Wollstonecraft's arguments in the Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) 
are well known: starting from the unqualified human right of 
self-determination she argues among others for economic self-dependency of 
women, for equal chances in education and in particular for the possibility 
to end a personal relationship unilaterally. Marriage is a fraud. In his 
Enquiry concerning Political Justice (1793) Godwin, as is also well known, 
stresses the distribution of property as one of the main barriers to an 
egalitarian society. When he discusses feminist matters, he is merely 
echoing Wollstonecraft. 
 
The recipe for a bestseller 
 
It is often argued that Malthus's first Essay was an integral part of the 
campaign against Jacobinical literature. Waterman (1991: 7) even argues 
that the book was an anti-Jacobin defence of property rights embedded in 
the prevailing religious world-view. I would not like to go that far. Winch 
(1987: 17) is right in making the necessary differentiations. The Essay is 
not a political pamphlet. Moreover, the culmination of the anti-Jacobinical 
campaign was the commotion concerning Godwin's Memoirs. Malthus had nothing 
to do with that. However, there can hardly be any doubt that in that 
agitated intellectual climate almost any book which deals with Godwin and 
the 'passion between the sexes' would have attracted a lot of attention. 
Since there is no point in speculating about how the Essay would have fared 
without that fuss, we can leave the matter with the suggestion that Malthus 
had a recipe for a bestseller. Malthus may have sensed this, for he wrote 
the Essay in a great hurry.  
 
After the Essay was published the conservative forces appear to have gone 
into the offensive. As is well known, the Anti-Jacobin campaign against the 
ideals of the French revolution started with Burke's Reflections on the 
Revolution in France (1790). Burke's arguments for the status quo, however, 
are purely defensive and very traditional. He had a hard time with his 
critics, among whom were Godwin and Wollstonecraft. And at the very moment 
that Godwin is put in the pillory, Malthus comes up as a dispassionate 
scientist who argues that although it is true that the French ideals 
promise a marvelous future, in real life these ideals must be in accordance 
with the 'natural laws of society'; for otherwise they will bring us 
misery. In other words, the viability of human rights (and in particular 
Wollstonecraft's rights of women) had to be evaluated in the light of 
'natural laws'. This is a scientific programme. The increasing 
offensiveness of the conservatives is partly explained by an increasing 
reliance on scientific arguments after June 1798. 
 
Many subjects discussed by Malthus were those which were also discussed in 
the streets. To be sure, Malthus stays far from that noise, he addresses 
Godwin's ideas with dignity and he does not mention Wollstonecraft once, 
comme il faut. However, the Essay is about the social consequences of the 
passion between the sexes and it stresses moral principles. The main 
argument is not that loose morals and in particular a perfect freedom in 
the commerce of the sexes is morally objectionable, although there can be 
no doubt that Malthus held that opinion. It is that looseness comes at high 
costs for society. Such an argument corresponds astonishingly well with the 
prejudices which at the time were being mobilized against Wollstonecraft's 
conduct in life. 
 
There is more to it. Perhaps I see ghosts everywhere, but when reading 
chapter 10 of the first Essay once again it occurred to me that there may 
be a hidden meaning which we do not recognize anymore. E.g. Malthus argues 
that loose morals and the resulting population pressure leads to poverty, 
which will drive out feelings of love. 
 
The mighty law of self-preservation expels all the softer and more exalted 
emotions of the soul. 
 
What is he referring to and what is he saying? Are these the softer and 
more exalted emotions which Godwin shows on almost every page of the 
Memoirs? And is he suggesting that when they fell in love the feminist and 
the philosopher lost sight of reality? Or is this just another sweeping 
generalization of an economic cynic? 
 
Malthus directly attacks the idea that marriage is a fraud. He attributes 
it to Godwin, but he must have known that Wollstonecraft was its main 
representative. Marriage is, according to Malthus, a natural institution. 
Love has got nothing to do with it. In the natural order the logic behind 
it is an insurance principle. This is not the insurance Smith had in mind 
when he talked about the economic value of the children in America. 
Malthus's 'natural' principle is one which protects the English mothers. 
The argument is that when morals are loose and the father not known, the 
population explosion is at the expense of the decent part of society. 
Malthus warns us that there is no such thing as fraternity and argues that 
there is a limit to what society is willing to pay for these wicked women. 
 
That a woman should at present be almost driven from society for an offence 
which men commit nearly with impunity, seems to be undoubtedly a breach of 
natural justice. 
 
This means that it is foolish for a woman to strive for liberty. More in 
particular, it is very unreasonable that she should try to be economically 
independent from a husband, both from the point of view of society and with 
an eye to her own economic security. Finally, and once again relying on a 
'natural law' argument, Malthus wipes the floor with equality: men and 
women cannot be equal. 
 
When those two fundamental laws of society, the security of property, and 
the institution of marriage, were once established, inequality of 
conditions must necessarily follow. 
 
Are you ready to accept that in 1798 the Anti-Jacobins, who did their best 
and used every means to put Wollstonecraft and Godwin in a bad light, must 
have believed that Malthus had nicely done away with the 'liberty, equality 
and fraternity' slogan? They had reasons to hail his Essay as a scientific 
masterpiece. 
 
Final Remarks 
 
Whether 1798 was a sad year is for the reader to decide. For Godwin it 
certainly was. In 1798 the 'dismal science' showed its ugly face and 
feminism was to be buried for more than seventy years. But whatever we 
think about the events, the story about 1798 should be told. It makes us 
once again aware of the importance of the intellectual climate in which 
economic ideas are put forward. 
 
Literature 
 
Holmes, R., 1985, Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer, London: 
Holder and Stoughton 
 
Holmes, R., 1988, The Feminist and the Philospher, London: Holder and 
Stoughton. The same story is told in the introduction to Wollstonecraft by 
Godwin. 
 
Waterman, A.M.C., 1991, Revolution, Economics and Religion, Christian 
Political Economy, 1798-1833, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 
 
Winch, D., 1987, Malthus, Oxford: Oxford University Press 
 
Wollstonecraft, M., 1796, W. Godwin, 1798, A short Residence in Sweden and 
Memoirs of the Author of the Rights of Woman, Penguin books, 1987 
 
 
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