Conversations with Malthus
Suzanne Rickard meets one of the bogeymen of the 19th century and discovers he was not the cold-hearted monster that was often portrayed.
'Population Malthus', the political economist the Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus, MA, FRS, slipped quietly to his death through heart failure just before Christmas 1834. During his lifetime this mild-mannered Anglican clergyman is said to have ‘generated more vituperation, vilification and misunderstanding than that of any comparable figure in the history of social and political thought’. The source of such vituperation goes back to his first published essay, An Essay on the Principles of Population as it Affects the Future Improvement to Society (1798).
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