Malthus on Emigration and Colonization: Letters to Wilmot-Horton

Abstract

Students of the history of British emigration know Wilmot-Horton2 as a tenacious but eccentric advocate of the doctrine of state-aided emigration, who was in correspondence with Malthus on the subject of colonization. It is known vaguely that he had intended to publish either the whole or a part of his correspondence with Malthus, probably in a fifth series of his Causes and Remedies of Pauperism, the first four series of which, together with an introductory volume, had appeared in 1829-30.3 But little more than this was really known about Malthus's letters. An unpublished Bristol University thesis (1936) by E. G. Jones on Wilmot-Horton mentions and quotes very briefly from a letter from Malthus to Horton, which is referred to as being then at Catton Hall, Staffordshire. Our attempt to locate the Malthus-Horton correspondence led us to the Central County Library at Derby where the bulk of the Horton family papers were deposited about two years ago. But although we came upon some interesting papers in this collection, we were unable to find any Malthus letters. However, Mr. D. W. H. Neilson, the present owner of Catton Hall, generously agreed to a further search being made there, and he, Professor Hutchison and I recently (March 1962) discovered in the cellars a further collection of interesting papers, including the manuscript letters of Malthus. All these papers are also deposited at Derby.4 The Malthus letters-twenty in all and dating from February, 1823 to May, 1831-were carefully preserved in two separate files. All the letters were written to Horton, except one, dated May 24, 1829, which was addressed to Senior who presumably passed it on to Horton. Along with these two files there was a manuscript of 86 foolscap pages covering part of the Malthus-Horton correspondence. It was probably