Francis Place Research Articles

Francis Place on the Propriety of Preventing Conception

Francis Place on the Propriety of Preventing Conception

The Fighting Jew: The Life and Times of Daniel Mendoza, Champion Boxer by Wynn Wheldon

Reviewed by: The Fighting Jew: The Life and Times of Daniel Mendoza, Champion Boxer by Wynn Wheldon Todd M. Endelman Wynn Wheldon, The Fighting Jew: The Life and Times of Daniel Mendoza, Champion Boxer ( Amberley Publishing, 2019). Pp. 288. $32.95. It is an understatement to say that the history of boxing does not command attention in the field of eighteenth-century studies. Sad to say, Wynn Wheldon's biography of the bare-knuckle fighter Daniel Mendoza, a London-born Jew of Spanish and Portuguese descent who was active in the ring in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, will do little to correct this. It is long on anecdotes and short on analysis. Wheldon, who came to the subject because his wife is a descendant of Mendoza, writes in a lively and engaging way but does not probe the implications of Mendoza's career. This is regrettable. Prizefighting flourished in Britain at this time but not elsewhere in Europe. Why, one wants to know, did the British have a fondness for fisticuffs and what does this say about British taste and social habits? In addition, prizefighting's popularity, which often bridged the social gap between the highborn and the lowborn, its links with gambling and crime, and the imaginative work it did in crystallizing notions of nationality and masculinity are left unexplored. The one dimension of Mendoza's life that Wheldon pursues is his Jewishness, especially its place in his career and in the formation of images of the Jew. In this period, at least thirty Jews made a name for themselves in the ring, Mendoza the best known and the most successful among them. He was credited with introducing a more "scientific" form of boxing, one that emphasized finesse, agility, and intelligence, rather than brute strength and bulk. (He himself was not a big man. He stood five feet seven inches tall and weighed 160 pounds in his heyday.) Long after his career in the ring came to an end, he continued to tour the provinces, attracting large audiences to exhibitions of his prowess, in which he sparred and imitated the boxing styles of other well-known fighters. He was, as Wheldon makes clear, as much a showman as an athlete. His Jewish birth was not an obstacle to acceptance into "the fancy" (the boxing fraternity), success in the ring, and popular acclaim. A "Mendoza" became a slang word for a physical set-to. Throughout his career, he fought as a Jew—that is, he was labelled as such by friends and foes ("Mendoza, the noted fighting Jew"), a label he embraced. He was a great hero to the Jews of London, who vicariously participated in his victories in the ring. His triumphs occurred, however, at the same time that popular culture continued to stigmatize Jews as untrustworthy, scheming, rapacious, and greedy. The coexistence of anti-Jewish sentiment and pro-Mendoza admiration may represent one of the first manifestations of a phenomenon that became commonplace in twentieth-century [End Page 482] America, where athletes and entertainers from minority groups enjoyed public acclaim while racial stereotyping continued to thrive. The concurrence of such seemingly opposed sentiments calls for further comment. One possible reason that Wheldon does not engage with this problem is that he believes that Mendoza, whom he calls, with good reason, "the most famous Jew of his day" (in Britain), made potential assailants think twice before harassing Jews in the street. He did so, according to Wheldon, by erasing "a particular stereotype of the Jew as craven and submissive and un-English" (213). His only evidence for this is a passage from the radical reformer Francis Place's autobiography, in which Place claimed that Mendoza's celebrity and the spread of boxing skills among young Jewish men put an end to Jew-baiting. While there might have been a diminution in random assaults on Jews in London in the first half of the nineteenth century, there is no reason to attribute this to Mendoza. More likely, it was due to the more general decline in casual violence and the Evangelical-inspired growth of civility and respectability. Moreover, even in the wake of Mendoza's triumphs, there...

Francis Place (1647–1728) and his collection of works on paper

Abstract Within the modest archive of materials relating to the artist Francis Place at Hospitalfield House in Arbroath is an eighteenth-century notebook listing a selection of drawings by Place and others, which were inherited by his daughter Frances Wyndham. Although Place’s original and significant collection of prints, drawings and paintings is now widely dispersed, the drawings notebook at Hospitalfield and a corresponding notebook listing intaglio prints go some way to reconstructing the contents of his studio or ‘painting room’ at York, and aid our understanding of the influences that informed this largely self-taught artist. The details in the drawings notebook of sketches now lost or in private hands also greatly develop Place’s known oeuvre in this medium; evidence is provided for a far broader range of subjects, including nude figure studies and biblical subjects, than has previously been acknowledged.

Living Pictures: The Art of Staging in Contemporary Photography

Living PicturesThe Art of Staging in Contemporary Photography Kristine Somerville Click for larger view View full resolution The Dining Room (Francis Place) (II), 1997 © Sarah Jones, courtesy Maureen Paley, London [End Page 33] Click for larger view View full resolution The Dining Room (Francis Place) (VI), 1997 © Sarah Jones, courtesy Maureen Paley, London In Edith Wharton’s novel The House of Mirth, the Wellington Brys, a couple insecure about their social standing in New York society, want to attract new friends. To succeed, they must pull off a bold party. After careful thought, the “two baits” they use are an evening of expensive music and tableaux vivants, a series of living pictures popular among upper-class Victorians. The Brys enlist a dozen fashionable young women and costume them as characters from paintings by Goya, Van Dyck, Titian, and Watteau. The women model scenes of nymphs dancing across a patch of flower-strewn grass or garlanding an altar until the final red velvet curtain opens on Lily Bart, the novel’s protagonist, presented without artifice. She is herself the work of art. While this moment marks Lily’s social triumph, it also displays the era’s love of the art of staging. With attention to lighting, costumes, props, backdrops, and set pieces, they re-created lushly theatrical scenes from classical art. [End Page 34] Of the constructed tableaux, Wharton writes, “To unfinished minds they remain, in spite of every enhancement of art, only a superior kind of wax-works; but to the responsive fancy they may give magic glimpses of the boundary world between fact and imagination.” Click for larger view View full resolution The Dining Room Table (Francis Place) (III), 1998 © Sarah Jones, courtesy Maureen Paley, London In the late eighteenth century, Lady Emma Hamilton, wife of the British ambassador to Naples, introduced what she called “attitudes” to European society. Draped in a simple shawl, her hair down around her shoulders, she used gesture and expression to transform herself into figures from classical sculptures and vases. Though at first they considered it improper, Victorians could not resist the performative charm of Lady Hamilton’s attitudes, and the popular entertainment quickly evolved into elaborate tableaux. Transformation into imaginary characters offered a socially acceptable way of flaunting a woman’s beauty; she could let down her hair, kick off her slippers, and slip into a revealing [End Page 35] Click for larger view View full resolution Ryan Schude, The Diner. Sun Valley, California. 2008 [End Page 36] Click for larger view View full resolution Ryan Schude, The Saturn. Mid-City, Los Angeles. 2007 costume. Trying on alter egos represented a form of emancipation from rigid social roles. When photography was invented in 1839, the familiar practice of role playing and staging scenes for tableaux became a natural subject for the new medium. People were quick to grasp the potential of the photograph as a virtual stage. Photographers became directors, posing “actors,” choosing the sets, props, and costumes, and determining the lighting and placement in implied narratives. Early examples of the influence of tableaux vivants on Victorian photography are plentiful. At an estate near Scotland, between 1843 and 1847, English photographers David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson made photographic illustrations of scenes from Sir Walter Scott’s novel The Antiquary, posing their figures in front of handmade backdrops and using atmospheric lighting. For his photographs, Swedish-born Oscar Gustave Rejlander hired actors from traveling tableau vivant groups and arranged them like theatrical performers [End Page 38] Click for larger view View full resolution Jonathan Hobin, diana’s dead, In the Playroom, 2010 Click for larger view View full resolution Jonathan Hobin, The Twins, In the Playroom, 2010 [End Page 39] Click for larger view View full resolution Jonathan Hobin, Triple Threat, In the Playroom, 2013 in front of a backdrop painted with a landscape and framed by a large curtain on either side. Charles Darwin later hired him to shoot several photographic illustrations for his book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. Julia Margaret Cameron cast well-known public figures as characters in her neighbor Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem Idylls of the King, a retelling of the Arthurian...

Civilizing Taste: “Sandman Joe,” the Bawdy Ballad, and Metropolitan Improvement

Focusing on the ballad “Sandman Joe” from Francis Place’s collection of flash ballads remembered from his youth, this article tracks how and where bawdy ballads were performed in London in the 1780s in order to understand better the soundscapes of late eighteenth-century London. Questioning narratives that assume the “civilizing process” begins with the middling sorts and spreads belatedly to the lower orders, attention to bawdy urban ballads makes visible the complex dynamics affecting elite and popular culture in the late eighteenth century and the subsequent desire to affix stable meanings on to urban space.

John Cleave’s Weekly Police Gazette (1834–6), Francis Place, and the Pragmatics of the Unstamped Press

This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the English at ODU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in English Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of ODU Digital Commons. For more information, please contact digitalcommons@odu.edu. Repository Citation Jacobs, Edward, John Cleave's Weekly Police Gazette (1834-6), Francis Place, and the Pragmatics of the Unstamped Press (2010). English Faculty Publications. Paper 23. http://digitalcommons.odu.edu/english_fac_pubs/23

John Hunt to Edwin Atherstone: Seven Letters

(2009). John Hunt to Edwin Atherstone: Seven Letters. The Keats-Shelley Review: Vol. 23, No. 1, pp. 56-81.

EDITORIAL PRINCIPLES

Many of the difficulties one encounters when editing Place's manuscripts have already been thoroughly discussed and described in Mary Thale's introduction to The Autobiography of Francis Place While relatively few sections of the diaries have literally been cut out of the manuscript, several sections have been crossed out or overwritten. In those cases where I have been able to read through the overmarkings, I have presented them in this text as stricken out or, in a very few instances, noted the section as such in a footnote. As Thale noted, perhaps the most confounding aspect of the manuscripts is Place's awkward and sometimes confusing use of punctuation. Commas are often omitted entirely or replace full stops at the end of sentences. Thus, one sometimes finds commas preceding the capitalization of the first word in what appears to be the next sentence

Der Frühsozialist Thomas Hodgskin und die Anfänge der Germanistik in Großbritannien

Thomas Hodgskin (1787–1869) wurde bisher nur als radikal-liberaler Nationalökonom rezipiert, er ist jedoch auch ein bedeutender Bildungsreformer und Wegbereiter der Germanistik in Großbritannien. Seine Reiseberichte über Norddeutschland enthalten Beobachtungen zum literarischen Alltagsleben verschiedener Schichten; er erteilte Sprachunterricht und publizierte über deutsche Literatur; in seiner Korrespondenz mit Francis Place, James Mill und Jeremy Bentham lieferte er Vorschläge zu einem modernen Bildungsideal, das die Gründung des University College London mitprägte, aus dem auch der erste germanistische Lehrstuhl in Großbritannien hervorging. Aus der Außenperspektive eines in ökonomischer Theorie und Praxis überlegenen Landes entwickelte Hodgskin Ansätze zu einer sozialgeschichtlichen Analyse der Literatur und Bildung in Deutschland zu einer Zeit, als dort die Hochschulgermanistik sich erst zu konstituieren begann.

Identity, Language, and Resistance in the Making of the Victorian “Criminal Class”: Mayhew's Convict Revisited

T is widespread agreement that the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saw the articulation of a concept of a “criminal class”— a group of offenders allegedly drawn to crime because of moral degeneracy rather than being driven to it by their material circumstances. They were “the marginal people among the urban poor—the vagrants, street-folk, prostitutes, and thieves,” and they were perceived to constitute “the main danger to the social and moral order” in the period. The concept of a “criminal class” was voiced by a great variety of members of the respectable classes, including the magistrate Patrick Colquhoun, the political radical Francis Place, the poet Robert Southey, statistical societies, and the Constabulary Report of 1839. As in previous eras of social upheaval, including the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, these respectable fears generated a literature of roguery purporting to describe this underworld. The concept of a “criminal class” enjoyed such potency that it continued to flourish into the 1850s and 1860s. In recent historiography Michel Foucault was a leading figure in observing the power of the concept of a “criminal class.” In early nineteenth-century France, he wrote, “the myth of a barbaric, immoral and outlaw class . . . haunted the discourse of legislators, philanthropists and investigators into working-class life.” There, he found contemporary observers reporting that crime was “almost all from the bottom rank of the social order” and that “nine-tenths of murderers, thieves

Ricardo and the Utilitarians

The paper discusses Ricardo's relationship to Mill and Bentham. It discusses first the origins of the myth of Ricardo's dependence from Bentham through Mill, and Halévy's contribution to the freezing of such a myth. The paper reconstructs what were their shared political commitments and activities and the kind of specific political views and agenda that may be ascribed to Ricardo himself. The paper then discusses the question of Ricardo's adhesion to Benthamite ethics. It examines fragments in Ricardo's correspondence with Maria Edgeworth and Francis Place, and adds fresh light on the issue by highlighting the partial overlapping between Bentham's ethics and the kind of intuitionism with theological consequentialism that Ricardo had learned from the Unitarian minister, Thomas Belsham.

James Mill on the Growth and Limitation of Population

The brief passages reproduced below from James Mill's 1821 work, Elements of Political Economy, present an early analysis of total and net fecundity, a discussion of the scope and limits of government influence on fertility, and a reflection on the goal of a stationary population. In his preface Mill describes the Elements as “a school‐book in political economy”—it was in fact based on the lessons he gave to his then barely teenaged son—and he disavows any claim to originality. Moreover, the chapter on wages, from which the excerpts come, has been generally disdained because of its espousal of the discredited wage‐fund theory of wage determination. But Mill's treatment of population is as fresh and stimulating as it is concise.James Mill (1773–1836) is now known more as the father of John Stuart Mill—and as the designer of the latter's famously rigorous education—than for his own writing. Born and educated in Scotland, Mill moved to England, making his living as a journalist. On the side, he was writing what became a three‐volume History of British India (1817), which led to long‐term employment in the London office of the East India Company. Mill's thinking on economics was strongly influenced by his friendship with David Ricardo and on public policy by Jeremy Bentham. The group of reformist thinkers that surrounded him, known as the philosophical radicals, were protégés in the main of Bentham. Mill, like others in this group, was a proponent of family planning, albeit far more cautious on the subject than the propagandist Francis Place. “Prudence,” which for Malthus meant only delay of marriage, Mill took equally to cover control of marital fertility: it should comprise measures “by which either marriages are sparingly contracted, or care is taken that children, beyond a certain number, shall not be the fruit.” In the last of the excerpts, offering an unapologetic vision of bourgeois leisure and affluence, he anticipates J. S. Mill's notable chapter on the stationary state (Book IV, Chapter 6) in the Principles of Political Economy (1848)—see the Archives item in PDR 12, no. 2.The text is reproduced from the 3rd edition of the Elements (London, 1826), this part of which is virtually the same as the first edition aside from some minor improvements in expression. The excerpts are from Chapter 2, Section 2, pp. 46–50, 57–59, and 63–66.

Industrial Arbitration, Equity, and Authority in England, 1800—1850

In an obscure aside, the well-known English working-class radical, Francis Place, remarked in his Autobiography that even when “in deepest poverty” he had tried to serve other artisans. Some he had helped to train up as small masters or foremen while others he aided by working to settle their problems and disputes. “I had many matters brought to me for adjudication, arbitration or arrangement,” he wrote. “I hardly know the time when for three months together I have been free from this kind of interference.” Most matters it seems had to do with debtors and their creditors, but others appear to have concerned the settlement of estates or even affairs “related to an association or large body of men.” While he may have been justly proud of his service to the working-class community, Place's comment provides an insight into working-class life that is rarely glimpsed. He did not choose the word arbitration accidentally. By the nineteenth century, life and work in England had been penetrated by forms of dispute resolution that were meant to secure “order without law.”

A provincial man of science at work: Martin Lister, F.R.S., and his illustrators 1670-1683.

Between October 1670, when Martin Lister arrived in York, and September 1683, when he removed to London, he was at the centre of an informal group of virtuosi - naturalists, artists and antiquaries - who either lived in the provincial capital or visited regularly. 1 Part of the medical establishment at York, and keenly interested in physiological phenomena, Lister was to become nationally renowned as a scientist and naturalist. 2 The Philosophical Transactions carried 28 non- illustrated scientific communications from Lister between 1669 and 1673. Over the following 10 years his published papers and books were increasingly illustrated. A study of the association between Martin Lister and the amateur artists William Lodge and Francis Place provides the opportunity to consider: the relationship between the scientist and his illustrators; the visual conventions being developed in scientific publishing; and the value the scientific community placed on the visual representation of their observations, scientific collections and published communications. How far does a study of the association of Lister and his illustrators illumine general issues pertinent to the history of science? What value have later scholars placed on the work of Lister’s illustrators?

Fatal Secrets and the French Fertility Transition

There are references in historical French literature to withdrawal or mutual masturbation mostly outside marriage. It is difficult to determine to what extent withdrawal was used within marriage. The context of marital fertility is important in understanding early French fertility decline. The first reference to use of withdrawal among marital couples is given as Francis Place and Robert Dale Owen in the 19th century. Most of the early references are made to extramarital use as a cultural practice that is communicated and a learned behavior. Although Jean Sutter argued that coitus interruptus is capable of appearing spontaneously most contributors in the most authoritative French study of the introduction of family limitation accept a view of social diffusion. Jean-Baptiste Moheau in 1778 is credited with the allusion to fatal secrets among French peasants. Fertility decline occurred during a period when French writers mention the early practice of birth control either premarriage or in extramarital affairs. The most widely quoted passages on French demography are attributed to Moheaus Recherches et considerations sur la population de la France. The Flandrin interpretation of Moheaus passages suggests the diffusion of contraceptive information from the higher to lower social classes. Santow considered withdrawal the main technique responsible for marital fertility decline in Western Europe during the 19th century. Although the condom was invented in 1710 and the sponge later in the 1700s little reference is made to these forms of contraception in the literature. Pornography during the 1700s mentions abortifacients. Eight literary references during this period excluding Casanova refer to withdrawal methods which are considered unreliable and mistrusted by women. Senancour in 1806 and Robert Dale Owen in 1831 suggest that trust in the male lover is key to the success of withdrawal. Religious writings from confessors of the 18th century called withdrawal conjugal onanism.

"The Improper Arts": Sex in Classical Political Economy

THE CONCEPT OF RATIONAL ECONOMIC MAN was the brainchild of classical political economy-Adam Smith, Robert Malthus, Jeremy Bentham, and their contemporaries. Of the famous trio just named, however, only Bentham ever suggested that rational economic man should be rational in bed, and his writings on the subject (many unpublished until the twentieth century) remain largely ignored. The otherwise conventional James Mill alluded indirectly to the use of contraception, and the self-educated radical Francis Place actively campaigned for it. Yet few historians of economic thought have credited either of them with any important innovation. Classical economists' concern with population centered on the consequences and determinants of demographic growth. Matters relative to sexual intercourse, at first blush, may seem only marginally salient to that theme. Yet one consequence of the passion between the sexes-the conception of children-plays a central role in determining population growth. How odd, then, that economists were so reluctant to direct their dispassionate, scientific gaze at issues of sexual rationality and self-interest. Many, though not all, were apparently influenced by prevailing social norms and religious doctrines. In this essay, I hope to provoke further research by outlining a critique of the discourse on sexuality in early political economy, emphasizing two related issues. First, despite their claims to a rational, secular view of the world, most early political economists accepted conventional standards of heterosexuality and female monogamy and espoused the view that contraception was immoral as well as improper. Second, they not only underestimated the influence of rational self-interest on the practice of sexual in

Benthamites and Lancasterians—The Relationship between the followers of Bentham and the British and Foreign School Society during the early years of Popular Education

Much has been written about the Benthamite theories of education and their debt to monitorialism. Bentham himself, in Chrestomathia, based his blueprint for the schools of the future on the use of monitors, and James Mill, in his various articles on education, envisaged universal schooling within a monitorial framework. In more recent times, scholars, such as Burston, have discussed the influence of the theory of mutual instruction on Utilitarian educational thought. Yet in all this output, little attention has been given to relations between Benthamites and Joseph Lancaster, one of the foremost practical exponents of monitorial teaching in the early nineteenth century nor to the organization in Southwark which perpetuated his methods. When Lancaster himself has been referred to, it has usually been in unfavourable terms. Bentham expressed his contempt for the ‘self-styled Quaker’, who ‘so notoriously and scandalously abused’ his early reputation as a successful schoolmaster. Francis Place, abandoning his early enthusiasm for Lancaster, decided that he was ‘adapted to the teaching in the school and to nothing else’ and became ‘mischievous, ridiculous and childish’ after he was ‘caressed by the great’. Halévy summed him up as ‘a pure madman’.

Late Modern

The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000. By Paul Kennedy Der Auswärtige Dienst von ǒsterreich (‐Ungarn), 1720–1920. By Erwin Matsch Revolution in Brussels 1787–1793. By Janet L. Polasky The Frozen Revolution: an essay on Jacobinism. By Ferenc Fehér Francis Place, 1771–1854: The Life of a Remarkable Radical. By Dudley Miles A Social History of the Non‐conformist Ministry in England and Wales, 1800–1930. By K.D. Brown Sicily: The Insecure Base: A History of the British Occupation of Sicily, 1806–1815. By Desmond Gregory Sectarian Violence: The Liverpool Experience 1819–1914. By Frank Neal Threshold of a New World. Intellectuals and the Exile Experience in Paris, 1830–1848. By Lloyd S. Kramer The Anglo‐American Crisis of the Mid‐Nineteenth Century: The Times and America, 1850–1862. By Martin Crawford Crusade against Drink in Victorian England. By Lilian Lewis Shiman The Rise of Modern Business in Great Britain, the United States, and Japan. By Mansel G. Blackford Nineteenth Century Britain: Integration and Diversity. By Keith Robbins British Foreign Secretaries and Foreign Poky: From Crimean War to First World War. Edited by Keith M. Wilson The Culture of Capital: art, power and the nineteenth‐ century middle class. Edited by Janet Wolff and John SeedConsole and Classify: the French psychiatric profession in the nineteenth century. By Jan GoldsteinGladstone, Whiggery and the Liberal Party 1874–1886. By T.A. Jenkins The Financial Times: A Centenary History. By David KynastonA Royal Rebel. A psychological portrait of Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria‐Hungary. By John T. Sdvendy Karl Kraus, Apocalyptic Satirist. Culture and Catastrophe in Habsburg Vienna. By Edward Timms The Ottoman Empire and the World‐Economy. Edited by Huri Islamoǧlu‐Inan Victorian Feminism 1850–1900. By Philippa Levine E. Sylvia Pankhurst: Portrait of a Radical. By Patricia W. Romero The Alliance of Iron and Wheat in the Third French Republic 1860–1914. By Herman Lebovics. France, Fin de Siècle. By Euguen Weber The Letters of T.E. Lawrence. Selected and edited by Malcolm Brown Ireland before and after the Famine: Explorations in economic history, 1800–1925. By Cormac ÓǴrada Workmen's Compensation in Twentieth Century Britain: Law, History and Social Policy. By P.W.J. Bartrip Government Factories and the Origins of British Regional Policy 1934–1948, including a Case Study of North Eastern Trading Estates Ltd. By Herbert Loebl Below The Magic Mountain: A Social History of Tuberculosis in Twentieth Century Britain. By Linda Bryder The Secret Lives of Trebitsch Lincoln. By Bernard Wasserstein Out of the Night. By Jan Valtin The Politics of Manpower, 1914–1918. By Keith Grieves Town and Country Under Fascism: The Transformation of Brescia, 1915–1926. By Alice A. Kelikian The Formation of the Nazi Constituency. Edited by Thomas Childers The Theatre of the Weimar Republic. By John Willett Nichtangriffspakte: Enhvickiung und operative Nutzung in Europa 1922–1939. By Rolf Ahmann The Great Powers in the Middle East 1919–1939. Edited by Uriel Dann Europe Between the Wars. A Political History. By Martin Kitchen The Mensheviks after October: Socialist opposition and the Rise of the Bolshevik Dictatorship. By Vladimir N. Brovkin Mass Observation at the Movies. Edited by Jeffrey Richards and Dorothy Sheridan The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema in Documents, 1896–1939. Edited by Riachard Taylor and Ian Christie The Bleak Midwinter—1947. By A.J. Robertson Education in the Post‐War Years: A Social History. By Roy Lowe The Other Europe. By Jacques Rupnik

A proportionate understanding

Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834) was brought up in the ideology of progress, but made a complete break with progressive thought with his Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), in which he argued that it is useless, even dangerous, to provide relief for the poor, as this encourages them to reproduce. The success of this work provoked a heated discussion, obliging Malthus to expand and elucidate his ideas on population. This resulted in a second Essay (1803), markedly different from the first. This work established Malthus's lasting reputation; he was appointed to a chair in political economy – the first of its kind in Europe – and elected a member of the Royal Society. In 1820, he published another major work: Principles of Political Economy. Malthus's theory soon became known on the continent, particularly in France and Germany, but not without misconceptions or misinterpretations. Most of his opponents have only taken up a caricatural model according to which population always increases in a geometrical progression, while the means of subsistence only increase in an arithmetical progression. In fact, Malthus referred only to tendencies: demographic growth is always checked, be it preventively or positively. In the first Essay, these checks were identified as misery (in the wider sense) and vice; in the second Essay, Malthus introduced the notion of moral restraint (meaning late marriage). All this was embedded in Malthus's moral and theological reflection on progress and Providence; but the Principle of Population also implied pessimistic views on poverty and state assistance, meaning that Malthus's reputation – among socialists and progressivists at least – was permanently tarnished. This perception was quite unjustified, since Malthus was a liberal member of the Whig Party and in favor of reform. Malthus's intellectual legacy was extremely varied. On the economic level, the theory of effective demand, which he introduced in the Principles, was a lasting success; on the political level, the very term ‘Malthusian’ was coined as early as 1822 by Francis Place, who proposed a much easier and more effective method of checking population growth than moral restraint: the limitation of births within marriage. It is in this form, representing a complete break with Malthus’ theory, that neo-Malthusianism became established in the nineteenth century, gaining wide acceptance after the Second World War, even at the United Nations.

Francis Place and the Chartists: Promise and Disillusion

Francis Place and the Chartists: Promise and Disillusion