AN ESSAY ON THE PRINCIPLE OF POPULATION; or a View of its Past and Present Effects on Human Happiness; with an Inquiry into our Prospects Respecting the Future Removal or Mitigation of the Evils which it Occations. A New Edition very much Enlarged
1803réf. 45495London: Printed for J. Johnson by T. Bensley 1803. Second enlarged edition. Large 4to pp. viii 3contents 1errata 610. Bound in contemporary full calf rebacked at an early time with the original spine laid down. Ownership signature on the endpaper of "N.W. Ridley Colborne" on the endpaper and "Horace W. Baddle 1859" on the top of the title page. Some light intermittant spotting and staining but a nice clean copy with wide margins. Garrison-Morton 1693; Carpenter XXXII 2; Einaudi 3668; Goldsmiths' 18640; Kress B.4701; Mattioli 2207 See Printing and the Mind of Man # 251. The great quarto edition of Malthus' masterpiece a very important work in the field of economics and a source of Darwin's "idea of 'the struggle for existence'" PMM The ReverendThomas Robert Malthus FRS 1766 - 1834 was a British scholar influential in political economy and demography. He has become widely known for his theories concerning population and its increase or decrease in response to various factors. The six editions of his Principles of Population published from 1798 to 1826 observed that sooner or later population gets checked by famine disease and widespread mortality. The central idea is a simple one: that population expands geometrically while food production grows arithmetically. This edition though being the second may be considered as a new work which Malthus himself also claimed; -it is thoroughly revised and much enlarged nearly four times the length of the original essay the title has been changed the title of the first is merely: "An Essay on the Principle of Population as it Affects the Future Improvement of Society with Remarks on the Speculation of Mr. Godwin M. Condorcet and Other Writers" He notes: "In the course of this inquiry I found that much more had been done than I had been aware of when I first published the essay. The poverty and misery arising from a too rapid increase of population had been distinctly seen and the most violent remedies proposed so long ago as the times of Plato and Aristotle. And of late years the subject had been treated in such a manner by some of the French economists occasionally by Montesquieu and among our own writers by Dr. Franklin Sir James Steuart Mr. Arthur Young and Mr. Townsend as to create a natural surprise that it had not excited more of the publick attention" Preface to the second edition p. IV. "The "Essay" was highly influential in the progress of thought in the early nineteenth-century Europe. "Parson" Malthus as Cobbett dubbed him was for many a monster and his views were often grossly misinterpreted. But his influence on social policy whether for good or evil was considerable. The Malthusian theory of population came at the right time to harden the existing feeling against the Poor Laws and Malthus was a leading spirit behind the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834." PMM 251. Printed for J. Johnson, by T. Bensley unknown books
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