Contemporary Attacks on William Godwin in 1798: War, Wollstonecraft, and Anti-Jacobinism

No great historical insight is needed to observe that Malthus's 1798 Essay on the Principle of Population addresses Godwin.Footnote 13 The book's subtitle, “with Remarks on the Speculations of Mr. Godwin, M. Condorcet, and Other Writers,” makes this clear. Six of the Essay's nineteen chapters mention Godwin in their titles; a third of the Essay's text discusses him explicitly. Even Malthus's very first sentence informs readers that a discussion about Godwin led him to write the book: “The following Essay owes its origin to a conversation with a friend, on the subject of Mr. Godwin's Essay on avarice and profusion, in his Enquirer.” Recognizing this, nearly all histories of Malthus's 1798 essay address Godwin to some extent. A few historians idiosyncratically dismiss Godwin's influence—most notably Gertrude Himmelfarb, who argues that Godwin was already so insignificant in 1798 that Malthus must have been addressing Adam Smith.Footnote 14 Yet most scholars recognize that Malthus's first essay does address Godwin's ideas.Footnote 15 Historian A. M. C. Waterman has rightly stressed the polemical qualities of the essay, arguing that, when Malthus wrote the first Essay on the Principle of Population, he viewed it not as a major contribution to political economy but above all as an attack on Godwin and his view of property. As Waterman puts it, although the population principle was “eventually acknowledged to have been ‘scientific progress,’ [it] emerged not as the fruit of disinterested inquiry, but as the unintended outcome of ideological polemic.”Footnote 16 However, scholars have not connected the essay to the sexual scandal that beset Godwin during the months when Malthus was working out the population principle and writing his essay.

What did it mean to write a book about William Godwin in 1798? For one thing, it meant to be one of a small crowd of pamphleteers, journalists, and other writers attacking Godwin. Between February 1798 and February 1799, at least four other essays attacking Godwin's philosophy were published; in addition, three anti-Godwinian novels and two books of anti-Godwinian satirical poetry were published.Footnote 17 All were widely reviewed; many went into multiple editions. Book reviews in fourteen journals discussed the most shocking aspects of Godwin's private life. The Anti-Jacobin Review, which began publishing in July 1798, devoted ten articles to lambasting him in 1798 and eighteen in 1799. The attacks, which grew increasingly vituperative, continued for the next few years. At least six new books attacked Godwin in 1799, eight in 1800, and three in 1801.Footnote 18

Why were there so many attacks on Godwin after 1798? Godwin had been one of Britain's most famous radicals ever since his celebrated Enquiry Concerning Political Justice was published in 1793. Yet never before had he been the focus of such widespread, virulent invective.Footnote 19 Three related factors made Godwin and his ideas about sex attractive targets in 1798. First, Wollstonecraft and Godwin were easy to demonize in 1798 because their sexual heterodoxy, like that of other British radicals, was in fact inspired partly by the French Revolution. As Suzanne Desan has shown, the revolutionary French government had extended “liberty, equality, and fraternity” to marriage, legalizing easy divorce in 1792 and rejecting the traditional legal and social opprobrium facing unwed mothers and their children.Footnote 20 Inspired by the French campaign to render sexual love egalitarian, many English radicals, including Godwin and Wollstonecraft, followed suit in both their writings and their private lives.Footnote 21 Godwin's Enquiry rejects marriage altogether in favor of reasoned voluntary relations between men and women; the eponymous heroine of Wollstonecraft's novel, Maria, suffers imprisonment and worse at the hands of her husband, who mercilessly subjects her to every possible oppression a wife could face under the legal doctrine of coverture.Footnote 22

Second, in late 1797, a few months before Malthus wrote, patriotic panic during the war with France had led to a full-fledged attack on British radicalism. Militarily, the early months of 1798 were among the war's most dismal. After five years of warfare, only Britain was left fighting the French. Between October 1797 and May 1798, Napoleon's “Army of England” was encamped across the channel, evidently massing to invade Britain and administer the coup de grâce. At home, rumors swirled that radical British subversives were plotting to join the French invaders and take up arms against the government—“United Englishmen” and “United Scotsmen,” as well as the “United Irishmen,” who actually took up arms. In 1797, to forestall domestic insurrection, the Pitt government suspended habeas corpus and rounded up any remaining members of the London Corresponding Society. At the same time, they encouraged an anti-radical propaganda campaign: in September 1797, The Anti-Jacobin; or, Weekly Examiner, financially supported by the government and organized by an under secretary of state, George Canning, led the way in publishing attacks on a variety of British radicals.Footnote 23 Before January 1798, however, The Anti-Jacobin; or, Weekly Examiner and other loyalists had paid little attention to Godwin.

Third, at the height of this wartime panic, in January 1798, the grief-stricken Godwin published a sexually revealing biography of his late wife, Mary Wollstonecraft, inadvertently providing the patriots with a perfect target.Footnote 24 In September 1797, Wollstonecraft had died of puerperal fever after only six months of marriage. The Memoirs of the Author of “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman”, written with all the love, style, and honesty Godwin possessed, revealed Wollstonecraft's suicide attempts, extramarital affairs, and unwed motherhood. Believing both in the power of truth and that marriage was inherently unjust, Godwin scorned the pious platitudes normally found in memoirs of the departed. Instead, he honored Wollstonecraft's memory by depicting her life and character as fully as possible.Footnote 25 Forthrightly, he detailed her unrequited passion for the married painter Henry Fuseli, her extramarital relationship with Gilbert Imlay, and the birth of her two illegitimately conceived daughters. He even edited and published Wollstonecraft's extensive love letters to Imlay in volumes 3 and 4 of her Posthumous Works, comparing them favorably with the “language of sentiment and passion” in Goethe's Werther.Footnote 26 Only “the circumstances of Mary's being in a state of pregnancy” led to his marrying her, he informed the astounded public.Footnote 27 Anti-Jacobins leapt to drag Wollstonecraft's name through the mud, insisting that Godwin's pride in his wife's evident “whoredom,” as demonstrated by the Memoirs, proved that vice and libertinism lay at the heart of political radicalism. Perhaps most horrifying to conservative readers, Godwin presented Wollstonecraft's life as a model of excellence and sensibility. As one reviewer put it, “Blushes would suffuse the cheeks of most husbands were they forced to relate those anecdotes of their wives which Mr. Godwin voluntarily proclaims to the world.”Footnote 28 In print and in private conversation, Mary Wollstonecraft became a cautionary example demonstrating that feminism and harlotry were inherently linked. Within a month of the publication of the Memoirs, books and articles began to appear condemning Godwin. It was at this moment that Malthus chose to write his Essay on Population, framing it explicitly as a refutation of Godwin's notorious radicalism and focusing on the disastrous results of unfettered human sexuality.

How do we know that Malthus knew anything about this controversy? We find evidence in the marginalia of his personal copies of Godwin's Memoirs of Wollstonecraft and Wollstonecraft's Posthumous Works, which remain in his library, housed at Jesus College, Cambridge. Indeed, Malthus was unusually voluble in responding to Wollstonecraft. Typically, as his bibliographer writes, he was “an infrequent annotator, disinclined to register agreement or disagreement with views stated, or to make other additional comments.” Normally he marked his books only with lightly penciled horizontal or vertical lines in the margins. Relatively few of his books bear any of his handwriting at all.Footnote 29 Yet Malthus was interested enough in Wollstonecraft to write six marginal comments in his copy of her Posthumous Works.Footnote 30

Although some corners were folded, no pencil marks appear until the middle of volume 3. At that point, Malthus seems to have lost patience with Wollstonecraft's love letters to the increasingly bored Imlay. On page 118, when Wollstonecraft demands of Imlay, “What does your heart say!” Malthus's handwriting responds sharply, “Nothing at all says Mrs. Blunt.”Footnote 31

Malthus's subsequent comments suggest that, like contemporary book reviewers, he pondered why a woman of Wollstonecraft's genius would choose the path of sexual immorality.Footnote 32 In the margins of her short story about a woman who adores a married man, Malthus speculates about the nature of sexual love in general, particularly Wollstonecraft's feelings for the married painter Fuseli, which Godwin had revealed in his Memoirs of Wollstonecraft. Malthus penciled in the following: “This turn seems to be introduced for the purpose of making it an instructive tale for youth; which however it was hardly intended to b[e.] It is the picture of a part of her o[wn] life. Fuseli (the other friend) her[e] made an indelible impression upon her, which is here most enchantingly described.”Footnote 33 Other marginalia focus more directly on Wollstonecraft's weakness of character. In a comment recalling several reviewers’ suggestions that she was a woman of genius, Malthus replies to her discussion of genius and strength of mind: “Genius & strength of mind seem to be very different things—they may exist separately; in which case the former will be instructed, the latter not.”Footnote 34 Moreover, although we cannot tell whether Malthus or some other reader folded the corners down in his copies of the Memoirs and the Posthumous Works, these markings suggest that the corner-folder too was particularly interested in understanding how Wollstonecraft's thoughts and character led her to form sexually illicit relationships.

What are Wollstonecraft's Posthumous Works and Godwin's Memoirs of her doing in Malthus's library? Relatively few other works of this kind appear there; Malthus's taste in reading typically ran neither to novels nor to memoirs of females. Whatever made Malthus purchase and read these books must have been something out of the ordinary, such as research for a book about Godwin. Moreover, the handwriting in the margins exactly matches that of his 1799 travel diaries, which suggests that he read and commented on these books at about the same time.Footnote 35 I believe that he bought and read these volumes early in 1798 as he was conceiving or working on the first Essay on Population.

Portrait of the Parson as a Young Man: A Revisionist Look at Malthus in 1798

To understand the first Essay's origins, we need to see its author in an unfamiliar light—as an ambitious writer researching a salable book. This section argues that, when he wrote the Essay in 1798, Malthus was a sociable and ambitious man, known among friends for his dry sense of humor. For at least two years, he had wanted to write a publishable book in order to better his position. Far from living in rural obscurity, as he later depicted himself, he readily obtained any books necessary to allow him to research and write the book he hoped would help him escape his ill-paid curacy.

In 1798, aged thirty-two, Malthus had served for five years as the underpaid curate of Okewood's tiny chapel of ease in rural Surrey. Okewood was too poor to maintain a curate's residence, so Malthus resided at his father's substantial home in Albury, riding nine miles into the country on Sundays to preach and read divine service at its unheated chapel.Footnote 36 Although Malthus's biographer Patricia James speculates that “Malthus must have loved Okewood,” there is scant evidence of this.Footnote 37 Too poor even to marry, and well past the age when men of his class normally did so—his cleft lip, cleft palate, and consequent speech impediment precluding active ministry in a fashionable parish—Malthus's future may well have looked dismal.

One of the best ways for an underpaid eighteenth-century minister to obtain a benefice was to attract the notice of a like-minded patron by publishing a book. A 1796 letter from his father suggests that Malthus had attempted this route to advancement at least once before. That year, he tried to publish a political pamphlet entitled “The Crisis,” but the publisher Debrett rejected it, and Malthus decided not to pursue the matter. His father, deeply disappointed, wrote Malthus that he believed the pamphlet worth publishing, even if it would not guarantee him a better post: “I can’t reconcile myself to your not publishing your pamphlet. I am sure it will never do you discredit, though I cannot answer that it will get you a Deanery.”Footnote 38 In context, this sounds as if Malthus's father believed his son had written the pamphlet because he wanted to obtain—if not a deanery, the most prestigious post below the rank of bishop—at least a benefice outside Okewood. His father's letter suggests that Debrett had said that “The Crisis” was not topical enough to attract readers. In this letter, Malthus's father, himself a thrice-published author, offered his son advice on what publishers were looking for: “The truth is that the market overflows, and if there is not some particular abuse or known name, the booksellers are not willing to risk their money.”Footnote 39 Malthus did not repeat this mistake in 1798. Instead, Malthus opted to write about the scandal-ridden William Godwin, whose “particular abuse and known name” had much better luck in attracting a publisher. Unfortunately, however, the book did not attract a patron with a benefice. (For that, Malthus would have to wait until after he published the second version of the Essay in 1803, when he finally obtained a handsome benefice worth £300 a year, of which he used £70 to pay a curate to perform all the ministerial duties.)Footnote 40 Even without a benefice in hand, and having no immediate prospect of employment, Malthus left Okewood in 1798. In short, there is some reason to suspect that, by early 1798, when he began writing the Essay, Malthus was looking for a way to distinguish himself in print in order to leave Okewood and obtain a better post. It also seems likely that Debrett's explanation for not publishing “The Crisis” inspired Malthus to look for a more topical—even scandalous—subject in 1798.

Not only did Malthus intend to make his 1798 Essay salable by making it topical but he also employed heavy irony and even humor. This, too, contradicts received wisdom, for the mature Malthus was rightly known as humorless. Yet, according to Bishop William Otter, a close friend of Malthus's from his university days, as a young man Malthus was well known for his drollery. His “taste for humour … was prevalent throughout his youth, and even survived a portion of his manhood, and at Cambridge, in particular, set off as it used to be by a very comic expression of features, and a most peculiar intonation of voice when he was in the vein, was often a source of infinite delight and pleasantry to his companions.” As a young man, his “fitful bursts of fancy … were wont to set the table in a roar.”Footnote 41

According to Otter, Malthus abandoned his humorous demeanor only after he had published the 1798 Essay. Otter writes: “In his riper years, this taste gradually faded away. … But the reason is obvious. From the moment the principle of population had been struck out from his mind, and had taken hold of the public attention, it became to him the predominant and absorbing subject of his thoughts, constraining him to grave reflection, and causing every other tendency to yield to it.”Footnote 42 In other words, after 1798, as Malthus began to turn his population principle to purposes weightier than polemic, he adopted a new, grave demeanor matching his own sense of his principle's importance.

Indeed, the 1803 Malthus's eagerness to obscure his population principle's satirical association with Godwin is partly responsible for the enduring image of the 1798 Malthus as a sober country parson. In 1798, the scandal-ridden Godwin had been newsworthy and a fit subject for an ironic polemic. By 1803, however, Godwin had been thoroughly discredited, and Malthus wanted to dissociate his population principle from its anti-Jacobin origins. Indeed, if Malthus could have excluded Godwin altogether from the sober, fact-oriented 1803 edition, he might well have done so. He did omit Godwin's name from the second Essay's subtitle. He also excised most of the first Essay's explicit discussion of Godwin's ideas.Footnote 43

Perhaps most important to a revisionist biography, Malthus's second Essay amends the first Essay's origin story by denying Godwin's importance in this original formulation of the population principle. Thus, in 1803 Malthus informed his readers that, although his book was “suggested” by Godwin, the population principle itself was actually “deduced” from less controversial thinkers: “The Essay on the Principle of Population, which I published in 1798, was suggested, as is expressed in the preface, by a paper in Mr. Godwin's Inquirer. It was written on the spur of the occasion, and from the few materials which were within my reach in a country situation. The only authors from whose writings I had deduced the principle, which formed the main argument of the essay, were Hume, Wallace, Dr. Adam Smith, and Dr. Price.”Footnote 44 As we shall see, however, the marginalia in his copy of Political Justice suggest that, although Malthus did cite these authors in the first essay, he actually developed the population principle in large part by reading Godwin.

Moreover, although historians have mostly accepted the above statement at face value, Malthus was being disingenuous in suggesting that he wrote the first Essay on the “spur of the occasion, and from the few materials which were within his reach in a country situation.” He seems to have been able to obtain any book he wanted, including Godwin's Memoirs of Wollstonecraft and her four-volume Posthumous Works. Moreover, he obtained copies of the only two books Godwin cited by name in Political Justice’s chapter on population, both of which must have been relatively hard to get: Robert Wallace's Various prospects of mankind, nature and providence and the original French version of Condorcet's Equisse d’un tableau historique des progrés de l’esprit humain. Wallace's relatively obscure religious tract had not been reprinted since 1761. Moreover, although an English translation of Condorcet's Equisse was available, Malthus did not use that version. Instead, he used the original French version, imported from behind enemy lines during wartime.Footnote 45 Malthus might not have had access to Jesus College's library while he was in Surrey, but he had no trouble obtaining the obvious books pertaining to Godwin's views on population and sex.

Why should the Malthus of 1803 want his readers to believe that he had penned his 1798 edition using only books that happened to be on his or his neighbors’ shelves? Surrey was no dark corner of the land. Britain had an extensive and well-developed market for print culture long before 1798. London booksellers were delighted to send books by common carrier to counties far more remote than Surrey. Guildford was only a few miles from Malthus's home in Albury. What might Malthus have been hiding by suggesting that he had written the 1798 Essay on the spur of the moment, using whatever books happened to be at hand?

I believe Malthus opened his revised Essay with the above passage in order to obscure the first Essay's connection with Godwin. He wanted his 1803 readers to think that he had “deduced” the population principle after reading the work of great intellectuals like Hume and Smith, not after reading the discredited Godwin. Perhaps Malthus hoped that nobody would think that he had picked up Condorcet or Wallace after mining Godwin's footnotes, that nobody would remember that Godwin had mentioned Condorcet's Equisse in his passage on overcoming death and discussed Wallace's Various prospects in his passage on overpopulation. The ambitious, respectable clergyman surely hoped posterity would forget his 1798 Essay's connection with Wollstonecraft. Nonetheless, when Malthus wrote his first Essay in 1798, he had good reason to seek to distinguish himself in print in order to obtain a better benefice by writing a topical satire upon Godwin's radical philosophy in the context of the breaking Wollstonecraft scandal.

Sex, Death, and Perfectibilism: Common Anti-Godwinian Themes and the Anti-Jacobin

In writing his topical book, Malthus devoted much of his text to three commonly satirized Godwinian ideas. These were Godwin's belief that society could be perfected through human effort, his speculation that men might learn to live forever, and his heterodox views on sexual morality. Malthus devoted a full third of the first Essay—seven chapters in all—to refuting these three ideas, as anyone who reads the book will see. Yet, although Donald Winch, among others, has insightfully analyzed Malthus's objections to Godwin's perfectibilism, scholars seem not to have noticed that many writers besides Malthus also satirized these Godwinian ideas in 1798. These others included the well-known The Anti-Jacobin; or, Weekly Examiner (AJWE), whose ironic, mock-respectful tone toward Godwin would be echoed in Malthus's first Essay.

Scholars have refused to call the first Essay on Population an anti-Jacobin text. Perhaps they are thinking of the later, more vicious anti-Jacobinism that developed by the end of 1798, after the appearance of the second, nastier, and unrelated Anti-Jacobin Gazette, first published in July 1798. It is quite true that Malthus was far more civil than the later anti-Jacobins. Yet, so was The Anti-Jacobin; or Weekly Gazette, and the first Essay on the Principle of Population bears remarkable similarities to it and other anti-Jacobin attacks on Godwin that were published during the first half of 1798, when Malthus himself was writing.

To understand the first Essay as a speech act—a polemic that worked, in part, by ridiculing Godwin's views of sex, death, and perfectibility—we need to understand both how Godwin used these three ideas in his own writings and how writers besides Malthus used them to attack Godwin in 1798. This section will very briefly summarize Godwin's Political Justice, first concentrating on how these three ideas fit into its larger argument and then exploring the use of these themes in a series of articles satirizing Godwin in the AJWE. Published between February and June 1798, precisely when Malthus was writing, these articles may well have served as a model for his ironically humorous tone when satirizing Godwin's sexual radicalism.

Although Godwin's views on these topics may sound bizarre when taken out of context, they make more sense when situated within the larger argument of his Enquiry Concerning Political Justice.Footnote 46Political Justice—Godwin's eight-volume, comprehensive reconsideration of political theory—bases political society on obligation rather than rights. Godwin begins with two seemingly unexceptional principles. First, in all circumstances, individuals are obliged to do what is “just,” defined as the one action that would most benefit mankind and that would lead to increased wisdom, equality, and knowledge.Footnote 47 Second, individuals must have total freedom of conscience in order to discern and perform these just actions.Footnote 48

From these two premises flowed a host of radical conclusions. Government, contracts, and natural rights, especially the right to private property, were unjust and should be abolished. Government was unjust because it coerced individuals to do as they were told rather than as their consciences demanded. Similarly, contracts, binding legislation, and promises all coerced the judgment and should be avoided in order to allow people to follow their consciences.

Most unacceptable to Malthus, particularly in the context of Godwin's atheism, was his condemnation of private property. According to Godwin, no right could supersede the duty to choose the one action that would best serve humanity. Therefore, Godwin rejected natural right theory and, with it, private property rights. Instead, he insisted that each individual had an obligation to devote his possessions to the use he judged would best benefit mankind. “Perfectibility,” or the belief that society could be perfected through reason and intelligence, was Godwin's third important premise. Because succeeding generations built on the knowledge of their predecessors, human improvement must be limitless. Malthus would make Godwin's perfectibilism a prime target in the 1798 Essay.Footnote 49

Godwin's defense of nonmarital sexual intercourse followed logically from his condemnation of contract. Marriage, like all contracts, was inherently coercive and unjust because it forced a couple to remain together even if one or both parties judged a different sexual liaison more likely to benefit mankind. It followed logically that, if marriage was unjust, sexual intercourse should not be tied to it. In 1798, Godwin's defense of nonmarital sexual intercourse was widely reviled. Yet his views of marriage and sex were relatively unimportant to Political Justice, taking up a mere seven pages near the very end of the eighth book.Footnote 50 Moreover, despite their heterodoxy, Godwin's views on sex had received relatively little serious critical attention until his Memoirs's revelations about his and Wollstonecraft's sexual behavior made them such good grist for the mills of anti-Jacobin writers.

Godwin's speculations about abolishing death were almost as notorious as his view of marriage, yet they were even more peripheral to Political Justice's larger argument. In the penultimate chapter, “Objection to this System from the Principle of Population,” Godwin speculates tentatively that someday human intelligence might even learn to overcome death itself. This argument was more rhetorical than substantive, however. Nearing his conclusion, Godwin wanted to inspire his readers to imagine the limitless possibilities of human improvement: one day reason might even teach people to live forever! To avoid misunderstanding, Godwin immediately insists that his speculations about immortality were merely “conjecture.” His larger argument was “altogether independent of the[ir] truth or falsehood.”Footnote 51 Yet satirists, ignoring these qualifications, had a field day ridiculing Godwin's suggestion that men might become immortal.

To see how the early anti-Jacobins combined these three stereotypical Godwinian themes—faith in human perfectibility, rejection of marriage, and hope of earthly immortality—let us look at a series of articles that were published during the months Malthus wrote his Essay, which he completed on 6 June. Between 2 April and 11 June 1798, the widely circulated AJWE published six articles putatively written by a transparent parody of Godwin, “Professor Higgins of St. Mary Axe.”Footnote 52 Indeed, it is not unlikely that Malthus read the “Higgins” articles while he was writing his Essay on Population. Although today no periodicals remain in Malthus's library, it does include a 1799 edition of the Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin, which reprints these Higgins articles.Footnote 53 It seems at least possible that Malthus purchased this volume in 1799 because he had enjoyed the articles the previous year. The editors of the AJWE adopt a mock-respectful tone toward “Professor Higgins”—a tone that Malthus's essay would echo, especially when addressing Godwin's views on sexuality. For example, the first Higgins article reports with mock seriousness that Mr. Higgins “contends with infinite spirit and philosophy against the factitious sacredness and indissolubility of that Institution [Marriage], and paints with glowing colours the happiness and utility (in a moral as well as political view) of an arrangement of an opposite sort”; it predicts “the recommendation of so judicious an Author cannot fail to have its weight.”Footnote 54

The AJWE's Higgins repeatedly praises sexual promiscuity. For example, one of the articles consists of Higgins's poem, “The Progress of Man, Canto Twenty-Third: On Marriage.” The “Contents” section summarizes its arguments: “Dissolubility of Marriagerecommended—Illustrated by a Game at Cards Whist—CribbagePartners changed—Why not the same in Marriage?”Footnote 55 In a later article, Higgins praises the sexual morals of a play that depicts “the reciprocal fortunes of one or more Husbands to one or more Wives, and to the Children who may happen to arise out of this complicated and endearing connection.”Footnote 56 Malthus would likewise draw on Godwin's views about sex, ostensibly taking them very seriously and letting Godwin's own views and words discredit him, just as the AJWE did.Footnote 57

Although these articles mention neither Higgins's sex life nor Wollstonecraft, there was no need to remind readers that both Godwin and his late wife had sex before marriage. Between January and November 1798, fourteen British journals published detailed reviews of the Memoirs, keeping the particulars of Godwin's sex life and unorthodox defense of his wife's premarital sexual adventures constantly before the reading public.Footnote 58 Like the AJWE, Malthus did not need to mention Wollstonecraft. He could assume that, when he mentioned Godwin, his readers would think of his premarital relations with Wollstonecraft.

As did so many other books and journals, the AJWE ridiculed Godwin's belief in human perfectibility.Footnote 59 Higgins's “New Principles” included “the eternal and absolute ‘perfectability of Man.’” Higgins explained that, because men had risen from the lowly level of “the cabbages of the field” to their current state of excellence “by the mere exertion of our own energies,” they would in the future be able to “continue to exert and expand ourselves in a proportion greater than any thing of which we have yet any notion”—as long as human energies were not repressed by government or religion.Footnote 60

Finally, Higgins hoped to vanquish death. To this end, he suggests utilizing Galvani's recent discovery that electrical current could make dead frogs jump to “deter mankind from dying (which they so pertinaciously continue to do) of various old-fashioned diseases, notwithstanding all the brilliant discoveries of modern Philosophy.”Footnote 61 Higgins even asserts that advancing knowledge could raise man to a more worthy rank “in which he would be, as it were, all mind, would enjoy unclouded perspicacity and perpetual vitality, feed on oxygene and never die, but by his own consent.”Footnote 62 Higgins's prediction that human knowledge could teach men to live forever with no need for food would be satirically echoed in Malthus's first Essay.

Malthus made Godwin's much-ridiculed ideas about sex and immortality central to his polemic. The first Essay devotes two full chapters to the mistaken belief in “indefinite prolongation of human life,” two full chapters to Godwin's heterodox views about sexuality, and three full chapters to an explicit refutation of Godwin's views on perfectibility. Moreover, as Donald Winch has argued, Malthus's entire essay can be read as a refutation of Godwin's belief in perfectibility.Footnote 63

In sum, Malthus's polemic was part of a much wider conversation on Godwin. Like the AJWE and many other anti-Jacobin writers of early 1798, Malthus plays on Godwin's most notorious, easily satirized beliefs. Unlike these other Godwin critics, however, Malthus discusses population. To understand how Malthus's population principle connected to this broad tendency to satirize Godwin's views on sexuality, immortality, and perfectibility, we need to look more closely at both the first Essay and the marginalia in Malthus's personal copy of Political Justice.

Malthus's Marginalia: Finding Population in Godwin's Political Justice

Why did Malthus choose to focus his anti-Godwin polemic on the issue of population? Did Godwin's notorious views about sex and death inspire Malthus's population principle? Although we lack any letters or personal papers from 1798 that would let us answer these questions definitively, the marginalia in Malthus's own copy of Political Justice, combined with the text of his 1798 Essay, suggest that Godwin's discussion of population in Political Justice's notorious passages about sex and immortality was what first drew Malthus's attention to the subject of population. Malthus marks five passages in which Godwin discusses population increase—first in relation to the food supply and then in relation to freely chosen, nonmarital sexual intercourse. I suggest that Malthus developed his population principle while reading Godwin's notorious discussion of sexual intercourse unfettered by marriage. This section of my article begins, as did Malthus himself, with Godwin's “Of Avarice and Profusion” and then follows Malthus to his copy of Political Justice, skipping quickly, as did he, to the notorious passages about death and sex.Footnote 64

There is no reason to doubt the Essay's very first sentence: “The following Essay owes its origin to a conversation with a friend, on the subject of Mr. Godwin's Essay on avarice and profusion in his Enquirer. This discussion started the general question of the future improvement of society.”Footnote 65 Malthus's original aim after reading “Of Avarice and Profusion” seems to have been to refute Godwin's perfectibilist assertion that, if labor and property were distributed equally, all people could live in comfort.Footnote 66 “Of Avarice and Profusion” makes two recommendations to end material inequality. First, society must equalize labor.Footnote 67 Second, mankind must stop producing and consuming unnecessary luxuries. This would allow people to spend their time on tasks more socially and intellectually useful than production. Few commodities were absolutely essential for human subsistence. “If the labour necessarily required to produce them were … equitably divided among all, each man's share of labour would be light, and his portion of leisure would be ample.” As we will see, a crucial passage of the Essay on Population will quote the text I have italicized.Footnote 68

“Of Avarice and Profusion” never mentions population, however, and there is no evidence that this essay inspired the population principle itself. Rather, Malthus seems to have been irritated by the essay's assertion that enough sustenance existed to support all people, if only property were redistributed. His First Essay on the Principle of Population would insist, in contradistinction to “Of Avarice and Prosperity,” that scarcity was inescapable—there could never be enough sustenance for all. Yet, although Godwin never addresses population in “Of Avarice and Profusion,” he included two footnotes directing the reader to book 8 of Political Justice, which does discuss population, and which, I will argue, was the immediate inspiration of Malthus's population principle. So let us follow Malthus to his copy of Political Justice and analyze his marginal markings, which flag passages about population amid Godwin's discussions of property, immortality, and sexual intercourse.

Overpopulation was an unlikely topic for a 1798 political pamphlet, and it was one in which Malthus had previously shown little interest. As has often been noted, political economists at the time agreed that population increase was inherently beneficial to both nation and economy.Footnote 69 Nor is there any evidence that Malthus had read or thought much about population before reading Political Justice. The best-known contemporary British authors who had addressed population—Arthur Young, Joseph Townsend, and Sir F. M. Eden—are completely absent from Malthus's footnotes and citations.Footnote 70 Indeed, the only authors besides Smith, Hume, Price, Howlett, and Godwin whose ideas on population Malthus discusses in 1798 were Condorcet and Robert Wallace—both of whom had been discussed in Godwin's chapter on population, which seems to be where Malthus discovered them. In short, there is no reason to think that Malthus had considered population extensively before marking Godwin's passages on population in Political Justice.Footnote 71

Eighteen marginal marks—about two-thirds of Political Justice's total marginalia—appear in the first fifty-one pages, suggesting that Malthus began by reading dutifully and carefully. These early marks tend to flag either Godwin's basic premises or his materialist explications of human character, which surely irked Malthus. Neither sex nor population appears in these early chapters.Footnote 72 After reading four chapters, however, Malthus seems to have become bored or irritated with Godwin and to have skimmed or skipped the next 926 pages.

The nineteenth mark, then, appears toward the end of Political Justice's final volume, in which Godwin advocates an egalitarian distribution of property. The first three marks, all in the chapter entitled “Benefits Attendant on a System of Equality,” relate to the aspect of “Of Avarice and Profusion” that had first irritated Malthus, Godwin's denial of material scarcity. First, Malthus marks a paragraph that predicts that an egalitarian distribution of property would lead to the end of “all great occasions of crime.”Footnote 73 Second, he marked that paragraph's final sentence: “The invasion of one man upon the security of the other, is a thought alien to the human mind, and which nothing could have reconciled to us but the sharp sting of necessity.”Footnote 74 Finally, Malthus marks a phrase that he seems to have believed epitomized Godwin's absurdly unrealistic hopes for human happiness in an egalitarian society: “Mind would be delivered from her perpetual anxiety about corporal support, and free to expatiate in the field of thought which is congenial to her.”Footnote 75 In the 1798 Essay's chapter 10, which uses the population principle to ridicule Godwin's view of sex most directly, Malthus would quote this sentence three times. But Malthus encountered no reference to sex or population until the end of the eighth volume.

Then, finally, Godwin turns to population, and so does Malthus, who—significantly—marks a passage on population in relation to the food supply. Godwin closes his discussion of equality by arguing that the unequal distribution of property prevented happiness by keeping population artificially low. If land were distributed equally, Godwin suggests, Europe could produce enough food to support five times its current population. He wrote: “There is a principle in human society by which population is perpetually kept down to the level of the means of subsistence,” in words Malthus would later quote but did not flag here. The current system of property, Godwin asserts, destroyed 80 percent of possible human happiness by “strangling a considerable portion of our children in their cradle.” Whatever might be the value of a man's life—whatever would be his happiness in a free and equal state of society—and now comes the line Malthus marks—“the system we are here opposing may be considered as arresting upon the threshold of existence four fifths of that value and that happiness.”Footnote 76 In other words, Godwin argues that more food would lead to more population and thus to more human happiness.

Was this the first time Malthus thought of refuting Godwin's rejection of material scarcity by discussing population? The question is probably unanswerable. Malthus—who won first-class honors (ninth wrangler) in mathematics at Cambridge—might well have asked whether Godwin's formula about the direct relation between food, population, and human happiness was mathematically viable. Might not a different formula be preferable?

So far, then, Malthus marked a passage in Political Justice that relates population to the food supply but not yet to sexual intercourse. The last three of Malthus's marginal marks, however, all discuss nonmarital sexual intercourse in relation to population or material scarcity. Two come from the notorious passage where Godwin advocates sexual intercourse unfettered by marriage.Footnote 77 First, Malthus marks Godwin's suggestion that sequential relationships with different sex partners might increase the population. Godwin was actually predicting that, if marriage were abolished, random promiscuity would probably be rare. Instead, “each man would select for himself a partner, to whom he will adhere as long as that adherence shall continue to be the choice of both parties.” Malthus marked the following sentence: “Perhaps this side of the alternative is most favourable to population.”Footnote 78 Godwin rightly assumed that pre-Malthusian readers would view increased population as a social benefit, even if they were squeamish about freely chosen and broken sexual relationships. Malthus however, must have realized that this marked passage provided the last piece of a principle that would allow him to ridicule Godwin's scandalous view of sex while proving that population increase meant that mankind could never escape material scarcity. Unleashed sexual desire, combined with enough food, would make the population explode.

The sixth mark in book 8, impressed two pages later with such force that it indented the two subsequent pages, suggests that Malthus had already begun to imagine using Godwin's views on sex and population to ridicule the egalitarian redistribution of property. This mark flags the following: “Such are some of the considerations that will probably regulate the commerce of the sexes [once marriage is abolished.] In a state of equality, it will be a question of no importance to know who is the parent of each individual child.”Footnote 79 A just society would happily support all children regardless of parentage, Godwin predicted. As the minister of an impoverished woodland chapelry, however, Malthus had surely observed ratepayers’ extreme reluctance to support illegitimate children, particularly if fathers could be compelled to pay child support.

The seventh and final marked phrase in book 8, like the previous two marked phrases, refers to sex and population, but it appears in Godwin's passage predicting earthly immortality. After mankind had learned to avoid death, Godwin suggests, the world might appear threatened by overpopulation. Yet, even then, human reason would avoid material scarcity because the wise men then alive would voluntarily stop having sex. Malthus marked this phrase: “The men, therefore, whom we are supposing to exist, when the earth shall refuse itself to a more extended population, will probably cease to propagate.”Footnote 80 Malthus would have a great deal of fun with this speculation in the Essay. With this, Malthus had figured out how to hoist Godwin on the explosive petard of his own sexual radicalism. On the one hand, Godwin himself conceded that his proposed system of freely chosen sexual partners would lead to an increase in population; Malthus would argue that this would lead to severe problems of material scarcity. On the other hand, Godwin somehow believed that human nature would allow all men to cheerfully shun sexual intercourse. Familiar with the Wollstonecraft controversy, Malthus realized that Godwin's recent revelations about his own middle-aged extramarital affair made this assertion manifestly ridiculous.

There is no way to prove what Malthus was thinking when he marked these phrases. Yet, in the absence of any other contemporary sources explaining why and how he formulated his population principle in a book attacking Godwin's Political Justice, we have only his marginalia, which suggests that he turned relatively quickly to that book's already notorious passages on property, death, and sexual intercourse. These marginalia show that Malthus flagged several of Godwin's passages on population—the earliest evidence we have that Malthus was thinking seriously about population. Moreover, several of the Godwinian passages that Malthus marked discussed the relationship between population and sexual intercourse unfettered by marriage. In the first Essay on the Principle of Population, Malthus would turn these themes into a powerful polemic that worked, in part, by satirizing Godwin's views on sex.

Sexuality, Perfectibility, and the Population Principle: Ridiculing Godwin in Malthus's First Chapter

The 1798 Essay takes the passages about population, food, and sex that Malthus had marked in Godwin's Political Justice and reconfigures the relationship between these factors in mathematical terms. Malthus thus framed his population principle and used that principle to refute Godwin's perfectibilism. As demonstrated above, Malthus took note of Godwin's formula that equated more productive land with more food, more population, and therefore more human happiness. He also flagged Godwin's suggestion that, if men and women were allowed to change sexual partners whenever they chose, the population would grow. Malthus combined these two Godwinian premises about population increase and supplied his own mathematical assessments of the relative rates of increase in food versus population. This was the population principle, which used Godwinian ideas about sex and population to disprove Godwin's argument that human efforts could perfect society.

Malthus begins his book by signaling to the reader that he, like the AJWE, intends sections of his book to be funny. Much of his preface strikes the same tone of ironic deference used in the AJWE's Higgins articles. The text of Malthus's preface explicitly denies what his book's title and first sentence have already established—that this was a polemic attacking Godwin's radicalism. Insisting that his mind was open to all men and opinions, Malthus “professes to have read some of the speculations on the future improvement of society in a temper very different from a wish to find them visionary.” Yet, like the mock-respectful AJWE, he modestly proclaimed himself unequal to that task, admitting ironically that he lacked “that command over his understanding which would enable him to believe what he wishes, without evidence, or to refuse his assent to what might be unpleasing, when accompanied by evidence.”Footnote 81

The first chapter continues the irony, opening with the sarcastic claim that those who loved knowledge saw the French Revolution as a possible harbinger of limitless improvement. It is surely a mistake to read this as a continuation of the Paine-Burke debates on France of the early 1790s.Footnote 82 By 1798, after five grueling years of war, the middle-class idealists who had formerly enthused about France had mostly fallen silent. However, this opening allowed Malthus to suggest that Godwin supported the French Revolution. Humanity, Malthus continues mockingly, suffered in “painful suspense.” Shall mankind move forward to limitless improvement? Or was this impossible?Footnote 83 Yet, as Malthus well knew, the “painful suspense” of those British moderates who, between 1789 and 1793, had looked with hope to France had long since been terminated by Terror, war, and now Napoleon's army, poised to invade England even as he wrote. Continuing in this ironically neutral voice for several paragraphs, Malthus defers elaborately to speculative philosophers’ great wisdom and intellect—again, like the Higgins articles.

Finally, Malthus ridicules Godwin more openly by equating the assertion in “Of Avarice and Profusion” that all men could be made happy with the assertion that all men were becoming ostriches. “A writer may tell me that he thinks man will ultimately become an ostrich. I cannot properly contradict him,” says the mock-humble Malthus. Yet, if speculative writers wanted to convince reasonable people of something as preposterous as human perfectibility—or ostrichification—Malthus suggests ironically that they should provide hard evidence: “to shew that the necks of mankind have been gradually elongating, that the lips have grown harder and more prominent … that the hair is beginning to change into the stubs of feathers.” In short, Godwin's prediction that equal property would lead to universal happiness was as absurd as a prediction that men would one day become ostriches. To drive the point home, Malthus quotes Godwin's “Of Avarice and Profusion” (in my italics): “And till the probability of so wonderful a conversion can be shewn, it is surely lost time and lost eloquence to expatiate upon the happiness of man in such a state; to describe his powers, both of running and flying, to paint him in a condition where all narrow luxuries would be condemned, where he would be employed only in collecting the necessaries of life and where consequently each man's share of labour would be light and his portion of leisure ample.”Footnote 84

Immediately after this passage, Malthus abandons his deferential tone and in short, direct sentences, designed to contrast with the foregoing nonsense, presents the two “postulata” underlying his population principle:

Both postulates were suggested by Political Justice. The first postulate contradicts Godwin's perfectibilist suggestion that human intelligence could overcome all bodily limitations, including death. It echoes Professor Higgins’ suggestion that one day man would “feed on oxygene and never die, but by his own consent.”Footnote 86

The second postulate refers to a phrase marked in Malthus's copy of Political Justice: Godwin's speculation that the men who will exist “when the earth shall refuse itself to a more extended population, will probably cease to propagate.” In the context of the Wollstonecraft affair, Malthus's insistent statement that “the passion between the sexes” was not likely to diminish worked as an ad hominem joke at Godwin's expense. The middle-aged Godwin's much-publicized premarital affair with the equally middle-aged Wollstonecraft—both at an age when their passions would normally be expected to have cooled—made his prediction that sexual desire might dwindle with time a potentially hilarious weapon to turn against the philosopher. Malthus would repeat this joke in three chapters of the 1798 Essay and would devote chapter 11 to elaborating upon it.Footnote 87

In the ironically neutral tone of the AJWE, Malthus pretends to ponder why Godwin held such innocent views about sex. “I do not know that any writer has supposed that on this earth man will ultimately be able to live without food,” Malthus deadpans. “But Mr. Godwin has conjectured that the passion between the sexes may in time be extinguished.” Knowing his readers to be well versed in Godwin's recent sexual history, Malthus pretends to explain the potency of sexual desire to an unworldly, virginal philosopher: “Towards the extinction of the passion between the sexes, no progress whatever has hitherto been made. It appears to exist in as much force at present as it did two thousand or four thousand years ago. There are individual exceptions now as there always have been. But as these exceptions do not increase in number, it would surely be a very unphilosophical mode of arguing, to infer merely from the existence of an exception, that the exception would, in time, become the rule and the rule the exception.”Footnote 88 Malthus's reference to “individual exceptions” almost certainly referred to the pre-Wollstonecraft Godwin. In 1793, when Godwin first published his prediction that men might “cease to propagate,” he was a respectable bachelor and former nonconformist minister. Before publishing his Wollstonecraft Memoirs, he himself had seemed an “individual exception” to the rule of passion. Yet, at the absurdly advanced age of forty-two, when by all accounts his desires should have dwindled, he had a fling with a middle-aged unwed mother. Implicitly, this proved the truth of Malthus's second postulate. Even the great philosopher himself could not live up to his preposterous speculation that sexual passion might eventually fade away.

Malthus then explains the population principle mathematically, balancing desire, food, and population and implicitly refuting Godwin's suggestion that a fivefold increase in food, and thus population, meant a fivefold increase in happiness. Unchecked population increased geometrically, while food increased only arithmetically. Godwin's fivefold increase in happiness was impossible. Man's appetite for food and his appetite for sex could be kept in equilibrium only through vice and misery.

Malthus concludes this chapter by asserting that if his postulates—men need food and sexual desire is immutable—were true, then “the argument is conclusive against the perfectibility of mankind.” The population principle theorizes an immutable mathematical relationship between two Godwinian precepts that Malthus had marked when reading Political Justice: the observation that increased food led to increased population and the suggestion that voluntary, easily dissolvable sexual relationships would be “good for population.” As Malthus intended, his population principle—drawn from Godwin's own precepts of property, death, and sex—disproved Godwin's belief in human perfectibility.

“Unshackled Intercourse” Destroys Godwin's Perfect Society: Chapter 10

Chapter 10, the longest in the Essay, argues that unfettered sexual desire itself would destroy Godwin's perfect society—by implication, just as it had already destroyed both Wollstonecraft's and Godwin's reputations. It begins by asserting—in the mock-flattering tone of the Higgins articles—that Godwin's “system of equality” was “without doubt, by far the most beautiful and engaging of any that has yet appeared.” Yet Godwin had invented a chimera. The population principle proved that the average man could never have enough to eat. “Man cannot live in the midst of plenty. All cannot share alike in the bounties of nature.” If there were no established government to protect the property of those few who possessed enough, every man would be obliged to stand guard over his own property. As Malthus puts it—inverting the Godwinian passage he had marked in his copy of Political Justice—“Every individual mind would be under a constant anxiety about corporal support, and not a single intellect would be left free to expatiate in the field of thought.”Footnote 89

To prove this, he shows what would happen if Godwin's “beautiful [and marriage-free] system” were established in what Malthus satirically calls its “utmost purity.” All institutional causes of vice and misery in Britain would be removed. Property and labor would be distributed equally. Britain's inhabitants would live in clean, airy country homes, producing and obtaining enough food to allow universal health and happiness. In accordance with Godwin's view of justice, marriage would be abolished and “the commerce of the sexes established upon principles of the most perfect freedom.” And Malthus quotes some of Godwin's most notorious lines, employing them, with no comment, allowing readers to imagine the results of unleashing this rampant sexual desire from its normal marital restraints (I italicize Malthus's direct quotations from Godwin):

What would result from equal property, “unshackled intercourse,” and no paternity costs? “I cannot conceive of a form of society so favourable to upon the whole to population,” Malthus declared.Footnote 94 The population would “increase faster than in any society that has yet been known.” The food supply would increase, but not nearly fast enough, and in fifty years, misery would reign. “Alas! What becomes of the picture where men lived in the midst of plenty … where the narrow principle of self-interest did not exist, where Mind was delivered from her perpetual anxiety and free to expatiate in the field of thought which is congenial to her?” sneers Malthus, again quoting the passage he had marked in Political Justice. Food would be stolen. Mothers would be unable to support their broods of miserable, sickly children. Benevolence would disappear, and self-love “lords it triumphant over the world.”Footnote 95 To force people to work, private property would be reinstituted, and government would be established to protect property rights. Marriage would be reinstituted, in order to force fathers to support their own children. Women would be made subject to the sexual double standard, to prevent them from bearing bastards who must be maintained at public expense. Finally, because society would be unwilling to pay for “the members of a family which was grown too large for the original division of land appropriated to it,” poverty and the class system would return.Footnote 96

In 1798, anti-Jacobins frequently derided Godwin for his unconventional defense of sexual freedom. Malthus took this ridicule a final step, concluding, “We may venture to pronounce with certainty that if Mr. Godwin's system of society were established in its utmost perfection … not thirty years could elapse before its utter destruction from the simple system of population.”Footnote 97 Godwin's egalitarian abolition of marriage was the precise mechanism that would destroy his egalitarian system of property. Sexual intercourse, unfettered by marriage, must engender an explosive population, rendering Godwin's perfect society impossible.

Above all, in the context of the scandal unleashed by Godwin's memoirs, the tiny persons of two-year-old Fanny Imlay and newly born Mary Godwin served as implicit proof of Malthus's population principle. If even the brilliant, middle-aged, and unmarried Wollstonecraft conceived two children under the influence of these radical principles, what could be expected if the poor and uneducated—the entire society—followed suit? Wollstonecraft's illegitimately conceived daughters—unmentioned in Malthus's essay but shockingly present in the public discussion over Godwin's sex life—were only the first of the hungry hordes of fatherless children who would arrive should society as a whole adopt Godwin's visionary philosophy.

Conclusion

Behind Malthus's very first statement of his population principle in 1798, implicit but unmistakable, lurked the figure of the pregnant, unmarried Mary Wollstonecraft. In the light of the scandal over the Memoirs’ revelations, it was neither delicate nor necessary for the ambitious young clergyman to discuss her explicitly. In 1798, any discussion of Godwin's philosophy of marriage must inevitably remind the reading public of Wollstonecraft and her shocking conduct.

Sexual ridicule—of Godwin explicitly and Wollstonecraft implicitly—was essential to both the text of Malthus's 1798 Essay and the formulation of his population principle. Written in order to attack Godwin's radical views of property (and probably in hope of gaining Malthus a benefice) in the context of an impending French invasion and the Wollstonecraft sexual scandal, the Essay invoked Godwin's radical views on sex in at least three ways. First, the Essay emulated other 1798 anti-Jacobin polemics by ridiculing Godwin's views on perfectibility and death, as well as sexual intercourse unfettered by marriage. Second, it mocked Godwin by plucking out of context his speculation that overpopulation might inspire men to cease having sexual intercourse and by applying this idea to him personally. The middle-aged Godwin's recent revelations about his extramarital relationship with Wollstonecraft allowed Malthus to transform this suggestion that the passion between the sexes might dwindle over time into an unmistakable ad hominem attack on the philosopher. Third, the population principle itself appears to have been crafted from Godwin's discussion of population and sexual intercourse, as flagged in two passages Malthus marked in his own copy of Political Justice. On the one hand, Godwin suggested that a direct relationship existed between cultivated land, food supply, population, and human happiness: an increase in the former factors necessarily led to an increase in the latter. On the other hand, Godwin suggested that population would increase if unhappily matched people could take new sexual partners. Malthus combined these two ideas but reframed Godwin's mathematics: while plentiful food would make the population increase arithmetically, as Godwin suggested, sexual intercourse would make the population increase geometrically. Godwin's perfect society would thus collapse under the pressure of population resulting from unfettered sexual desire. This was the origin of Malthus's population principle.

In the long run, of course, the population principle's importance far exceeded its polemical origins. Malthus's principle would play a central part in both nineteenth-century politics and classical liberal economics. As the century wore on, Malthus was increasingly hailed as a great intellectual, his Essay on Population lauded as a foundational text, while Godwin and his Enquiry Concerning Political Justice faded from popular memory. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the first Essay's connection with the Wollstonecraft scandal and anti-Jacobinism was all but forgotten.

Yet, if historians wish to understand classic texts like the 1798 Essay as, in Quentin Skinner's words, “speech acts,” we must resurrect the forgotten story of Malthus's satirical intentions.Footnote 98 Malthus wrote the first Essay in a particular time and place. He intended to address a wider literary conversation. If we ignore the circumstances under which the text was written, we will miss much of its original meaning, including its irony, anti-Jacobinism, and innuendo.

Recognizing the subtle sexual invective in Malthus's polemic allows us to understand not only the Essay's genesis and meaning but also its reception. For example, historians have puzzled over the seemingly disproportionate criticism heaped on Malthus after 1806 by Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, and Hazlitt. Since all four of these authors were close friends of Godwin, Wollstonecraft, or both, they might well have resented the way Malthus's brilliant career had been built upon the anti-Jacobin campaign to discredit the couple.

Equally important, understanding the population principle's polemical origins casts suggestive light on subsequent historical developments. As I argue elsewhere, if we ignore how profoundly Malthus's population principle was rooted in Godwin's sexual radicalism—both lived and philosophical—we cannot understand why the “neo-Malthusian” thinkers of the 1820s—Richard Carlile, Frances Wright, and Robert Dale Owen—simultaneously advocated contraception and attacked marriage. These radicals self-consciously worked to counter Malthus's anti-Godwinian insistence that both sexual and social equality inevitably led to overpopulation and human misery. Moreover, remembering that Mary Wollstonecraft was the very first sexually autonomous, Malthusian villainess casts a new light on subsequent demonizing of “irresponsible” unwed mothers and their children by Margaret Thatcher's government and by U.S welfare reformers today.

In sum, it matters that Malthus originally framed his population principle as an ad hominem satire on Godwin and Wollstonecraft's sexual egalitarianism. In his 1798 Essay, Malthus argued that unequal wealth was as inevitable as husbandly authority because these two types of inequality were indissolubly linked. Egalitarian sexual relations inevitably led to bastard children; thus, if all women emulated Mary Wollstonecraft, the population would skyrocket, causing famine and misery. Sexual scandal, invasion fears, and perhaps his desire to write a salable book inspired Malthus's principle of population.