The history of early nineteenth-century political economy remains a fertile breeding ground for scholars of various methodological persuasions. Intellectual histories of the period by scholars such as J. R. Poynter or Donald Winch can usefully be read in conjunction with studies by the likes of Boyd Hilton or Peter Mandler on political economy's impact on the governing classes. These are complemented by the works of literary critics, such as Mary Poovey or Philip Connell, who have examined the reception of political economy among cultural elites.
These two volumes shed new light on the transmission of political economy to more popular audiences. Both authors share a common interest in the works of Harriet Martineau, whose attempts to educate her readers in the precepts of political economy led one hostile contemporary to denounce her as ‘a female Malthusian. A woman who thinks child-bearing a crime against society!’ (Cooper, p. 145; Huzel, p. 75). Huzel is primarily concerned with providing a sustained account of how the Malthusian population principle was popularly received and depicted during Malthus's own lifetime, especially in debates on poor relief (Malthus died shortly after the passage of the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act), whereas Cooper's approach is more eclectic, taking as its organizing principle the idea that there was, and still is, an underlying tension between what family ‘is’, and what it ‘ought to be’. Cooper finds evidence of this conceptual struggle in sources as chronologically diverse as the fictions of Defoe and the facts of the 1851 census.
Huzel's aim is to substantiate Poynter's claim that ‘whatever the intrinsic interest of Bentham's writings on poverty and indigence, it must be admitted that for every reference to him in later discussion of the Poor Law, there were twenty to Malthus’ (p. 3). What distinguishes Huzel's account from earlier studies of Malthus's reception, including Poynter's, is his reliance upon mass circulation literature. The first chapter takes a more conventional approach, reviewing the basic features of Malthus's thought in the first six editions of the Essay on the principle of population (1798–1826), and in lesser-known works, including the Principles of political economy (1820) and Definitions in political economy (1827). Significantly, in light of what follows, Huzel argues that Malthus's reputation among other political economists was in decline from the early 1820s due to his heterodox positions (from the point of view of young Ricardian Turks) on Say's Law, rent, and the corn laws. In other words, Huzel downplays Malthus's theoretical contributions to political economy in order to establish clearly defined boundaries for the rest of the book. What matters from Huzel's perspective is not Malthus's stature as a political economist, but his popular reputation as a trenchant opponent of the right to relief. Huzel acknowledges, but largely brackets, the modern scholarly debate concerning the relative influence of Malthusian versus Benthamite ideas on the poor law commissioners, and subsequent legislation.
Three main chapters follow, each looking at a different type of popular literature. The first, dealing with Harriet Martineau's Illustrations of political economy (1832–4) and Poor laws and paupers illustrated (1833–4), examines how Malthusian proposals for the alleviation of poverty, such as late marriage and the abolition of redistributive systems of poor relief, were exemplified to a wider public. Martineau's didactic method relied on presenting Malthus's doctrine ‘pure and simple’ in a series of stylized tales, featuring an array of characters who conform in varying degrees to the behavioural ideal of moral restraint (p. 62). Huzel is sensitive, however, to differences between Malthus and Martineau, drawing attention to Martineau's optimism regarding the benefits of emigration and the possibility of future social improvement.
The next chapter considers William Cobbett's response to Malthus. Huzel identifies Cobbett as a perceptive critic of ‘the parson’, whose objections to the Malthusian system were not simply emotional (as Poynter argued), but based on a wide range of economic, social, and legal evidence. In terms of readership, Cobbett's two-pence publications, including the Political Register and Two-Penny Trash, ‘outsold all other newspapers, periodicals or political tracts’ in the half-decade before 1819, and continued to sell well even after the passage of the Six Acts (p. 109). Cobbett's case against Malthus consisted in two denials: first, that the principle of population was empirically valid, and secondly, that the poor laws created population growth. Huzel remarks that Cobbett was right ‘in perceiving that the core principles of the Poor Law Amendment Act were fundamentally Malthusian’ (p. 146). Yet it is a curious feature of the analysis that while Huzel repeatedly emphasizes the extent to which contemporaries, not least Cobbett himself, deliberately misread Malthus, he seems to accept their readings of the New Poor Law as ‘Malthusian’ unproblematically.
The final substantive chapter is an ambitious survey of roughly two dozen of the most important, though not necessarily best-selling, working-class newspapers and periodicals published between 1817 and 1836. Huzel examines the extent to which the ‘pauper press’ echoed Cobbett's critique of Malthus, or diverged from it. One important, but unsurprising, finding is that the pauper press did not constitute a united or cohesive body of thought, and was not nearly so single-minded in its attacks on Malthus as Cobbett was. Instead, editors such as Bronterre O'Brien launched wider assaults on political economy qua system (p. 191).
Ultimately, Huzel suggests, the disunity of the pauper press rendered it ineffective in the face of a powerful middle-class consensus on the necessity of wholesale poor law reform. Divisions over such basic issues as whether overpopulation was possible, let alone how it ought to be solved (Francis Place, for example, attracted widespread opprobrium for his pro-birth control stance), did not stop Malthus from becoming a hate figure of the pauper press, but in policy terms this mattered little.
Huzel has made an original and important contribution to the historiography of English poor law reform. However, given Huzel's stated intention to substantiate Poynter's claim that references to Malthus outnumbered those to Bentham by a ratio of twenty to one in debates on pauperism, it is disappointing not to find any comparative analysis of Bentham's influence in the radical pauper press (in the index there are over 100 references to Malthus, and only two to Bentham). As Malthus himself discovered, it is sometimes unwise to present simple ratios as self-evident truths.
Brian Cooper's book supplements, rather than repeats, aspects of James Huzel's study. Although both authors are concerned with the transmission and reception of the Malthusian population principle, Cooper's chronological span is wider, if more selective. Whereas Malthus is the undoubted centre of gravity in Huzel's book, credited with transforming opinion on population and pauperism, he is assigned a more modest role by Cooper. For Cooper, Malthus's Essay is indicative of a wider discursive shift that attached great importance to classification as a tool of economic and demographic analysis.
The introductory chapter suggests that early nineteenth-century commentators on the family faced a choice between two classificatory categories: ‘representative types’, such as the models of family life presented in literature or political economy manuals; and the ‘statistical aggregates’ reported in abstracts compiled by statisticians and census-takers.
In the second chapter, Cooper argues that the lack of visible facts on early eighteenth-century family formation led contemporaries to worry about the transfer of property between different social ranks. Partly in response to these fears parliament passed Lord Hardwicke's Marriage Act in 1753, which sought to protect property from the consequences of clandestine marriages contracted under the influence of passion, rather than reason. Malthus is identified as the heir to this tradition because he sought to subject sexual passion to economic reason.
The third chapter uses evidence from early nineteenth-century conduct manuals to reveal the extent to which political economists and moralists were engaged in a common pedagogical project, aimed at reproducing the manners and conduct of ‘economic man’ or the ‘Malthusian couple’ (two examples of Cooper's ‘representative types’) within the population at large (the ‘statistical aggregate’). In other words, Cooper seeks to explain how ‘contemporaries squared the abstractions of political economy with descriptions of real world behaviour, viewed as deviations from the ideal’ (p. 74).
The second half of the book enlarges upon this theme, by examining, in turn, the literary and statistical output of Harriet Martineau, Adolphe Quetelet, and the British census. Each case study considers how different forms of family behaviour, both ideal and empirical, were presented to the reading public. Whereas Martineau's critics attacked her for paying insufficient regard to the evidence of population statistics and real-life behaviour in her fictionalized depictions of family formation (pp. 117, 143), the statistical facts compiled by Quetelet in his Treatise on man (1842) proved resistant to unambiguous causal explanations (p. 163).
Notwithstanding their divergent epistemological preferences, Martineau and Quetelet were both attracted by the reforming potential of classification. For Martineau, classification would solve the confusion of the unreformed poor law, which turned ‘the industrious into vagabonds, and the sober into rogues’ (p. 135). What was needed, one of Martineau's characters suggested, was a moral test to distinguish ‘between innocent and guilty indigence’ (p. 134). Quetelet, on the other hand, thought classification would decide other pressing social questions, such as whether factory work retarded the growth of children (p. 170).
Cooper's analysis of census commentary considers how British census-takers measured the family, and the contemporary responses which their categories provoked. He argues that William Farr, who co-ordinated the British census between 1851 and 1871, was pragmatic in his classifications of family types, and was in any case far more interested in an individual's occupation than their domestic arrangements (p. 202). Nonetheless, one effect of Farr's methods was to expose the so-called ‘redundant woman’ problem, i.e. those women who did not conform to the domestic categories of mother, sister, or daughter. Cooper is frustratingly vague, and even contradictory, in his discussion of this matter, however. Although he refers to English political economists collectively insisting ‘upon female economic dependence’ in their treatises (p. 199), he offers no specific examples. Nor does he elaborate on his assertion that Farr's occupational classifications ‘frightened some readers by revealing the state of the English family’. Indeed, Cooper seems rather hazy on what Farr's methods actually entailed. If Farr really had ‘mixed the sexes … in the occupational categories’, as Cooper erroneously claims, it would surely have been impossible to determine the size of the non-dependent female population (p. 207).
While Cooper's book contains many stimulating observations, particularly regarding some unexpected affinities between Martineau and Quetelet, it suffers from a tendency to shoehorn too many disparate debates into one binary opposition. This makes the argument difficult to follow at times, since texts are introduced and analysed with only fleeting regard to their individual contexts. Notwithstanding these criticisms, Cooper and Huzel have uncovered fruitful lines of enquiry that demonstrate that the historiography of nineteenth-century political economy is not yet overpopulated.
