The Popularization of Malthus in Early Nineteenth-Century England

The Popularization of Malthus in Early Nineteenth-Century England
Author: James P. Huzel
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 244
Release: 2017-05-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1351883720

The political economist Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834) has gained increasing and deserved scholarly attention in recent years. As well as the republication of his works and letters, a rich body of scholarship has been produced that enlightens our understanding of his thoughts and arguments. Yet little has been written on the ways in which his message was translated to, and interpreted by, a popular audience. Malthus first rose to prominence in 1798 with the publication of his Essay on the Principle of Population, in which he blamed rising levels of poverty on the inability of Britain's economy to support its growing population. His remedy, to limit the number of children born to poor families, outraged many social reformers, most notably William Cobbett, but found a ready audience in other quarters, Harriet Martineau, among others, being a famous Malthusian advocate. In this new study of Malthus and the impact of his writings, James Huzel shows how, by being both popularized and demonized, he framed the terms of reference for debate on the problems of pauperism and became the beacon against which all proposals seeking to remedy the problem of poverty had to be measured. It is argued that the New Poor Law of 1834 was deeply influenced by Malthusian ideals, replacing the traditional sources of outdoor relief with the humiliation of the workhouse. Dealing with issues of social, economic and intellectual history this work offers a fresh and insightful investigation into one of the most influential, though misunderstood, thinkers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and concludes that Malthus was perhaps even more important than Adam Smith and David Ricardo in fostering the rise of a market economy. It is essential reading for all those who wish to reach a fuller understanding of how the tremendous social and economic upheavals of the Industrial Revolution shaped the development of modern Britain.

The Science of Starving in Victorian Literature, Medicine, and Political Economy

The Science of Starving in Victorian Literature, Medicine, and Political Economy
Author: Andrew Mangham
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 228
Release: 2020-04-29
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0198850034

Oxford University Press Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP New Book Announcement Date 15/10/2019 Serial no. Title The Science of Starving Edition New product Subtitle Medicine, Political Economy, and the Victorian Novel Status Draft Technical Main edition ISBN 0198850034 ISBN 9780198850038 Pub. date 16/04/2020 Binding Hardback No.of vols/vol no. Price �50.00 Imprint OUP Terms AJ Bibliography No Royalty Yes Format 234x153 mm Joint IP Extent 224 pp Text colours 1 Illustrations Series/no. () Digital Formats Also available as an ebook for Retail & Institutions (Single User access) Also available online for Institutions only as part of Oxford Scholarship Online Author(s)/editor(s) Title Forename Surname Role Nationality Prof Andrew Mangham Author Affiliation Professor of Victorian Literature and Medical Humanities, University of Reading Responsible editor Jacqueline Norton Publishing History Assistant Commissioning editor Aimee Wright Agent Production editor Alannah Santra Rights Co-publisher Territorial World Original publisher Translation Available Date orig.edn pub/op Book club Available Translation? No Other sub.rights Available Orig.lang & title Classifications Main Literature Secondary Victorian literature and science Catalogue Section QB Other The Science of Starving in Victorian Literature, Medicine, and Political Economy is a reassessment of the languages and methodologies used, throughout the nineteenth century, for discussing extreme hunger in Britain. Set against the providentialism of conservative political economy, this study uncovers an emerging, dynamic way of describing literal starvation in medicine and physiology. No longer seen as a divine punishment for individual failings, starvation became, in the human sciences, a pathology whose horrific symptoms registered failings of state and statute. Providing new and historically-rich readings of the works of Charles Kingsley, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Charles Dickens, this book suggests that the realism we have come to associate with Victorian social problem fiction learned a vast amount from the empirical, materialist objectives of the medical sciences and that, within the mechanics of these intersections, we find important re-examinations of how we might think about this ongoing humanitarian issue.

Hunger and Famine in the Long Nineteenth Century

Hunger and Famine in the Long Nineteenth Century
Author: Gail Turley Houston
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 203
Release: 2022-05-19
Genre: History
ISBN: 0429582536

Capturing Dorothy Hartley’s point that there was "a dislocation of the food supply" during the Industrial Revolution, which occurred through the enclosure movement, the poor laws, the game and corn laws (qtd. in Consuming Fictions 8), this section would begin with the date of Thomas Malthus’s "Principle of Population" (1798) to capture voices invoked during the lead up to the Reform Bill of 1832.

Political Descent

Political Descent
Author: Piers J. Hale
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 451
Release: 2014-08-05
Genre: Science
ISBN: 022610852X

Historians of science have long noted the influence of the nineteenth-century political economist Thomas Robert Malthus on Charles Darwin. In a bold move, Piers J. Hale contends that this focus on Malthus and his effect on Darwin’s evolutionary thought neglects a strong anti-Malthusian tradition in English intellectual life, one that not only predated the 1859 publication of the Origin of Species but also persisted throughout the Victorian period until World War I. Political Descent reveals that two evolutionary and political traditions developed in England in the wake of the 1832 Reform Act: one Malthusian, the other decidedly anti-Malthusian and owing much to the ideas of the French naturalist Jean Baptiste Lamarck. These two traditions, Hale shows, developed in a context of mutual hostility, debate, and refutation. Participants disagreed not only about evolutionary processes but also on broader questions regarding the kind of creature our evolution had made us and in what kind of society we ought therefore to live. Significantly, and in spite of Darwin’s acknowledgement that natural selection was “the doctrine of Malthus, applied to the whole animal and vegetable kingdoms,” both sides of the debate claimed to be the more correctly “Darwinian.” By exploring the full spectrum of scientific and political issues at stake, Political Descent offers a novel approach to the relationship between evolution and political thought in the Victorian and Edwardian eras.

William Hazlitt

William Hazlitt
Author: Kevin Gilmartin
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 369
Release: 2015-06-11
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0191019380

Over the course of a literary career that extended from the lingering Malthusian controversies of the late eighteenth century to the brink of the Reform Act of 1832, William Hazlitt produced a remarkable body of committed radical journalism. Against the view that partisan passion undermined his aesthetic judgment and compromised his celebrated disinterestedness, William Hazlitt: Political Essayist restores politics to the center of his achievement as a critic and essayist. In doing so Kevin Gilmartin explores his constructive relationship with the early nineteenth-century popular reform movement, while acknowledging his desire to reflect critically on radical politics and express his own doubts about social progress. Early chapters attend closely to his critical method and matters of style and form, focusing on the political development of his contradictory prose manner. Paradox and inconsistency are central to his attack on 'Legitimacy', a term he drew form the lexicon of post-Napoleonic political journalism. In treating legitimate government as a revived form of divine right monarchy, Hazlitt often produced harrowing visions of the perfect refinement of oppressive power and the complete elimination of any principle of liberty or resistance. At the same time he found ways to preserve his commitment to oppositional political expression and the redemptive necessity of what he termed 'a word uttered against'. Later chapters bring together the spiritual heritage of rational Dissent and emerging democratic developments in London to understand Hazlitt's distinctive mobilization of radical memory as a way of contending with present injustice and envisioning a political future.

An Essay on the Principle of Population and Other Writings

An Essay on the Principle of Population and Other Writings
Author: Thomas Malthus
Publisher: Penguin UK
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2015-06-04
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 0141392835

Malthus' life's work on human population and its dependency on food production and the environment was highly controversial on publication in 1798. He predicted what is known as the Malthusian catastrophe, in which humans would disregard the limits of natural resources and the world would be plagued by famine and disease. He significantly influenced the thinking of Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace and his theories continue to raise important questions today in the fields of social theory, economics and the environment. With an introduction by Robert Mayhew.

Suffering and Happiness in England 1550-1850: Narratives and Representations

Suffering and Happiness in England 1550-1850: Narratives and Representations
Author: Michael J. Braddick
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2017-07-26
Genre: History
ISBN: 019106517X

Suffering and Happiness in England 1550-1850 pays tribute to one of the leading historians working on early modern England, Paul Slack, and his work as a historian, and enters into discussion with the rapidly growing body of work on the 'history of emotions'. The themes of suffering and happiness run through Paul Slack's publications; the first being more prominent in his early work on plague and poverty, the second in his more recent work on conceptual frameworks for social thought and action. Though he has not himself engaged directly with the history of emotions, assembling essays on these themes provides an opportunity to do that. The chapters explore in turn shifting discourses of happiness and suffering over time; the deployment of these discourses for particular purposes at specific moments; and their relationship to subjective experience. In their introduction, the editors note the very diverse approaches that can be taken to the topic; they suggest that it is best treated not as a discrete field of enquiry but as terrain in which many paths may fruitfully cross. The history of emotions has much to offer as a site of encounter between historians with diverse knowledge, interests, and skills.

Women Writing Men

Women Writing Men
Author: Joanne Ella Parsons
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 156
Release: 2022-06-08
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1000598233

This book explores how women writers create and question men and masculinity. As men have written women so have women written men. Debate about how men have represented women in literature has a long and distinguished history; however, there has been much less examination of the ways in which women writers depict male characters. This is clearly a notable absence given the recent rise in interest in the field of 18th- and 19th-century masculinities. Women writers were in a unique position to be able to deconstruct and examine cultural norms from a position away from the centre. This enabled women to ‘look aslant’ at masculinity using their female gaze to expose the ruptures and cracks inherent within the rigid formation of the manly ideal. This collection focuses on women’s representations of men and masculinity as they negotiate issues of class, gender, race, and sexuality. Women Writing Men: 1689 to 1869 will be of interest to academics, researchers, and advanced students of Literature, Gender Studies, Critical Theory, and Cultural Studies. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Women’s Writing.

The Oxford Handbook of British Romantic Prose

The Oxford Handbook of British Romantic Prose
Author: Robert Morrison
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 993
Release: 2024-04-18
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 0192571494

The Oxford Handbook of British Romantic Prose is a full-length essay collection devoted entirely to British Romantic nonfiction prose. Organized into eight parts, each containing between five and nine chapters arranged alphabetically, the Handbook weaves together familiar and unfamiliar texts, events, and authors, and invites readers to draw comparisons, reimagine connections and disconnections, and confront frequently stark contradictions, within British Romantic nonfiction prose, but also in its relationship to British Romanticism more generally, and to the literary practices and cultural contexts of other periods and countries. The Handbook builds on previous scholarship in the field, considers emerging trends and evolving methodologies, and suggests future areas of study. Throughout the emphasis is on lucid expression rather than gnomic declaration, and on chapters that offer, not a dutiful survey, but evaluative assessments that keep an eye on the bigger picture yet also dwell meaningfully on specific paradoxes and the most telling examples. Taken as a whole the volume demonstrates the energy, originality, and diversity at the crux of British Romantic nonfiction prose. It vigorously challenges the traditional construction of the British Romantic movement as focused too exclusively on the accomplishments of its poets, and it reveals the many ways in which scholars of the period are steadily broadening out and opening up delineations of British Romanticism in order to encompass and thoroughly evaluate the achievements of its nonfiction prose writers.

New Perspectives on Malthus

New Perspectives on Malthus
Author: Robert J. Mayhew
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 347
Release: 2016-06-20
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1107077737

Marking the 250th anniversary of his birth, this wide-ranging, interdisciplinary study reassesses Thomas Malthus's contested achievements and legacies.