Why Mr Fax got it wrong

Roy Porter

• English Population History from Family Reconstitution 1580-1837 by E.A. Wrigley and R.S. Davies
  Cambridge, 657 pp, £60.00, July 1997, ISBN 0 521 59015 9
• The Savage Wars of Peace: England, Japan and the Malthusian Trap by Alan Macfarlane
  Blackwell, 427 pp, £45.00, May 1997, ISBN 0 631 18117 2

Published two hundred years ago this year, An Essay on the Principle of Population made the Rev. Thomas Robert malthus into the man of the moment. Malthus’s principle – that population inevitably outruns food resources – was heralded by some as the decisive scientific refutation of the mad perfectibilist schemes of the French Revolutionaries and their English confrères like William Godwin, and damned by others as hardheartedness incarnate. Marie Antoinette had just told the poor to go and eat cake: Malthus trumped her, apparently sentencing them to death by starvation – and all on the strength of the ‘facts’. No wonder Thomas Love Peacock satirised him in Melincourt as ‘Mr Fax’, although we owe the ultimate put-down to William Cobbett: ‘I call you Parson.’