Deborah Valenze’s most recent book is The Invention of Scarcity: Malthus and the Margins of History.
In The Country and the City, Raymond Williams described the powerful attraction many people feel for the ‘knowable community’ of the rural past. We hope to find in such places, he wrote, a prelapsarian refuge from the world of today. One such refuge could be found in the novels of George Eliot, which are populated by cottagers, carpenters, farmers’ wives, lacklustre...
In the guise of natural theology, Malthusian political economy soon became the common sense of a middle class brought up to see the world as fallen and life as a trial: scarcity was ordained by providence,...
Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.
For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.