An Essay on the Principle of Population; or, A View of its Past and Present Effects on Human Happiness; with an Inquiry into our Prospects Respecting the Future Removal or Mitigation of the Evils whic

£5,000 · Offered by Maggs Bros Ltd

The ‘Great Quarto’ edition of Malthus’s canonical text of classical economics - in a striking contemporary binding - notionally the second edition of the Essay on Population published anonymously in 1798, but so substantially enlarged, rewritten, and re-titled as to be a new book. Malthus’s Essay “was originally the product of a discussion with his father on the perfectibility of society. Malthus senior was a supporter of the utopian views of Godwin and others, but recognised the force of his son’s refutation of these views, and urged him to publish. Thus, the first edition was essentially a fighting tract, but later editions were considerably altered and grew bulkier as Malthus defended his views against a host of critics. The Malthusian theory of population came at the right time to harden the existing feeling against the Poor Laws and Malthus was a leading spirit behind the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834” ( Printing and the Mind of Man ). “In 1803 Malthus published a greatly expanded second edition of the Essay, incorporating details of the population checks that had been in operation in many different countries and periods. He did not claim originality for the idea that population tends to outrun the food supply. In the preface to the second edition he stated that in writing the first edition he had deduced the principle of population from the writings of David Hume, Robert Wallace, Adam Smith, and Richard Price, but that in the intervening period he had become aware that

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