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101 MALTHUS, Thomas Robert. An Essay on the Principle of Population, as it Affects the Future Improvement of Society. London: printed for J. Johnson, 1798 A cornerstone of economics, very scarce unrestored thus Rare first edition of one of the most important and influential works in the history of economic thought; a lovely, unrestored copy, the blue paper stock notably fresh, and with an appealing contemporary Cambridgeshire provenance. This copy is inscribed in ink on the title page, “Earith Book Club No. 137”, with a further name written along the upper edge since crossed out. Earith is fifteen miles north of Cambridge, where Malthus attended Jesus College from 1784; this copy was presumably part of a subscription library
in the village. Further early marginalia range from a few small reading ticks to the contents pages and the erratum on page 156 being corrected in pencil to the longer annotation seen on page 73, which extends the text’s commentary on the malnourishment of labourers (the first pencilled note traced in ink). Here Q8r (pp. 239–40) is in its cancelled state, which amends the incorrectly printed phrase “the immortality of man on earth seems to be as completely established” to read “mortality” on line 9. “The central idea of the essay – and hub of the Malthusian theory – was a simple one . . . If the natural increase in population occurs the food supply becomes insufficient and the size of the population is checked by ‘misery’ – that is the poorest sections of the community suffer disease and famine. Malthus recognises two other possible checks to population expansion: first ‘vice’ – that is, homosexuality, prostitution,
WEALTH AND WELFARE
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