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Shelley and Malthus

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 August 2021

C. E. Pulos
C. E. Pulos*
Affiliation:
University or Nebraska Lincoln 8
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Extract

No one has hitherto undertaken an investigation of Shelley's relation to Robert Malthus. Previous Shelley scholarship contains no adequate examination of the remarks on Malthus in Shelley's prose. No attempt, furthermore, has ever been made to relate these remarks in the prose to any of the poems; and, therefore, some probable and significant allusions to Malthus in the poetry have gone entirely unnoticed. Various scholars, to be sure, have called attention to the main allusions discoverable in the burlesque Oedipus Tyrannus; but past interpretations of these references are in need of some modification. More important, however, than what pertains to Shelley's burlesque is the probable occurrence of hitherto quite unsuspected allusions to Malthus in a number of the major serious poems—including Prometheus Unbound.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 67 , Issue 2 , March 1952 , pp. 113 - 124
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1952

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References

Notes

1 Of Population (London, 1820), p. iv.

2 An Essay on the Principle of Population, ed. James Bonar (London, 1926), p. i. All references to Malthus are to this edition unless otherwise noted.

3 Thoughts on Dr. Parr's Spital Sermon (London, 1801). Inferring from the Thoughts that Malthus had converted Godwin, Francis Place was surprised by Godwin's later attack on Malthus: Place, Illustrations and Proofs of the Principle of Population, ed. Norman E. Himes (Boston and New York, 1930), p. 3.

4 See James Bonar, Malthus and His Work (London, 1885), p. 360.

5 See Place, Illustrations and Proofs, pp. 164-165.

6 Godwin quotes from the letters of a number of such persons (Pref., Of Population).

7 See Bonar, Malthus and His Work, p. 363. The others in Bonar's incomplete list of prominent Malthusians are Copleston, Hallam, Brougham, Mackintosh, Whitbread, Mill, Senior, and Ricardo.

8 See Arthur Aspinall, Lord Brougham and the Whig Party (Manchester, 1927), p. 73.

9 See the letter in the autobiographical Life of Robert Owen (London, 1857-58), ii, 192-193.

10 See G. D. H. Cole, The Life of William Cobbett (New York, 1924), pp. 89, 410. Perhaps Cobbett's Political Register was the most anti-Malthusian periodical in England. Cobbett did not tolerate radicals who endorsed Malthus (ibid., pp. 284-285). Leigh Hunt's Examiner, on the other hand, is more representative of the left-wing attitude toward Malthus, though it has surprisingly little to say about him. On 29 Oct. 1815 the Examiner published Hazlitt's abusive “Queries Relating to the Essay on Population” (included in The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. B. P. Howe [London and Toronto, 1932], vii, 357-361). But this attack is nearly counterbalanced by the highly complimentary reference to Malthus in the Examiner, 26 Feb. 1815, p. 8. The Examiner sometimes recommended emigration to America for “our extreme poor” (27 Dec. 1818, p. 819), implying endorsement of Malthus' theory that overpopulation is the cause of poverty.

11 The Complete Works of Perty Bysshe Shelley, Julian Edition (London, 1926-30), vii, 32. All references to Shelley's works are to this edition.

12 To Peacock, 15 Feb. 1821.

13 The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Cambridge Edition (Boston, 1901), p. 628.

14 Poems of Shelley (London, 1911), i, 661.

15 “Shelley's ‘Swell-Foot the Tyrant’ in Relation to Contemporary Political Satires,” PMLA, xxxvi (1921), 340-341.

16 A Study of Shelley (London, 1880), p. 207.

17 “Shelley: A Reference to Ricardo in ‘Swellfoot the Tyrant’,” N&Q, Jan. 1939, pp. 25-26.

18 Kenneth Neill Cameron, “A Major Source of The Revolt of Islam',” PMLA, lvi (1941), 192-193.

19 James Grahame, An Enquiry into the Principle of Population (Edinburgh, 1816), p. 33.

20 Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, 3rd ed. (London, 1806), ii, 117-118.

21 Ibid., ii, 398.

22 Quarterly Review, xviii (1817), 378.

23 Bonar, Malthus and His Work, p. 337.

24 The concept of Necessity held by these radicals was based, of course, on an aspect of Hume's philosophy. See F. B. Evans, “Shelley, Godwin, Hume, and the Doctrine of Necessity,” SP, xxxvii (1940), 632-640.

25 Essay on Population, 3rd ed., ii, 372-373.

26 Shelley's Works, ix, 317, note.

27 To Godwin, 25 July 1818.

28 To Peacock, 8 Oct. 1818. Pierre Prévost translated Malthus into French in 1809. If Shelley had not read Malthus before, his knowledge of Malthusian doctrines could have come from conversation, reviews, and replies to Malthus.

29 “The Political Symbolism of ‘Prometheus Unbound’,” PMLA, lviiii (1943), 728-753.

30 Many recent critics, though presenting widely different interpretations, agree in rejecting the traditional view that identified the “fatal child” with Demogorgon. See, for instance, Locock, ed. Poems of Shelley, i, 617-618; Carl Grabo, Prometheus Unbound: An Interpretation (Chapel Hill, 1935), pp. 96, 101-102; Cameron, PMLA, lviii (1943), 748-752; Carlos Baker, Shelley's Major Poetry: the Fabric of a Vision (Princeton, 1948), p. 109, note. Grabo interprets the “fatal child” as the Godwinian concept of Necessity, Cameron as “Anarchy,” and Baker as the figment of Jupiter's imagination. Grabo's view is unacceptable because it assumes an hostility toward the Godwinian concept of Necessity for which there is no evidence in Shelley, while Baker's view falls short of a full interpretation. Nor is Cameron's view wholly satisfactory. The term “Anarchy” in Shelley means either the “anarchy below” of armed rebels (Hellas, 1. 268) or the military power of despots (Hellas, ll. 229-301), and Shelley's tyrants glorify only the latter. Neither sense of the word, however, nor the two senses combined, can explain, it seems to me, why Jupiter should expect by means of “Anarchy” an omnipotence in the future which he had not enjoyed in the past.

31 Hazlitt's Works, i, 181.

32 Hazlitt's Reply to Malthus (the first three chapters of which originally appeared in Cobbett's Weekly Political Register, 14 March, 16 and 23 May 1807) was published in 1807 anonymously. Writing in 1816, James Grahame referred to it as one of the three most distinguished rebuttals of Malthus (An Enquiry into the Principle of Population, p. 71). In a letter to Leigh Hunt, 21 April 1821, Hazlitt complained that Godwin's Of Population had stolen one-half of his reply to Malthus without acknowledgment (P. P. Howe, The Life of William Hazlitt [New York, 1922], p. 321). Shelley might have read Hazlitt's Reply to Malthus at Godwin's, where in 1817 he sometimes stayed when in London, and where he spent one evening with Hazlitt (Newman Ivey White, Shelley [New York, 1940], i, 520).

33 See H. G. Lotspeich, “Shelley's ‘Eternity’ and Demogorgon,” PQ, xiii (1934), 309-311; Baker, Shelley's Major Poetry, p. 116, note.

34 Cameron, PULA, lviii (1943), 728-730.