SOURCE: Beaty, Frederick L. “Byron on Malthus and the Population Problem.” Keats-Shelley Journal 18 (1969): 17-26.

In the following essay, Beaty investigates the references to Malthus in Lord Byron's correspondence and poetry.

Both the letters and poetry of Byron contain references to Thomas Robert Malthus that were immediately clear and meaningful to early nineteenth-century readers. Malthus's concisely phrased hypothesis about the relationship of population growth to the means of subsistence and his incisive theories on political economy made him so famous in his own day that thoughtful contemporaries were obliged to read his work. If for no other reason, idealists such as Wordsworth, Southey, Coleridge, Scott, Hazlitt, and Shelley acquainted themselves with his Essay on the Principle of Population—his rebuttal to Godwin's and Condorcet's views on human perfectibility—in order to refute it as the prophecy of necessitarian despair. Many attackers denounced him, quite unjustly, as the spokesman of...