person
Thomas Malthus
Malthus
also: Мальтус
Thomas Malthus (1766-1834), English economist and author of the theory that population growth outstrips food supply; the father garbles his theory while claiming to have just read it in a journal.
Reading notes
- Before the Wedding §8 Malthus
Thomas Malthus (1766-1834), English economist and author of the theory that population growth outstrips the food supply -- garbled secondhand by the father into a piece of homespun advice about having fewer children.
- To Al. P. Chekhov, 17 January 1887. Moscow. §14 so as
not to multiply the proletariat, don't breed any more. That is what
Malthus and Pavel Chekhov both want.
A dark joke rather than a considered economic position: Chekhov invokes Thomas Malthus's population theory -- that population growth outstrips a family's or society's means of supporting it -- to tell his impoverished brother, who was raising several children with his common-law partner Anna Ivanovna on an unstable income, not to have more. The remark is characteristic of the brothers' habitually blunt, teasing correspondence rather than a settled view on family planning; it is preserved here as period content, not softened.