ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the reaction to Thomas Robert Malthus in the working class press between 1817 and the passage of the New Poor Law in 1834. It also analyses its immediate aftermath with particular emphasis on the extent to which William Cobbett's anti-Malthusianism was superceded by new and analytically more powerful critiques of the principle of population. The influence of Cobbett's ideas on the working-class press in the 1820s and especially in the 1830s immediately before and after the passage of the New Poor Law is undeniable. Malthus advocated total abolition of the Old Poor Law and denied the poor any legal right to relief. Such negative measures, he believed, would facilitate moral restraint since labourers with no parish support for their children would delay marriage fearing utter destitution. Although echoing much of Cobbett's hostility to Malthusians, the working-class press only rarely achieved his level of invective.
