ABSTRACT
The Principles printed by Pickering is the posthumous second (1836) edition, with variant readings from the first (1820) using a system of running footnotes for minor variants with extensive variations set apart at the end. The original notes by the editor-now usually identified as John Cazenoveare indicated but there is no substantive set provided by Wrigley and Souden. By contrast, a distinguishing feature of Pullen’s edition is its reprinting (Volume 1) of the 1820 Principles as in the original, with no modifications except for marginal letters. These have various functions, as we shall see, one of which is to indicate where alterations appear in the second edition and also in a set of Manuscript Revisions made by Malthus and now held in the Cambridge University Library. Volume 2 contains those alterations. Thus while Wrigley and Souden treat the 1836 edition as the primary text, Pullen does the reverse. This major editorial decision turns inter alia on the fact that we cannot be sure of the extent to which the second edition of the Principles is an authoritative version of Malthus’s last thoughts considering the omissions and additions made by Cazenove, coupled with the further circumstance that Malthus made his Manuscript Revisions to the first edition and it was considered desirable to include those Revisions in the new edition (Pullen 1989, 1:xiii). Such easy access for the first time to the Manuscript Revisions will be an important bonus to researchers.
