ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author read Thomas Robert Malthus use of visual tropes as a means of creating a position from which knowledge of an economy can be conceived as a thing to be observed, an object of scientific inquiry of the same order as natural phenomenon. The language could be drawn from the discourse of the picturesque, or from the gothic novels of Malthus’s contemporary Ann Radcliffe, works that at first glance seem very distant from the topics to which Malthus would go on to address in the Essay. Political economy shares the same language as literature, and, for Malthus, the same problem of attempting to render a complex, dynamic object. Malthus became the first professor of Political Economy at a college or university when he was given an appointment at the East India College in July 1805.
