ABSTRACT
During Robert Malthus's fallow decade, from 1788 to 1798, we can pinpoint little except for two events in the year 1793. On 10 June his college made him a Fellow: this was not simply an honour, it provided him with a small income, without any obligations, as long as he remained unmarried. At about the same time, he was appointed perpetual curate of Okewood, a chapel of ease at the southernmost tip of the parish of Wotton in which he was born. Okewood became an ecclesiastical parish in 1853, but before that date the remote little church was not licensed for marriages, and the curate was not instituted or inducted, merely nominated by the patron who had the gift of the rectory of Wotton - the illustrious Evelyn family. Daniel Malthus refers to both these landmarks in his son's life in the following letter, beginning with the fellowship:
I heartily congratulate upon your success; it gives me a sort of pleasure which arises from my own regrets. The things which I have missed in life, I should the more sensibly wish for you.
Alas! my dear Bob, I have no right to talk to you of idleness, but when I wrote that letter to you with which you were displeased, I was deeply impressed with my own broken purposes and imperfect pursuits; I thought I foresaw in you, from the memory of my own youth, the same tendency to lose the steps you had gained, with the same disposition to self reproach, and I wished to make my unfortunate experience of some use to you. It was indeed, but little that you wanted it, which made me the more eager to give it you, and I wrote to you with more tenderness of heart than I would in general pretend to, and committed myself in a certain manner which made your answer a rough disappointment to me, and it drove me back into myself. You have, as you say, worn out that impression, and you have a good right to have done it; for I have seen in you the most unexceptionable character, the sweetest manners, the most sensible and the kindest conduct, always above throwing little stones into my garden, which you know I don't easily forgive, and uniformly making every body easy and amused about you. Nothing can have been wanting to what, if I were the most fretful and fastidious, I could have required in a companion; and nothing even to my wishes for your happiness, but where they were either whimsical, or unreasonable, or most likely mistaken. I have often been on the point of taking hold of your hand and bursting into tears at the time that I was refusing you my affections: my approbation I was precipitate to give you.
Write to me, if I could do any thing about your church, and you want any thing to be done for you. Such as I am, believe me, dear Bob, yours affectionately, Daniel Malthus. 1
