ABSTRACT
Harriet Martineau, unlike earlier popularizers of political economy, aimed her work at the 'mass of the people'. Jane Marcet, who published Conversations on Political Economy in 1816, restricted her readership to 'young persons of either sex' in the middling and upper classes. It is significant that Martineau mentioned Thomas Robert Malthus by name in this passage. Although her work drew on the theories of many political economists — Smith, James Mill and David Ricardo among others — Malthus's Essay on the Principle of Population was central to her entire framework. Like Malthus, Martineau frequently asserts that the fundamental cause of rapid population increase is early and improvident marriage, especially when induced by the generous provisions of the Old Poor Law — the poor deliberately marrying young and having children in order to receive poor relief. Malthus died at the age of 68 at Bath on 29 December 1834, four months after passage of the New Poor Law.
