Malthus’ Essay on the Principles of Population was one of the most controversial books ever published. Going through six editions in the author’s lifetime, it cast a long shadow down the nineteenth century, with nearly all of the century’s leading thinkers - from Hazlitt and Ricardo to Marx and Darwin - feeling compelled to comment on it. This set collects together a wide range of responses to Malthus and his work from the hundred years following the first publication of the Essay (1798). Malthusian ideas on population, poverty, and morality are subjected to the most searching examination by authors whose attitudes range from the harshly vituperative to the respectfully admiring. The matters at issue include the English Poor Law, class conflict, birth control, classical wage doctrine, and the theory of natural selection. The extraordinary reach of the population essay’s influence is evident in the diverse backgrounds of those setting down their reactions to it: economists, literary figures, Members of Parliament, journalists, scientists, and birth control advocates. The responses are drawn from the United Kingdom, France and the United States and from every decade of the nineteenth century. All of the material has been carefully and attractively retypeset. Geoffrey Gilbert is Professor of Economics at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, New York, and editor of the Oxford University Press World Classics edition of the Essay on the Principles of Population .