Thomas Robert Malthus, F. R. S. (1766-1834)

Malthus was born in 1766, the second son of Daniel Malthus, a landed gentleman of moderate fortune. The father, an amiable, talented but eccentric man, was a friend of Rousseau and Hume, who came to visit him a few weeks after Robert’s birth. Robert’s tutor before he went to Cambridge was Gilbert Wakefield, another disciple of Rousseau, and at Jesus College, Cambridge, which he entered in 1784, he was a pupil of William Frend who was a friend of Joseph Priestley. He was 9th wrangler in 1788, took orders in the same year, was elected a Fellow of his College in 1793, and was inducted to the living of Walesby in Lincolnshire in 1802; in 1804 he married and vacated his Fellowship and was appointed to the chair of Modern History and Political Economy at the East India College established at Haileybury for the general education of cadets for the Indian service. He is thus the first English (as opposed to Scottish) professional academic economist. He remained at Haileybury for the rest of his life, and though his seminal ideas were conceived before he went there, it provided a more congenial scene for the development and elaboration of his ideas than a country living would have done

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