Thomas Malthus predicted the end of the world...but the only thing doomed was his own family



When the Reverend Thomas Malthus predicted in 1798 that the booming population would doom the world to famine and disaster, he had no idea how wrong he would prove to be.

Two centuries on, as the global population tops seven billion, his theory is wholly discredited – and in an ironic twist of fate, his own direct bloodline has been wiped out entirely.

Only 86 years after he wrote An Essay On The Principles Of Population, his branch of the family tree ended with the death of his last surviving daughter, Emily.



False prophet: Thomas Malthus foresaw global starvation but didn't predict his own family would be wiped out

Malthus didn’t foresee family lines simply petering out. He believed the population would double every 20 years until people were no longer able to produce crops fast enough to feed themselves.

He predicted that eventually there would be what is now called a Malthusian crisis. ‘This could be a dearth, a famine, a plague, or something that would cut numbers so the population and natural resources would be kept in tandem with one another,’ explains historian Dr Emma Griffin, of the University of East Anglia and author of A Short History Of The British Industrial Revolution. ‘Of course, it has never happened.’

Indeed, although our population hit seven billion last week, experts already say it will reach nine billion by 2050.

Economists believe the Industrial Revolution saved us from the doom Malthus foresaw. Technological innovation enabled modern society to equip itself with sufficient resources.

‘Once you’ve got an industrial society, the connection between the size of the population and the natural resources is broken so we aren’t dependent on our own agriculture to feed ourselves,’ explains Dr Griffin.

Only 86 years after he wrote An Essay On The Principles Of Population, his branch of the family tree ended with the death of his last surviving daughter, Emily.

Malthus didn’t foresee family lines simply petering out. He believed the population would double every 20 years until people were no longer able to produce crops fast enough to feed themselves.

Things looked very different in Malthus’s era. From his perspective, it seemed that every spurt in population had been followed by setback, such as the Black Death in the Middle Ages.

Yet his family line died out before they could witness the turnaround that modern technology would bring. It petered out in 1885 of entirely natural causes, in contrast to all he had predicted in his doom-laden essay.

Thomas Robert Malthus was born with a harelip and is said to have refused to have his portrait painted for many years. He rose to become one of the most eminent men of his day, an influential economist and a fellow of the Royal Society.

Inspired by his faith as an Anglican clergyman, Malthus preached the virtues of moral restraint as a way to control population. He believed that couples should remain celibate until they could afford to bring up children.

His ideas long outlived him. His notion of a perpetual struggle for survival proved influential on Darwin’s On The Origin Of Species, published 25 years after Malthus had died in 1834.

Malthus married his cousin Harriet in 1804 and had three children. All died childless, leaving his direct line ‘extinct’, as genealogists put it. The youngest, Lucy, died unmarried, aged 17. Both Henry and Emily married and lived to ripe ages – Henry to 78 and Emily to 79 – but for unknown reasons, neither produced any heirs.

Different world: From Malthus's point of view, every spurt in population had been followed by setback, such as the Black Death in the Middle Ages

‘What is sad and a little surprising is that none of his children produced a grandchild,’ says Else Churchill, of the Society of Genealogists in London. ‘In the days before fully accessible and effective contraception, there was a higher number of pregnancies, but in turn, a high number of cases of infant mortality.’

It may even have been that Henry or Emily had children who died in infancy, perhaps due to the genetic abnormalities suggested by Malthus’s harelip. However, these is little evidence for historians to do more than speculate.

While Malthus’s family tree died out, the branch of his only brother, Sydenham, flourished – a pertinent reminder of the unpredictability of population growth, and a rebuttal to Malthus, whose predictions were based on the false premise that numbers grew steadily and evenly.

Sydenham and his wife Mariana Georgina had five children. Three were daughters, one son died aged 14, but another son, also named Sydenham, continued the family name.

He had 11 children: four were sons, who between them bore 16 sons and eight daughters. Here in Sydenham’s bloodline was the closest to an heir to Thomas Malthus’s dynasty.

Genealogist Mark Bayley, co-director of Thegenealogist.co.uk, has traced one of Sydenham’s direct descendants. Nigel Malthus lives in New Zealand and is the great-great-great-great-grandson of Sydenham.

Just as Malthus’s own bloodline met a sudden end, so did the credibility of his theories of population crisis. As Bayley puts it: ‘It is ironic that he was the person who coined population implosion and that his own direct line died out soon after.’

The Principal of Population and The Future Improvement of Society, written by Thomas Robert Malthus 1798



