Feeling the Malthusian Empire: Martineau's Reformulation of Population in Illustrations of Political Economy

Abstract

Population was a socially significant yet politically precarious concept in nineteenth-century Britain. In order to highlight the affective implications of “population,” this essay examines Harriet Martineau's fiction in the context of early Victorian concerns over population growth and contemporary thoughts of political economy. As an avid supporter of Thomas Malthus, Martineau maintains that “proportionate labor” is the determining factor in national stability, but her use of sentimental fiction in Illustrations of Political Economy (1832–34) reveals aspects of the population crisis that are not accounted for by the classic political economists. Martineau's fiction presents population as a phenomenon collectively felt among Victorians rather than as an objective number that represents sociological truth. In her modification of the Malthusian principles to encompass affective negotiations that extend beyond individual morals, Martineau emphasizes the importance of somatic experience in shaping the nineteenth-century understanding of population. Furthermore, as Martineau's narrative resolution to the population crisis comes from well-managed emigration, her works demonstrate that geographical colonial expansion operated as an essential condition in establishing a nationally sustainable idea of population. Reassessing Martineau's literary and historical significance as an innovative successor of Malthus unveils a sophisticated Victorian nexus of population theory and the collective feelings of empire.

Population is a word that kindles strong feelings. The sense of crisis associated with the word owes much to Thomas Robert Malthus and his theory on population growth, which has gone through severe challenges on various fronts since its inception. The notorious extended debate with William Godwin, William Cobbett calling him “the monster MALTHUS,” and Sir Thomas Carlyle's description of Malthusian theory as “dreary, stolid, dismal, without all hope for this world or the next” are just a few instances of criticisms and controversies that An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) attracted.¹ Nevertheless, Malthusian theory has endured to the present day, as postcolonial theories of biopolitics and environmentalist arguments alike have revitalized his centuries-old insight.² I propose that the versatility of Malthusian theory stems primarily from the precariousness of the term population. While the population problem appears to have become a constant factor in modern history, understanding population as a mere number fails to fully capture the profound sense of crisis that pervades the collective imagination regarding the idea of population. To propose a more comprehensive definition of population that takes into consideration the incalculable historical intricacies of the concept, this essay examines Harriet Martineau's early Victorian imperial literary experiments within the context of the prolonged Malthusian debate.

Victorian novels, as a vehicle for social reform and education, reflect the major socioeconomic pressures and shifts of the era. The industrial novels of Charles Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell are well-known examples of literary treatments of the Victorian population crisis. Literary representations, however, do not always consistently align with the forces of change, be it the industrial revolution, capitalist developments, or theories of contemporary political economy. They are less concerned with the technicalities of economic principles that cause the crisis and more concerned with individuals’ subjective, felt experiences of the crisis. Martineau's Illustrations of Political Economy (1832–34) marks a special place in Victorian literature due to its explicit engagement with principles of classical political economy, thereby exposing the intersection of literary and socioeconomic understandings of Britain as a nation.³

My reading of her works focuses on the problematic triangle that population theory, literature, and the British Empire formed in the early nineteenth century. The assumptions underlying the perception of population as a natural object of authoritative control shape the administrative, cultural, economic, and biopolitical foundations of a modern nation, and it is no coincidence that Martineau adopted sentimental fiction as “the best [way] in which Political Economy can be taught.”⁴ Analyzing the mid-nineteenth-century population crisis through Martineau's affective illustrations of economic principles in her fiction reveals the cultural and historical factors that constructed the operative concept of population during her lifetime. By demonstrating how Illustrations negotiates the pressure of population in the imperial context, this article aims to redefine Martineau as a political writer who significantly modifies Malthusian theory to incorporate people's collective experience into the notoriously dystopian equation of population growth.

To highlight the significance of communal feeling in shaping the idea of population, my reading establishes a critical connection between two distinct tales in Martineau's Illustrations of Political Economy: A Manchester Strike, a dismal tale about a failed strike, and Homes Abroad, a tale in which emigration features as a solution to poverty and despair. Published as independent tales in Illustrations, these two stories are not categorically related. According to the “Summary of Principles” attached to each tale, one promotes the universality of the law of supply and demand to show the ineffectiveness of strikes, and the other advocates for the national economic merits of emigration.⁵ But the fundamental narrative force behind both tales is their shared interest in the proportion of available capital to the laboring population. Pairing the two tales makes clear the historical intimacy between the potentially troubling idea of population and the expansive geographical imagination of the empire. Such intimacy between imperial expansion and the idea of a manageable population highlights the inherently imperial nature of the Victorian understanding of population. Martineau's tales show how the empire's geopolitical expansion demands careful affective management of the shared experience on top of maintaining an equilibrium between the availability and use of resources in the colonies.

My argument builds on the prior critical works in Victorian studies that treat population as a complex social concept operating at the intersection of biopower, governmentality, and reproductive politics, such as Mary Poovey's, Catherine Gallagher's, and Lauren Goodlad's works.⁶ To investigate the mid-nineteenth-century colonial implications of what Gallagher has defined as “somaeconomics,” my reading emphasizes how Martineau's depictions of labor and economy in Illustrations foreground the unruly human body and its affective experiences across various socioeconomic backgrounds. Critical perspectives that extend beyond the conventional view of Victorian individualism also figure prominently in my reading. Emily Steinlight highlights in her study of population excess and the Victorian novel that the intersection of political economy and fiction sheds light on less calculable aspects of population that determine the collective imagination regarding national control over working bodies—biopolitical manipulation at its finest. And, of all genres, sentimental fiction has the capacity to effectively disrupt the notion of the population being a quantifiable and manageable entity as it demonstrates how emotional experiences defy being accurately captured by mathematical analysis of society. Building on Kyla Schuller's understanding of “sentimentalism's function as a biological discourse” that forges the idea of population,⁷ I delve into sentimentalism's function as an economic discourse in Martineau through her depiction of emotions associated with the issue of “disproportionate labor.” Martineau's literary representation of the Malthusian principle in The Manchester Strike and Homes Abroad, when discussed in its intersection with recent critical interests in corporeal and collective experiences in the Victorian novel, yields fresh insight into the concept of population.⁸ To historically ground this theoretical take, the following section will lay out the intellectual and economic context in which Martineau took up political economy as the subject of her literary work.

Martineau as an Innovative Successor of Malthus

Despite Illustration's extraordinary success, Martineau's merit as a writer has often been discussed in terms of her ability to make the principles of classical political economy widely known,⁹ rather than her literary excellence. She is seldom cited as an innovative economic theorist, even when she is praised for her effectiveness as an educator. Contemporary critics, such as Edward Bulwer-Lytton, perceive Martineau as a moral fiction writer who successfully educates her audience, but they underestimate her potential as a political economist.¹⁰ Such partial acknowledgment—although Martineau immediately became a celebrity writer who got stared at in the streets after publication¹¹—can be attributed to primarily two factors: the questionable political legitimacy of the economic principles demonstrated in her work and Illustration's hybridity in terms of its genre.

To begin with, the economic principles she intended to popularize in her fiction were not of her own invention, nor did she claim their originality.¹² And, more importantly, not all of the classic political economists’ theories that she chose to propagate remained creditable through her time. Martineau's fictional narratives present various lessons learned from classical political economists, including Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and Thomas Malthus. Among her wide-ranging teachers of political economy, Smith and Ricardo had become the benchmarks in understanding the principles of a burgeoning capitalist economy with their theories of free trade, division of labor, and the labor theory of value. But as one of the “most important defenders” of Malthus,¹³ she emphasized in her autobiography that Illustrations attempted “to exemplify Malthus's doctrine,”¹⁴ and her commitment to propagating Malthusian principles through fiction was met with particularly harsh criticisms.¹⁵ The well-known Malthusian concern expressed in An Essay on the Principle of Population—that population growth will eventually threaten the sustenance of a society—faced much resistance even within the field of political economy. The Malthusian conviction that restraints should be imposed on population growth could not sit comfortably in the context of the explosively expanding economy of Britain because it undermined the classical understanding of the human as the primary source of capital as well as of social good.¹⁶ Thus, by Martineau's time, a faithful adoption of Malthusian theory was considered “decidedly behind the present state of the science,” as John Stuart Mill puts it.¹⁷ Even when Malthusian theory came to be considered mostly inapplicable due to expectations of rapid industrial and technological development, Martineau, a sociologist deeply concerned about the state of the poor in Britain, believed in the urgency of educating the public on Malthusian principles.

Martineau's engagement with Malthusian principles in Illustrations, however, revises rather than merely reinforces his theory. The relentless attacks on Malthus often zoom in on his “checks” that seem to contradict the liberal, enlightened understanding of man.¹⁸ His theorization of positive checks including war, plague, and famine, as well as preventive checks like chastity and celibacy, gives the impression that he either treats humans as objects to be removed or as uncontrollable beings without self-restraint. But in later editions of An Essay on Population, Malthus addresses the importance and efficacy of individuals’ “moral checks” in keeping the population under control.¹⁹ Malthus emphasizes that “the only effectual mode of improving the condition of the Poor” is to practice moral restraints such as celibacy and delayed marriage,²⁰ and asserts that “obedience to the practical utility of his system and improvement” can “be expected from the most complete knowledge of our duties.”²¹ According to Malthus, the foundation for tackling the issue of disproportionate population growth lies in individuals’ understanding of their duties and their individual willingness to adhere to moral restrictions.

The fundamental distinction between Malthus and Martineau lies in their contrasting emphases on individual morality and collective affect. Literary manifestations of the population crisis expose that people's understanding of the principles of political economy depends heavily on their collective feelings. To formulate a resolution to the population crisis, Martineau imagines a geographical expansion that will secure increased production rather than imposing checks on individuals’ sexual and/or patriotic morality. In turn, the felt experience of people who emigrate, rather than how they restrict themselves from unregulated reproduction, becomes the primary concern for Martineau.

Accordingly, Malthus and Martineau differed greatly in their perspectives on the nature of education and how they approached the topic of educating the public. Although Malthus was largely pessimistic about the outlook of population growth, he believed that the proportionate increase of population is determined by the character of society's lower classes, “which depend[s] on their civil and political liberty and education.”²² Malthus was, in fact, an advocate of a national system of education for the laboring classes, thinking that it “would acquaint them with the true causes of their condition, and thereby reduce the chances of their supporting some of the more radical and revolutionary schemes that were afoot.”²³ Here, too, Malthus believed that individuals’ knowing “the true causes,” that is, a rational understanding of the situation, will automatically lead to social change.²⁴ But Martineau, as I shall discuss later in my analysis of her fiction, found it insufficient to make “the true causes of their condition” known to the public. Her design in Illustrations included both an explication of the principles of political economy and detailed descriptions of people's experiences of their condition.

In this context, I argue that generic hybridity, which has been the source of various underestimations of Martineau, becomes her strength as a writer of political economy. Martineau explicitly declares in the preface that the design of Illustrations is to “educate” the public on the topic of political economy, and she deliberately and specifically chose the form of narrative fiction for that purpose. The literary element, thus, demands a historically informed interpretation. Martineau paired all of her short fiction in Illustrations with lists of economic principles one can learn through each tale, unsubtly titled “Summary of Principles illustrated in this Volume.” The rugged juxtaposition of sentimental fiction and a didactic summary of economic principles conveyed an impression of inconsistency and marked her as an unrefined writer.²⁵ But it is exactly that imaginative combination of unlikely subjects which makes her a unique political theorist. Her use of sentimental fiction allows her to incorporate the collective, affective knowledge of empire and its population into the ruthless and inhuman economic equation that falls short of capturing the reality of mid-nineteenth-century British life. Through an analysis of Martineau's narrative negotiations of the population crisis in Illustrations, this article ultimately aims to articulate the Victorian nexus of population theory and the feelings of empire that embody the pivotal anxiety of the era.

“Too Many Hands for the Work to Be Done”: Proportionate Labor and Its Discontents

After a failed strike at a cotton factory in A Manchester Strike, two workers conclude that neither the bargainer nor the owner were to blame for the ensuing tragedy.²⁶ One of them asks, “Where then, was the evil?” And the other responds, “Certainly, in there being too many hands for the work to be done.”²⁷ “Too many hands” quite literally refers to the disproportion between available labor and demand for work in Martineau's tale, and according to the moral of the tale as summarized by the author herself, “nothing can permanently affect the rate of wages that does not affect the proportion of population to capital” (216). When envisioned via the ethically loaded term “evil,” this seemingly simple principle of political economy demands a second look at what “too many hands” meant for Victorians and how literature represented such an incomprehensible “vice.” It is no news that capitalism benefits from a constant excess of human labor; as Karl Marx famously remarks, a “surplus population of workers” is in effect “a condition for the existence of the capitalist mode of production.”²⁸ The tension between the idea of “surplus” and that of “population” shapes the essence of the Malthusian debate, while the calculation involved in the mathematical formula of political economy has been generally taken for granted. Martineau's fictionalization of economic theories in her Illustrations offers us a chance to rethink the fundamental implications of such a maxim by displaying how such surpluses actualize in people's lives.

The corporeal struggles of the laborers in A Manchester Strike reveal how the notion of a “proportionate population” constantly clashes with the collective realities of ordinary people. In this tale, the excess of laboring hands leads to a significant reduction in wages, but those “checks” clearly do not reduce the number of laboring hands. Reduced wages exacerbate starvation and destitution, thereby heightening social concerns about the population. But Martineau simultaneously maintains that the failure to solve the problem of proportions does not fundamentally modify the underlying principles of political economy, which she believes should be broadly disseminated to enhance the national economy. To borrow from an 1832 review of Illustrations published in The Spectator, “the theoretical object of the work is to illustrate the nature of Wages,”²⁹ and the narrator also emphasizes that A Manchester Strike primarily aims to educate its readers on an inescapable, impersonal economic rule: “the rate of wages in any country depends [. . .] not on the wealth which that country contains, but on the proportion between its capital and its population” (215). The importance of proportion, when explained on an abstract level, makes a convincing case, but to blame “the hands” for poverty is a whole new problem. Given the context of mass unemployment and the ensuing tragedy depicted in the tale, to claim that “the evil” was “in there being too many hands for the work to be done” exempts the capitalists from blame while implicitly establishing economic principles to be operating as an impartial and objective rule (161).³⁰

If Martineau's design in this tale was merely to impart Malthusian principles in their original form, the narrative should faithfully endorse the principles presented in the “Summary of Morals.” Objective elaboration of the disproportion between labor and capital, however, does not take up much narrative space in Martineau's work. Instead, the subjective depiction of suffering, which encompasses the characters’ somatic experience of poverty, repeatedly contradicts the theoretical principle. Furthermore, the overwhelming sense of agony frequently materializes in bodily pain, want, or decline—which, in turn, affects the bodies of others in A Manchester Strike. The readers, too, are strongly encouraged to perceive the topic of “proportion” in affective terms. Martineau's Illustrations, then, insists that the economic issues “theoretically” caused by excess labor cannot be fully understood without taking into account the collective feelings of the laboring population.

The very first scene of A Manchester Strike features a conversation between William Allen, the reluctant protagonist, and his eight-year-old daughter, Martha, who walks “more lame than ever to-day” owing to her knee injury from factory work (142). As they bemoan their recent wage reduction, the narrator maintains a compassionate perspective toward the distressed pair and urges the reader to feel for the characters’ suffering. Allen is introduced as “one of the most respectable looking among [the laborers]” and as a man who is “not made for ambition” (139, 175). The tale follows how he ends up taking the lead role in communicating the laborers’ demands to the masters and suffers from multilayered incongruity—from the mismatch of personal disposition and the lack of understanding on the part of his wife, not to mention having to turn a blind eye to his daughter's suffering—well before the ultimate punishment of losing his job.

The extended depiction of Allen as an exhausted laborer and the heartbreaking episodes of his family's suffering make the readers question his decision to participate in, not to mention lead, the strike. In this process of political persuasion, what truly haunts Allen's narrative of failure is the ailing body of his little daughter. The authorial logic is quite simple: the laborers, including Allen, cannot win what they want simply because there are fewer jobs than people who want jobs, and participating in strikes will only exacerbate the situation. To convince the readers of this ostensibly hard-and-fast economic rule, Martineau's narrator, albeit tangentially, blames the workers who participate in the strike for the struggles of their families. The somatic pain of Allen's daughter operates as a specimen that amplifies the affective responses of readers based on the Victorian ideals of domesticity. Here, the ailing body of a young girl signifies the failure of a happy family as the source of pride, causing utmost pain and agony among the young girl's family as well as other members of the community.

Economic as well as psychological suffering in A Manchester Strike palpably spreads among the town's inhabitants. Martineau deliberately juxtaposes the organizing process of the strike with the adversities of the laborers’ family members, and as she bombards the readers with sentimental scenes of family disasters, the gradual degradation of both mind and body gets highlighted. Readers are forced to witness that “now was the time to see the good son pacing slowly to the pawnbroker's to pledge his aged mother's last blanket to buy her bread” and to agonize over the reality in which “many a man who had hitherto been a helper to his wife and tender to his children, began to slam the door behind him, after having beaten or shaken the little ones all round, and spoken rough words to their trembling mother” (203). Martineau's description of these scenes of despair and violence insinuates that their domestic happiness and safety were destroyed precisely due to their communal action and that the strike is useless when the ratio of population and labor demand stays the same. But the negative impacts of the strike, instead of fostering acceptance of the ruthless economic theory, generate a lasting sentimental impact on the tale's characters and readers.

The strike in the tale fails miserably, and many workers eventually lose their jobs according to the supply-and-demand principle, but it is the fictional depictions of nonnumerical aspects of life, not numbers or calculations of any kind, that sustain Martineau's allegedly unbiased economic conclusions.³¹ The key to comprehending Martineau's works, I contend, is in articulating an alternative nexus of the perception of population and the economy: there are other calculations at work in Martineau's fiction. The appeal to conventional familial duty as individual productive laborers fails to override the sense of collectivity borne out of people's struggle with the scale of experience within which they locate themselves. Workers and their families begin to feel themselves as the very subjects who obstruct proportionate population growth and thus intuitively resist the Malthusian law. The incident I examine in the following paragraphs demonstrates a significant gap between the perspectives of Malthus and Martineau on the appropriate methods for teaching principles of political economy.

At the last committee meeting where the laborers officially announce their defeat, “there was a larger proportion than usual of ragged women and crying babies; for, as the women had been all along opposed to the strike, they were sensible of a feeling of mournful triumph in seeing it dissolved” (212, emphasis mine). Although the wives of workers are depicted as ignorant of economic principles or indifferent to their husbands’ ethical dilemma regarding the strike, they join the gathering to witness the end of this turmoil. Women and babies thereby become part of the feeling community. Martineau's sensory description of this gathering makes a poignant example of what John Plotz refers to as “the experience of being overcome by numbers” in his work on the rhetorical and aesthetic significance of crowds during the nineteenth century.³² The “ragged” presence of women's bodies communicates their sustained anxiety and long-standing concern about the consequences of the strike, and the resounding cries of babies fill the space of this political gathering with a conspicuous corporeal presence that combines a sense of mourning, exhaustion, limited relief, and a vague, enlarged collectivity.

The collective feeling shared beyond the isolated units of individual workers and their families—note that these two are the supposed primary units of capitalist production—develops as the feeling of population amidst the labor crisis. The predominant outcome here is collective discontent rather than a rational awareness of their own excess. In other words, the population crisis defies easy categorization or simple summary since the sense of collectivity dominates people's experience of population. This strikes me as one of the fundamental ways in which Martineau modifies Malthusian calculation. The aforementioned difference in their understanding of education figures importantly in this context.³³ For Martineau, collective feeling, as opposed to individual reason, operates as the key component in shaping the idea of population. Illustrations of Political Economy suggests that the collective affective resistance toward the principles of political economy must be taken into account for the idea and theory of “proportionate labor” to be convincing and advantageous to the public.

Proportionate Emigration as a Precarious Resolution in Homes Abroad

If A Manchester Strike highlights the scenes of despair caused by the population crisis, Homes Abroad decidedly seeks ways to resolve the pressure of population. To do so, Martineau experiments with the boundaries of British population in Homes Abroad.³⁴ The primary objective of the tale—to teach readers about the economic benefits of emigration—is contingent upon the newly imagined boundaries of population based on the material and geographical expansion of potentially productive territories. And for Britain in the nineteenth century, the answer was inarguably aggressive colonial expansion. The emigrants’ struggles represented in Homes Abroad demonstrate the complicated affective process through which imperial notions of population become naturalized, I contend. As Martineau explicitly points to the significance of “feeling like a whole community,” especially in constructing the idea of population in the colonial context, she effectively modifies the weaknesses of Malthusian theory, which inevitably generates competition and anxiety among the British population. In addition, the crises in the tale demonstrate Martineau's keen awareness of the colonial power dynamic at work as well as her writerly ability to mask such brutality as the due expansion of civilization. Through my analysis of the specific cultural and affective negotiations of the population pressures felt by Homes Abroad’s emigrants, Martineau's crucial addition to the Victorian principle of population will be clarified. Martineau's fiction highlights that the pervasive affective resistance generated in the process of colonial expansion should be considered a major factor in understanding the population crisis.

Homes Abroad is set in Kent, a city that “looks like a fruitful garden, capable of affording supporting as many inhabitants as can gather round its neat towns.” In reality, however, the city has “long suffered peculiarly from the poverty of its laboring population.”³⁵ As the story begins, Frank, the protagonist, and his sister Ellen are already aware of English people emigrating to Canada or to the Swan River Settlement in Western Australia for work, and they soon consult Mr. Jackson, who “had assisted in sending out some of his parishioners” to Van Diemen's Land (10).³⁶ When the protagonists feel “as if redemption was offered from a bondage which wears the soul and sickens the heart of man,” they imagine emigration as a total liberation from the conditions of English society (12). The emigrants-to-be are striving to save their suffering hearts and souls by making this bold move. But those who “send out” people to the colonies see the benefits of emigration from the perspective of an empire that seeks further control over the British population through systemic management: they see emigration as an act that can simultaneously “suppl[y] a want in the colony abroad” and “relieve the country of its over-fulness” (13). Such calculation necessarily involves a clear hierarchization between those who are practically forced to leave and those who “send out” others from their home country.

The hierarchy exemplifies not just the self-centered, geographically challenged vision of British economic thinkers but also the nationalist, exclusionist understanding of population and citizenship that characterizes the modern nation-state. The Godwinian human-centered idealism and the Malthusian anxiety about overpopulation may both support the emigrants’ desire to seek a better life abroad, but the calculation of emigration supporters in Homes Abroad is crystal clear. Emigration is supposed to eliminate “the troubles and moral evils of poverty [. . .] at the sacrifice of some of the privileges of high civilization” (123). Martineau's sentimental tale, however, betrays that promoting emigration as the solution to poverty dangerously simplifies the political implications of emigration. Martineau's depiction of the lived experience of “population control” in Homes Abroad effectively adds another layer to the nineteenth-century understanding of the idea of population, which in turn illustrates the imperial ironies of the population crisis.

Because it is “a benefit to rid [our nation] of thousands of her burdensome children” (124), emigration is a moral action on the individual level and a patriotic agenda on the national level. But as the condition “at the sacrifice of some of the privileges of civilization” suggests, the solution is immediately met with practical and affective resistance. Martineau, as a writer with keen political insight, is far from oblivious to the emotional complexities of emigration. Mr. Fellowes, who ardently objects to Mr. Jackson's plans, tries to “save” prospective migrants “from the manifold woes of the emigrant” (20). The “woes” encompass far more than material suffering. It entails a nation's ethical roots as a cohesive community. Mr. Fellowes asks, “Is it no evil to leave the country, and the kindred, and the father's house? Is it no evil to be severed from old connexions, and wrenched from all that has been beloved from birth?” (20). As is insinuated in his lamentation, the issue of population inevitably prompts discussions of national boundaries. Mr. Fellowes's emphasis on the sense of community and belonging as a natural state of being underlines the nonnegotiable necessity of feeling like a whole, undivided community if the moral and patriotic significance of emigration were to be convincing.

In order to mitigate the sociologically problematic nature of the concept of “population” while yet upholding some of the privileges of civilization, it becomes necessary to renegotiate the boundaries of the community. Martineau's tale demands a meticulous analysis precisely because it delves into the affective foundations of such imperatives. Martineau stages an extended argument between Mr. Jackson, who encourages the young couples of Kent to emigrate, and Mr. Fellowes, who argues that they should instead increase the production of food as a proper relief for the poor (19). Their respective “cures” for the population crisis bear a more substantial difference than it seems at first glance. Mr. Jackson's attempt to address the issue of “disproportionate labor” by deporting a portion of the population represents a divisive understanding of a community that imagines zero-sum competition among its members. When the narrator remarks that “the once-prosperous inhabitants of the parish, who were forever complaining that the bread was snatched from their mouths by new comers” (2, emphasis mine), we can infer that intercity travels and migration have already become prevalent social conditions that shape individual towns’ economies and their inhabitants’ anxiety of their community being under “attack.” The sense of “intrusion” and the immediate hostility toward outsiders can only stem from a very particular understanding of a community or population: one that prioritizes establishing unyielding boundaries and antagonizing those who come to join the group—unless they significantly contribute to the productivity of that population.

The instinctive and defensive calculation that shapes people's perception of the population crisis marks the basis of the intended moral of the story: “man's chief duty to his country is to provide honestly and abundantly, if he can, for himself and his family; and when this cannot be done at home, it is a breach of duty to stay and eat up other men's substance there, if a living can be had elsewhere” (125, emphasis mine). The pro-emigration perspective implies that the members of a community are in perpetual competition for a limited substance, and under this condition, choosing to stay at home when one can alleviate the problem by leaving is considered a violation of communal duty. Vilifying poverty effectively secures the moral superiority of emigration, but it comes with a considerable loss—the inconvenience of no longer being part of the proud entity that sustains the system of good and evil through national morals. To put it bluntly, the poor should either opt to strip other members of the community of their subsistence or deprive themselves of their own roots. Because the ethical implication of one's chosen relationship with one's mother country—that is, one's decision whether or not to leave the country—banks on people's mutual indebtedness as parts of the whole, the idea of “proportion” necessarily contends with the traditional notion of the nation as an entity that protects its inhabitants.³⁷

Martineau resolves this paradox ingeniously through imperial pride. As a Victorian intellectual who firmly believed in the liberal ideal and the idea of improvement,³⁸ she introduces comparisons into the narrative that appeal to her audience's sense of superiority and cultural pride. Recurring references to London as a place where jobs are easier to find and wages are higher, in contrast with descriptions of India, where workers are paid an extremely small portion of what English laborers were paid, attest to the increased interest and awareness of places outside of people's immediate communities. In this historical moment, convincing the inhabitants of Britain to feel that they were part of a larger whole was crucial to making emigration an attractive choice. Mr. Jackson's comparison of England to the ancient Greek civilization exemplifies a conviction to generate an imperial self-perception of Britain specifically through emigration. He argues that the Greeks’ “system of emigration,” as opposed to “feeding their surplus numbers by employing more and more in tillage at home,” has contributed to “enlighten[ing] and bless[ing]” the world and that “there would now have been little of the philosophy, the literature, the fine arts, which have spread from their country over the world” if it were not for massive emigration (28). Through this seemingly irrelevant example of the Greeks, the option of alleviating domestic tension by sacrificing some of the most cherished accomplishments of the nation becomes a potential source of heightened national pride.

Jackson's comparison of England to ancient Greece obscures the distinct cultural significance of effective population control, imperial self-identification, and even humanistic values. Poverty necessitates emigration, but it is that British sense of cultural superiority which turns emigration into a fulfillment of benevolent duty rather than an involuntary displacement. Martineau is clearly pushing for a settler-colonialist rhetoric when Mr. Jackson argues that they are migrating to a land that has a “fine climate, a fertile soil” and “inhabitants who speak their language, and are under the same government with themselves” (21).³⁹ For settler colonialism to function as a stable institution, the invader/migrant should come to the colonies with the intention to stay and to maintain their ways of life in the country of their origin. To put it in the language of proportion, the idea of the “whole” must be constant before and after emigration.

Thus, emigration dislocates the domestic tension caused by the crisis of “too many hands” only when it is imagined as an act that restores the feeling of proportion. In the final chapter of Homes Abroad, titled “True Citizenship,” Martineau addresses the very issue of “feeling” proportionate. The imperial fantasy of propagating “the good” navigates its way into the tale via a moralized definition of “population,” which develops from the competitive outlook discussed above. Martineau emphasizes in her “Summaries of Principles” that the emigrating population should still be sent out in “a state of organization” for successful settlement:⁴⁰

Wherever colonization was successful, the emigrating party has been composed of specimens of every rank and class; so that no one felt stripped of the blessings of the mother-country, but rather that he moved away in the midst of an entire though small society. (124, emphasis mine)

The organization is particularly important as it emulates what feels like “an entire” population. But such an “entire though small” society encounters a critical issue as soon as its inhabitants arrive at the colonies, precisely due to the very reason they chose to leave Britain. According to the standard economic principles taught by Martineau, the virtue and hope of a new settler colony should emerge from “the reverse proportion” of what they had in Britain. And the situation in the colonies, in terms of numbers and proportions, seems to match the emigrants’ expectations:

There was too little produce in proportion to the land; and too few dwellings in proportion to the produce; too much or too little of almost everything, for want of a due proportion of labour. The same thing is the case at home; only here the proportions are exactly reversed. It will be very strange if in a short time we do not rectify the condition of each country by the exchange which would be equally beneficial to both. (75, emphases mine)

The description above aligns perfectly with the author's announced purpose of convincing the readers of the benefits of colonial expansion. But even when the settlers find the reverse proportion to be true and that labor is in fact wanted in the colonies, the sense of disorientation, not the sense of control and power, dominates the narrative after they arrive in Van Diemen's Land. As various anxieties of the settlers are illustrated, the readers join the emigrants, who are altogether unsure of their safety, not to mention their prosperity in this new setting.

Here Martineau makes a point of delineating that successful emigration and settlement require a careful construction of the collective body of emigrants on top of material excess. The significance of individuals’ corporeal experience, as highlighted in the preceding section, regains prominence. Martineau's creation of a well-organized, “proportionate” colony begins primarily by physically putting together human bodies close to each other in the new, foreign land. As Frank surveys the new land to pick out a proper spot to settle in, it is more necessary for him to stay close to other settlers than to seek the “reverse proportion” of land to labor to an extreme extent.

Far other feelings, however, than those of discontent were awakened in Frank by the aspect of his new abode. It was almost in a state of nature, his employer, Mr. Stapleton, having preceded him to take possession only a few days before: but it was far from being a desolate spot in the midst of a waste, as settlers’ farms are wont to be in colonies where the unwise object is to disperse the inhabitants, instead of bringing them near to enjoy the advantages of a division of labour and reciprocity of consumption. (56, emphasis mine)

The successful establishment of a colony imagined in this scene is placed in contrast to the failure of the Dutch government at the Cape of Good Hope, which “forbade settlers to approach within three miles of each other” and thereby lost the benefits of civilization represented through commerce (45). The emigrants leave the mother country for a pastoral place where “the proportions [of labor and capital] are exactly reversed” (75),⁴¹ but what they actually need is the proportionate feeling of being at home, especially through a cluster of men with whom to “enjoy the advantages of a division of labour and reciprocity of consumption” (56). Understanding population as collective human bodies that enable commerce in the new world necessitates the building of that collective body with extreme care and strategy. The irony of Martineau's tale lies in the fact that the proportionate feelings of the population constitute the essence of feeling at home; reproducing proportionate feelings of the British population in conditions that are radically different from home remains a challenging task (121).⁴²

Colonial Negotiation of the Boundaries of Population

In addition to the difficulties of transplanting a sense of home into a completely unfamiliar environment, the new land of reverse proportions is not devoid of preexisting, unruly “threats.” The geographical spaces of the colonies are already inhabited by persons who do not belong to the British population, and the presence of the “other” generates serious concerns for the young couple who emigrated to Van Diemen's Land. “So many tales of horror” keep Ellen worried (89), although Harry tries to convince her that those are stories from the former times now that “such outrages are repressed and put an end to” (90).⁴³ When unsuccessfully managed, the negative collective feelings of a community may override the promising material condition offered by the “reverse proportion” and lead to a disastrous failure of emigration as an official strategy for population control. To account for the critical significance of imagining collective feeling in managing the population crisis, my reading demonstrates that not only the threat but the resolution to the population crisis come from the emigrants’ encounter with others who are not considered a part of the “population.”

A chapter from Homes Abroad focusing on the wedding day of Harry and Ellen portrays in detail the constant threat posed by the “runaway convicts” in the colony and the “hostile natives,” who are referred to as the “savages” (89–90). Still amazed at the state of the colonies, where there are “so few people to do things [. . .] that a man can scarcely be spared from work on his wedding day,” Ellen, too, walks out to start her part of the farm work. In the field, as if to justify the anxiety that the entire settler colony has suffered from, she finds a threat that immediately compels the British emigrants to acknowledge the narrow boundaries of the population. She “stumble[s] on something in the litter, which she mistook for a black pig, till its cry made her think it was something less agreeable to meet with,” referring to “a black baby” (95).

The settlers at first regard this neglected infant as a lure. They imagine that the “savages” have intentionally left their baby in order to ambush the settlers’ town when the farmers embark on a group hunt to eliminate the threat. The settler farmers thus decide to “le[ave] three or four men to guard the women and stock” against “an enemy who carried no other weapon than hatchets and pointed sticks, hardly worthy of the name of spears” (98). As is apparent in the sense of superiority implicit in the depiction of the “savages,” the settlers’ perception of progress and civilization is supposed to draw a clear distinction between the two groups. But Ellen “could not shut her heart any more than her ears” at the squall of “the black baby,” because the cry sounds exactly like white babies (100). She decides to comfort it, and soon, a “grovelling savage, lean and coarse as an ape, showing his teeth among his painted beard” shows up at Harry and Ellen's abode, creating a dramatic narrative tension. After shooting one of the “savages” to guard his home abroad, Harry realizes the awfully somatic nature of the colonial encounter.

Harry, returning with the musket he had just discharged, caught a full view of the creature groveling at his door, had the misery of feeling himself utterly unable to defend his wife, in a moment, he bethought himself at the back window, and of the loaded musket standing beside it. It proved to be within reach; but his wife was sitting almost in a straight line between him and the savage. No matter! He must fire, for her last moment was come if he did not. (101)

The pressure of competitive survival at home transforms into literal survival in the new world. The most urgent sense of danger in the scene, however, comes from the relational position of the bodies, not from the creature's violent action. The alignment of the four bodies—two black and two white—described in the scene captures the inevitability of British emigrants being muddled up with the “others.” The physical proximity of the bodies, especially the way in which the English wife holding the “other” baby in her bosom sits “almost in a straight line” between the English man and “the savage,” insinuates a sense of entanglement.

The intactness of the idea of population is jeopardized as the four bodies in this scene are not properly separated into two distinct groups. Moreover, the ominous possibility of Harry murdering his own wife becomes increasingly prominent. It is important to notice in reading this moment of heightened narrative tension that the placement of the four bodies in the scene above may be perceived as peaceful and even homely, with the baby nestling in the arms of a woman, until the racist distinction kicks in. Martineau's description highlights the threat posed by the presence of the “natives” by instilling a feeling of urgency through the physical proximity of the bodies in the scene. Such corporeal experiences in the colonies, however, not only shape the emigrants’ understanding of “proper population” but also suggest the danger of becoming indistinguishable from the “savages” who are deprived of civilization. The potential economic benefits of the “reversed proportion” in the colonies would be severely undermined if the emigrants were to lose faith in their sense of belonging to a larger whole. Specifically, Harry and his wife's anxiety expressed as immediate and somatic responses demonstrates that successful management of the collective feelings of the emigrants is the key to Victorian population governance.

Colonial violence, without irony in Martineau's iteration, accomplishes the difficult objective of managing the affective experience. Following the precarious moment of confrontation, a prompt affirmation of British superiority ensues. The narrative conveniently presents Harry with a triumph by showing that his bullet soon “lodg[es] on the head of the foe” (101). In his article titled “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Patrick Wolfe observes that when contests for land become contests of life, the settler-colonialist tendency he terms “the logic of elimination” is reinforced.⁴⁴ The removal of the imagined threat by killing the native without hesitation in Homes Abroad epitomizes the establishment of the “structure” of settler-colonial society in which the emigrants from Britain continue to be in a position of superiority without the anxiety of going native.⁴⁵ The violent colonial principle of removal, then, is inherent in the construction of the boundaries of a proper population. This episode underlines that “proportion” is not a simple matter of a numeric ratio between human labor and land but rather a complex social construct that emerges from the precarious imperial context of Britain.

To conclude the narrative on a positive note, the chapter serenely presents an unknowing affirmation of “the goodliness of the exchange from pauperism in Kent to plenty in Van Diemen's Land” (106). Nevertheless, the sensory and bodily descriptions of the colonial encounter leave a long-lasting impression. Martineau laboriously notes that the danger of settling in the colonies is “growing less every year” and makes a point of saying that even with all the inconveniences, the trouble of emigrating must be “less than living in England in hopeless poverty, or even than getting a toilsome subsistence there with the sight of hopeless poverty ever before one's eyes, and the groans or vicious mirth of pauperism echoing through the alleys of all the cities of England” (105, emphasis mine). The descriptive language she employs here highlights the “toilsome” sensory experience of poverty and starvation, having to “see” others’ suffering with one's eyes and hearing the echoing sounds of “groans” of pauperism, providing corporeal descriptions of the social problems caused by the “disproportionate labor.” The imagery of the “alleys” full of poor people, too, resonates with the somatic and affective experience of population excess, ostensibly serving the objective of political persuasion.

In Homes Abroad, the troubled process of emigration, including various forms of affective resistance described throughout the narrative, effectively revises Malthusian theory by radically questioning the calculability of population based solely on the proportion between labor supply and productivity of land. By the time Martineau outlines the national benefits of proportionate emigration in the concluding section of Homes Abroad, readers have already developed a conception of population that intrinsically involves the collective feelings of the people. And in the context of aggressive imperial expansion, the violent process of drawing the boundaries of “proper population” operates as the critical step in constructing the British idea of population.

I have emphasized the role of collective feeling in Martineau's narrative negotiation of the Malthusian principle of population by linking the pressure of population as experienced by the workers in A Manchester Strike to that of the emigrants in Homes Abroad. In A Manchester Strike, Martineau delineates the affective process through which the collective feeling of a population is constructed, emphasizing that people's felt experiences of “proportion” and “population” need to be taken into account when teaching the principles of political economy. And in Homes Abroad, Martineau undertakes an audacious endeavor to transfer the affective experience of the proportionate British population onto the foreign land in order to alleviate the domestic tension caused by disproportionate labor. These two tales included in her imperial educational project, Illustrations of Political Economy, reveal that feeling like a proper “population” entails a very complicated cultural manipulation beyond the mere propagation of the principles of political economy. The imperial deception of othering, via the eradication of Indigenous populations in the colonies, serves as a crucial mechanism for the establishment of enduring structures of dominance that support the sociological concept of population.

Martineau, a scholar who displayed both enthusiastic admiration and astute criticism toward Malthus, incorporates the collective felt experience of the population crisis to the precarious equation employed to calculate proportionate labor in the nineteenth century. By strategically deploying the affective power of sentimental fiction to illustrate the critical significance of collective feeling in managing the population crisis, Martineau's Illustrations offers us an unprecedentedly complex picture of the Victorian struggle to make sense of the increasingly important economic idea of population. Illustrations is a unique accomplishment both in the fields of literature and of political economy. Martineau's hybrid fiction effectively educates her readers on the basic economic principles of population as it generates a palpable understanding of what population implies for the laborers who share the lived experience of “disproportion.” Furthermore, she envisions a resolution to the population crisis by offering a settler-colonialist vision of “proportionate labor” and “proper population,” thereby suggesting that colonial expansion is a crucial political prerequisite for a national consensus on the concept of population to emerge. As the affective experiences of a population continue to be one of the most significant factors in the modern understanding of the ongoing population crisis, my analysis of Martineau's less acknowledged literary and political insight aspires to open up new and old ways of perceiving and feeling the world we inhabit today.