Milton’s Paradise Lost and Malthus’s An Essay on the Principle of Population: A Neglected Intertextuality

Abstract

Abstract In An Essay on the Principle of Population, Malthus quotes from Milton’s Paradise Lost, but since the quotation is merely a single line, and because there is neither explanation of its context nor mention of the sourced author or work, it has rarely attracted much scholarly attention. However, as this quotation was included in the first edition and persisted to the sixth edition of An Essay on the Principle of Population, it seems to be of some import. In this paper, with this citation as a clue, we will examine the intertextuality between Paradise Lost and An Essay on the Principle of Population and show the possibility that the former provided not insignificant inspiration for the latter.