Grand Pursuit: A Story of Economic Genius

In attempting to answer the age-old question “Why?” the mild-mannered minister anticipated not only Darwin but Freud. Sex, he argued, was to blame. Whether from observing the wretched lives of his parishion-ers, the influence of natural scientists who were beginning to regard man as an animal, or the arrival of his seventh child, Malthus had concluded that the drive to reproduce trumped all other human instincts and abilities, including rationality, ingenuity, creativity, even religious belief.

From this single provocative premise, Malthus deduced the principle that human populations tended always and everywhere to grow faster than the food supply. His reasoning was deceptively simple: Picture a situation in which the supply of food is adequate to sustain a given population. That happy balance can’t last any more than could Adam and Eve’s tenure in paradise. Animal passion drives men and women to marry sooner and have bigger families. The food supply, meanwhile, is more or less fixed in all but the very long run. Result: the amount of grain and other staples that had just sufficed to keep everyone alive would no longer be enough. Inevitably, Malthus concluded, “the poor consequently must live much worse.”

In any economy where businesses compete for customers and workers for jobs, an expanding population meant more households contending for the food supply, and more workers competing for jobs. Competition would drive down wages while simultaneously pushing food prices higher. The average standard of living—the amount of food and other necessities available for each person—would fall.

At some point, grain would become so expensive and labor so cheap that the dynamic would reverse itself. As living standards declined, men and women would once again be forced to postpone marriage and have fewer children. A shrinking population would mean falling food prices as fewer households competed for the available food. Wages would rise as fewer workers competed for jobs. Eventually, as the food supply and population moved back into balance, living standards would creep back to their old level. That is, unless Nature’s “great army of destruction”

—war, disease, and famine—intervened to hurry the process, as happened, for example, in the fourteenth century, when the Black Plague wiped out millions, leaving behind a smaller population relative to the output of food.

Tragically, the new balance would prove no more durable than the original one. “No sooner is the laboring class comfortable again,” Malthus wrote sadly, “than the same retrograde and progressive movements with respect to happiness are repeated.”

Trying to raise the average standard of living is like Sisyphus trying to roll his rock to the top of the hill. The faster Sisyphus gets almost there, the sooner he triggers the reaction that sends the boulder tumbling down the slope again.

Attempts to flout the law of population were doomed. Workers who held out for above-market wages wouldn’t find jobs. Employers who paid their workers more than their competitors did would lose their customers as higher labor costs forced them to raise prices.

For Victorians, the most objectionable implication of Malthus’s law was that charity might actually increase the suffering it was intended to ease—a direct challenge to Christ’s injunction to “love thy neighbor as thyself.”

In fact, Malthus was extremely critical of the traditional English welfare system, which provided relief with few strings attached, for rewarding the idle at the expense of the industrious. Relief was proportional to family size, in effect encouraging early marriage and large families. Conservative and liberal taxpayers alike found Malthus’s argument so persuasive that Parliament passed, virtually without opposition, a new Poor Law in 1834 that effectively restricted public relief to those who agreed to become inmates of parish workhouses.

“Please, sir, I want some more.” As Oliver Twist discovers after making his famous plea, workhouses were essentially prisons where men and women were segregated, put to work at unpleasant tasks, and subjected to harsh discipline—all in return for a place to sleep and “three meals of thin gruel a day, with an onion twice a week, and half a roll on Sundays.”

The fare in most workhouses probably wasn’t as meager as the starvation diet Dickens described in his novel, but there is no doubt that these institutions topped the list of working-class grievances.

Like most reform-minded middle-class liberals, Dickens considered the new Poor Law morally repulsive and politically suicidal and the theory on which it was based a relic of a barbaric past. He had recently returned from America with its “thousands of millions of acres of land yet unsettled and uncleared” and where the inhabitants were in “the custom of hastily swallowing large quantities of animal food, three times a-day,”

and found the notion that abolishing the workhouse would cause the world to run out of food absurd.

Bent on striking a blow for the poor, Dickens began early in 1843 to write a tale about a rich miser’s change of heart, a tale that he liked to think of as a sledgehammer capable of “twenty times the force—twenty thousand times the force” of a political pamphlet.

A Christmas Carol, argues the economic historian James Henderson, is an attack on Malthus.

The novel is bursting with delicious smells and tastes. Instead of a rocky, barren, overpopulated island where food is scarce, the England of Dickens’s story is a vast Fortnum & Mason where the shelves are overflowing, the bins are bottomless, and the barrels never run dry. The Ghost of Christmas Past appears to Scrooge perched on a “kind of throne,” with heaps of “turkeys, geese, game, poultry, brawn, great joints of meat, sucking-pigs, long wreaths of sausages, mince-pies, plum-puddings, barrels of oysters, red-hot chestnuts, cherry-cheeked apples, juicy oranges, luscious pears, immense twelfth-cakes, and seething bowls of punch, that made the chamber dim with their delicious steam.” “Radiant” grocers, poulterers, and fruit and vegetable dealers invite Londoners into their shops to inspect luscious “pageants” of food and drink.

In an England characterized by New World abundance rather than Old World scarcity, the bony, barren, anorexic Ebenezer Scrooge is an anachronism. As Henderson observes, the businessman is “as oblivious to the new spirit of human sympathy as he is to the bounty with which he is surrounded.”

He is a diehard supporter of the treadmill and workhouse literally and figuratively. “They cost enough,” he insists, “and those who are badly off must go there.” When the Ghost of Christmas Past objects that “many can’t go there; and many would rather die,” Scrooge says coldly, “If they would rather die, they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”

Happily, Scrooge’s flinty nature turns out to be no more set in stone than the world’s food supply is fixed. When Scrooge learns that Tiny Tim is one of the “surplus” population, he recoils in horror at the implications of his old-fashioned Malthusian religion. “No, no,” he cries, begging the Spirit to spare the little boy. “What then?” the Spirit replies mockingly. “If he be like to die, he had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”

Scrooge repents, resolves to give his long-suffering clerk, Bob Cratchit, a raise, and sends him a prize turkey for Christmas. By accepting the more hopeful, less fatalistic view of Dickens’s generation in time to alter the course of future events, Scrooge refutes the grim Malthusian premise that “the blind and brutal past” is destined to keep repeating itself.

The Cratchits’ joyous Christmas dinner is Dickens’s direct riposte to Malthus, who uses a parable about “Nature’s mighty feast” to warn of the unintended consequences of well-meaning charity. A man with no means of support asks the guests to make room for him at the table. In the past, the diners would have turned him away. Beguiled by utopian French theories, they decide to ignore the fact that there is only enough food for the invited guests. They fail to foresee when they let the newcomer join them that more gatecrashers will arrive, the food will run out before everyone has been served, and the invited guests’ enjoyment of the meal will be “destroyed by the spectacle of misery and dependence.”

The Cratchits’ groaning board, wreathed with the family’s beaming faces, is the antithesis of Malthus’s tense, tightly rationed meal. In contrast to Nature’s grudging portions, there is Mrs. Cratchit’s pudding—“like a speckled cannon-ball, so hard and firm, blazing in half of half-a-quartern of ignited brandy, and bedecked with Christmas holly stuck into the top”—not large enough for seconds perhaps, but ample for her family. “Mrs. Cratchit said that now the weight was off her mind, she would confess she had had her doubts about the quantity of flour. Everybody had something to say about it, but nobody said or thought it was at all a small pudding for a large family. It would have been flat heresy to do so. Any Cratchit would have blushed to hint at such a thing.”

The Christmas spirit was catching. By the story’s end, Scrooge had even stopped starving himself. Instead of slurping his customary bowl of gruel in solitude, the new Scrooge surprises his nephew by showing up unannounced for Christmas dinner. Needless to say, his heir hastens to set a place for him at the table.

Dickens’s hope that A Christmas Carol would strike the public like a sledgehammer was fulfilled. Six thousand copies of the novel were sold between the publication date of December 19 and Christmas Eve, and the tale would stay in print for the rest of Dickens’s life—and ever since.

Dickens’s depiction of the poor earned him satirical labels such as “Mr. Sentiment,”

but the novelist never wavered in his conviction that there was a way to improve the lot of the poor without overturning existing society.

Dickens was too much a man of business to imagine that schemes for bettering social conditions could succeed unless they could be paid for. He was a “pure modernist” and “believer in Progress” rather than an opponent of the Industrial Revolution. Wildly successful while still in his twenties, he had gone too far on his own talent to doubt that human ingenuity was climbing into the driver’s seat. Having escaped poverty by making his way in the new mass-media industry, Dickens was impatient with conservatives such as Carlyle and socialists such as Mill who refused to admit that, as a society, “we have risen slowly, painfully, and with many a hard struggle out of all this social degradation and ignorance” and who “look back to all this blind and brutal past with an admiration they will not grant to the present.”

Dickens’s sense that English society was waking up, as if from a long nightmare, proved prescient. Within a year of the Chartist “uprising,” a new mood of tolerance and optimism was palpable. The Tory prime minister admitted privately that many of the Chartists’ grievances were justified.

Labor leaders rejected calls for class warfare and backed employers’ campaign to repeal import duties on grain and other foodstuffs. Liberal politicians responded to parliamentary commissions on child labor, industrial accidents, and other evils by introducing the Factory Acts of 1844, legislation regulating the hours of women and children.

Dickens never imagined that the world could get along without the calculating science of economics. Instead, he hoped to convert political economists as the Ghost of Christmas Future had converted Scrooge. He wanted them to stop treating poverty as a natural phenomenon, assuming that ideas and intentions were of no importance, or taking for granted that the interests of different classes were diametrically opposed. Dickens was especially eager for political economists to practice “mutual explanation, forbearance and consideration; something . . . not exactly stateable in figures.”

When he launched his popular weekly, Household Words, he did so with a plea to economists to humanize their discipline. As he wrote in his inaugural essay, “Political economy is a mere skeleton unless it has a little human covering, and filling out, a little human bloom upon it, and a little human warmth in it.”

Dickens was not alone. There were—and would be—men and women in London and all over the world who reached the same conclusion. Having overcome formidable obstacles, they too saw man as a creature of circumstance. They too realized that the material conditions of life for the “nine parts in ten of the whole race of mankind” were no longer immutable, predetermined by the “blind and brutal past,” and utterly beyond human control or influence. Convinced that economic circumstances were open to human intervention yet skeptical of utopian schemes and “artificial societies” imposed by radical elites, they devoted themselves to fashioning an “engine of analysis”

(or, as a later economist put it, an “apparatus of the mind”)

that they could use to understand how the modern world worked and how humanity’s material condition—on which its moral, emotional, intellectual, and creative condition depended—could be improved.

Chapter I Perfectly New: Engels and Marx in the Age of Miracles (#ulink_beb9033a-f443-535b-9495-94b0f72bc8b2)

The exact point is that it has not gone on a long time. [It is] perfectly new. . . .

Our system though curious and peculiar may be worked safely . . . if we wish to work it, we must study it.

—Walter Bagehot, Lombard Street

“See to it that the material you’ve collected is soon launched into the world,” the twenty-three-year-old Friedrich Engels wrote to his corevolutionist, Karl Marx. “It’s high time. Down to work, then, and quickly into print!”

In October 1844, continental Europe was a smoldering volcano threatening to erupt. Marx, the son-in-law of a Prussian nobleman and editor of a radical philosophy journal, was in Paris, where he was supposed to be writing an economic treatise to prove with mathematical certainty that revolution must come. Engels, the scion of prosperous Rhenish textile merchants, was at his family’s estate, up to his eyebrows in English newspapers and books. He was drafting a “fine bill of indictment” against the class to which he and Marx belonged.

His only anxiety was that the revolution would arrive before the galleys.

A romantic rebel with literary aspirations, Engels was already an “embryonic revolutionary” and “enthusiastic communist” when he met Marx for the first time two years earlier. Having spent his adolescence freeing himself from his family’s strict Calvinism, the slender, fair, severely nearsighted Royal Prussian artillerist had trained his sights on the twin tyrannies of God and Mammon. Convinced that private property was the root of all evil and that a social revolution was the only way to establish a just society, Engels had yearned to live the “true” life of a philosopher. To his infinite regret, he was predestined for the family trade. “I am not a Doctor,” he had corrected the wealthy publisher of a radical newspaper who mistook him for a scholar, adding that he could “never become one. I am only a businessman.”

Engels Senior, a fervid Evangelical who clashed frequently with his freethinking son, wouldn’t have it any other way. As a proprietor, he was quite progressive. He supported free trade, adopted the latest British spinning equipment in his factory in the Wuppertal, and had recently opened a second plant in Manchester, the Silicon Valley of the industrial revolution. But as a father he could not stomach the notion of his eldest son and heir as a professional agitator and freelance journalist. When the global cotton trade collapsed in the spring of 1842, followed by the Chartist strikes, he insisted that the young Engels report to work at Ermen & Engels in Manchester as soon his compulsory military service was over.

Bowing to filial duty hardly meant the death of Engels’s dream of becoming the scourge of authority in all forms. Manchester was notorious for the militancy of its factory hands. Convinced that the industrial strife was a prelude to wider insurrection, Engels had been only too delighted to go where the action was and to use the opportunity to advance his writing career.

En route to England in November, he had stopped in Cologne, where he visited the grubby offices of the prodemocracy newspaper Rheinische Zeitung, to which he had been contributing occasional articles under the byline X. The new editor was a brusque, cigar-smoking, exceedingly myopic philosopher from Trier who treated him rudely. Engels had taken no offense and had been rewarded with an assignment to report on the prospects for revolution in England.

When Engels arrived in Manchester, the general strike had petered out and the troops had returned to their London barracks, but there were unemployed men hanging around street corners, and many of the mills were still idle. Despite his conviction that the factory owners would rather see their employees starve than pay a living wage, Engels could not help noticing that the English factory worker ate a great deal better than his counterpart in Germany. While a worker at his family’s textile mill in Barmen dined almost exclusively on bread and potatoes, “Here he eats beef every day and gets a more nourishing joint for his money than the richest man in Germany. He drinks tea twice a day and still has enough money left over to be able to drink a glass of porter at midday and brandy and water in the evening.”

To be sure, unemployed cotton workers had had to turn to the Poor Law and private soup kitchens to avoid “absolute starvation,” and Edwin Chadwick’s just-published Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain revealed that the average male life span in Manchester was seventeen years, half that of nearby rural villages, and that just one in two babies survived past age five. Chadwick’s graphic descriptions of streets that served as sewers, cottages damp with mold, rotting food, and rampant drunkenness demonstrated that British workers had ample grounds for resentment.

But while Carlyle, the only Englishman Engels admired, warned of working-class revolt, Engels found that most middle-class Englishmen considered the possibility remote and looked to the future with “remarkable calm and confidence.”

Once settled in his new home, Engels resolved the conflict between his family’s demands and his revolutionary ambitions in a characteristically Victorian fashion. He lived a double life. At the office and among his fellow capitalists, he resembled the “sprightly, good humored, pleasant” Frank Cheeryble, the “nephew of the firm” in Dickens’s Nicholas Nickleby who “was coming to take a share in the business here” after “superintending it in Germany for four years.”