Title Peopling the world : representing human mobility from Milton to Malthus / Charlotte Sussman

Edition First edition Published Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2020]

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Description 1 online resource (281 pages) Contents A Race to Fill the Earth: Mobility and Fecundity in Paradise Lost -- The Afterlives of Political Arithmetic in Defoe and Swift -- The Veteran's Tale: War, Mobile Populations, and National Identity -- Remembering the Population: Goldsmith and Migration -- The Emptiness at The Heart of Midlothian: Nation, Narration, and Population -- "Islanded in the World": Cultural Memory and Human Mobility in The Last Man -- Prospects of the Future: Malthus, Shelley, and Freedom of Movement Summary "This book discusses human mobility from Milton to Malthus. Each chapter of focuses on a group of subjects vulnerable to coerced mobility: the landless poor (Chapter 1); the native Irish (Chapter 2); army veterans (Chapter 3); the rural poor displaced by enclosure (Chapter 4); the Scots (Chapter 5); humanity imagined under the pressure of pandemic (Chapter 6); and the poor again under the new Poor Laws of the 1830s (Chapter 7). The first two chapters provide complementary accounts of the intersection between population and mobility: the first focusing on legal and economic policy toward the poor in relation to Milton's Paradise Lost; the second on the emergent science of political arithmetic as critiqued by Swift in his writing about Ireland. The first focuses on people, the second on numbering. These two chapters, plus a third, make up the first conceptual half of the book. They look at the concern prevalent from the Restoration to the mid-eighteenth century, triggered by the seeming superfluity of British population, to find a way for persons thought useless to the state-the poor, the Irish, and army veterans-to become useful again, usually by deploying them to "vacant" colonial spaces. The next three chapters, centered on Goldsmith's The Deserted Village, Scott's The Heart of Midlothian, and Shelley's The Last Man, examine the shift in the second half of the eighteenth century to anxiety about depopulation and the effect of disease, murder, and dispossession on England's sense of its identity in relation to its empire. Finally, the book turns to the work of Thomas Malthus, positioning it as an epistemological watershed as it reconceptualized peopling as a problem of time rather than space-a problem of futurity rather than territory"-- Provided by publisher Analysis Daniel Defoe John Milton Jonathan Swift Mary Shelley Oliver Goldsmith Paradise Lost Sir Walter Scott The Heart of Midlothian The Last Man Thomas Malthus essay on the principle of population overpopulation useless population Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index Notes Print version record Subject English literature -- 18th century -- History and criticism Emigration and immigration in literature. Population in literature. LITERARY CRITICISM -- Modern -- 18th century . British colonies Emigration and immigration Emigration and immigration in literature English literature Population Population in literature Auswanderung. Einwanderung. Auswanderung Motiv. Bevölkerung Motiv. SUBJECT Great Britain -- Population -- History -- 18th century Great Britain -- Colonies -- History -- 18th century Great Britain -- Emigration and immigration -- History -- 18th century Subject Great Britain Genre/Form Criticism, interpretation, etc. History Form Electronic book ISBN 0812296893 9780812296891

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