The Philosophical Breakfast Club (17 page)

Clement agreed to give over his workshop to the building of Babbage’s machine. His workshop was four miles away from Babbage’s house on Devonshire Street, on the other side of the Thames. Babbage labored in close collaboration with Clement: designing and sketching the machine and its parts, giving the drawings to Clement, who more precisely drafted the plans. Babbage consulted with Clement on how the parts of the machine should be designed, and the two of them devised new tools that could be used in producing these parts. In the beginning their collaboration was fruitful and mutually beneficial. Later it would be a different story.

Babbage was hard at work, his huge calculating engine starting to take shape. Whewell wrote him, evoking Mary Shelley’s recent novel
Frankenstein
, “I hope your new machine is growing strong and active like a young giant—I suppose it must begin to feel its power about this time and to think about moving the whole solar system.”
³⁵
Babbage himself felt “strong and active,” much like a Dr. Frankenstein creating something wholly new and heretofore unimaginable.
³⁶

I
N THE
1820
S AND EARLY
1830s, R
ICHARD
J
ONES OFTEN FOUND
himself contemplating suicide. In numerous letters during this period, he told Whewell—the only one privy to these dark thoughts—that he was thinking of “giving it all up.” After receiving a particularly grim missive, Whewell rushed off to see his friend, exhorting him to “leave poison to rats and arsenic to mineralogists!”
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Whewell was mystified by his friend’s despair. Jones had married in January 1823, when he was thirty-two, and settled down with his wife Charlotte (“Charley”) Attree in a new parish, Brasted, in Kent, Sussex, in the southeast of England. Brasted was a small town with one winding road flanked by stately eighteenth-century homes. Jones had been appointed the town’s vicar, and he enjoyed a higher social status and higher salary than he had as the curate in Ferring: he earned £100 a year plus fees for performing funeral services.
²
The new couple lived in a charming parsonage, which Jones surrounded with carefully tended rose bushes. Whewell had thought that Jones would now be content. He could not help occasionally venting his frustration at Jones’s constant complaints. “I hope someday to have an opportunity of convincing you that I have ten times as much reason to be angry and weary and dissatisfied with my life as you have,” Whewell fumed at one point.
³
To him, at times, the peaceful existence of a country priest with a wife and a parsonage and garden—and no students to tutor, no lectures to give, no college administrative duties—seemed like an earthly paradise.

Whewell’s friend Hugh James Rose, who was vicar of the nearby parish of Horsham and knew the Attrees, had warned of the dangers facing Jones. Speaking of the intended bride, Rose confided to Whewell that “the woman is old ugly stupid vulgar, poor, in bad health and beset by brothers and sisters who are really too horrible.”
⁴
But throughout the many years of their marriage, Jones never had a harsh word to say about
Charley, or her family. As Rose had predicted, she was often ill, and Jones nursed her devotedly, even as he was suffering from serious physical ailments himself. He took her to Bath for the waters and to Brighton for a round of “galvanising,” in which the current from a voltaic battery was applied to afflicted parts of the body—a much-talked-about cure in the first half of the nineteenth century. (Jones tried it as well, declaring it “a most severe process.”)
⁵

Perhaps today we would diagnose Jones as suffering from chronic depression, and treat him with psycho-pharmaceuticals. But Whewell had another cure in mind. A firm believer in the power of hard work to distract the mind from its demons, Whewell encouraged Jones to complete a project they had been planning since the earliest days of the Philosophical Breakfast Club meetings, one they both felt to be of the utmost importance—not only for Jones’s mental health, but for the well-being of the nation. Jones would be responsible for turning the discipline of economics into an inductive, Baconian science.

E
CONOMICS, OR
“political economy,” as it was then called (in contrast with a family’s “domestic economy”), was fast becoming all the rage. Nearly everyone, it seemed, was reading and talking about it. Jane Marcet, who had achieved popular success with her
Conversations on Chemistry
, turned to economics in 1816. Her
Conversations on Political Economy
, which presented economic theory in a format designed for the edification of women and children, went through sixteen editions. Journals and newspapers were filled with articles on economic topics such as taxes on imported corn, proposed solutions to the “pauper problem,” and descriptions of cavernous, newly mechanized factories. By 1822, Maria Edgeworth could write to a friend back in Ireland that, in England, “It has now become high fashion with blue ladies [i.e., bluestockings, or intellectual women] to talk Political Economy, and make a great jabbering on the subject.… [F]ine ladies require that their daughters’ governesses should teach them Political Economy.”
⁶

Like everyone else in those days, the members of the Philosophical Breakfast Club had ardently discussed the hot topics in political economy while at Cambridge.
⁷
By the time of their meetings, Jones had decided to devote to the subject whatever hours he could eke out from his probable future life as a clergyman. After graduating, all four men continued
to follow the progress of this discipline—especially Jones and Whewell, whose early letters to each other are filled with economic discussions.

This widespread interest in political economy was fueled by the feeling that economic problems were reaching a boiling point in the nation. Looking across the English Channel, the British saw the French Revolution and its bloody aftermath as a grim reminder of what could come of a laboring class pushed to the brink. And those on the lowest rung of the economic ladder in Britain were being pushed hard. In the final third of the eighteenth century, a large proportion of the British population lived in grinding poverty. Many families barely survived on a monotonous diet of stale bread, freezing in shacks or cellars, having nothing to look forward to but an even more pinching old age. Life was cheap in the countryside, where most people lived; violence was accepted and even enjoyed: cockfights, public whippings and hangings, and the occasional local riot added sparks of excitement to the dull daily routine. While on a visit to England in 1769, Benjamin Franklin exclaimed in disbelief, “I have seen, within a year, riots in the country, about corn; riots about elections; riots about workhouses; riots of colliers; riots of weavers; riots of coal-heavers; riots of sawyers; riots of Wilkesites; riots of government chairmen; riots of smugglers, in which custom house officers and excise-men have been murdered, the King’s armed vessels and troops fired at!”
⁸
These frequent local riots continued into the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Many in the upper classes still feared that a general riot of the masses could not be far behind.

By 1800 life was getting better for some. A growing middle class—shopkeepers, craftsmen, professionals such as physicians and clergymen, and manufacturers—were able to feed their families, and even had money left over for such luxuries as tea, cutlery, and porcelain crockery. But life was getting harder for farm laborers, who still made up a majority of the lower classes. The increased application of the Enclosure Laws had closed off open fields and common land in rural areas—land people had previously been free to use for grazing animals, growing food, collecting firewood, and hunting. This land was now privately owned, off limits to the poor who had depended on it to supplement their meager earnings. Making matters worse, fewer farm laborers were given live-in situations, reducing them to day laborers paid only when they were needed to work the land. A series of bad harvests meant that there was not as much work; farm laborers went long periods of time between jobs. The dearth also
led to the skyrocketing of the price of wheat: from 45 shillings a quarter in 1789, to 84 shillings a quarter in 1800, and averaging 102 shillings between 1810 and 1814. Large landowners grew richer than ever, while farm laborers faced the constant specter of starvation.
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The situation was exacerbated by an acceleration of population growth in the last part of the eighteenth century. Families had more mouths to feed and less money to spend on food, which was growing ever more expensive. Most laborers could survive only because of the welfare system of the time, known as the poor laws, which had been in effect since the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, two hundred years before.

From Eizabeth’s time onward, landowners had paid taxes called “rates” to their local parishes. The money raised in this way was given to the poor members of the parish—both to those out of work and to those whose labor did not pay enough to live on. It was not a perfect solution, but it did alleviate the worst cases of poverty while not unduly harming the wealthier landowners.

Suddenly, however, the number of poor was growing by leaps and bounds, and so was the amount of money needed to take care of them: from £2 million in 1786 to £4.2 million in 1803 and £6 million in 1815.
¹⁰
Poor rates were going up, and landowners were complaining.

The problem was real enough, but it attained the status of a “crisis” that needed solving because of the writings of a young clergyman from Surrey. Thomas Robert Malthus (always called Robert by his friends and family) was the sixth of seven children of Daniel and Henrietta Malthus. Daniel, known as a liberal and eccentric landowner, was a friend of the Scottish thinker David Hume, and had gone on botanizing trips with the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Robert would later recall evenings at home with the likes of Hume, the English radical William Godwin, and other philosophers and political writers. After graduating from Jesus College, Cambridge, as ninth wrangler, and being ordained as an Anglican clergyman, Robert returned home and commuted from there to his nearby parish.

Until Daniel Malthus died in 1800, he and his son—both feisty intellectuals—often argued about the issues of the day. One of those disputes led to the publication, in 1798, of the book that made Robert Malthus famous:
An Essay on the Principle of Population, as It Affects the Future Improvement of Society, with Remarks on the Speculations of Mr. Godwin, M. Condorcet, and Other Writers
. William Godwin in England and the Marquis
de Condorcet across the Channel in France had agreed that misery and vice were the result of bad government. Both men believed that under better civil conditions the human race could continually perfect itself and its societies until everyone enjoyed long, healthy, happy, and free lives. Thus political radicalism could help bring about a new age for mankind. (Condorcet’s optimism for the future was not borne out in his own case: once a leading light of the French Enlightenment, and a liberal supporter of the French Revolution, he died in prison under mysterious circumstances after being arrested for “treason,” a charge manufactured by the radical Jacobins when Condorcet argued against the constitution they had prepared.)

The young Malthus dissented from such optimistic expectations. He deemed it impossible to perfect men’s lives, for a law no less binding than Newton’s law of universal gravitation ordained that the size of the population would always exceed the available food supply. Expressing this with mathematical-sounding precision, Malthus claimed that while population always increases geometrically, by doubling (1, 2, 4, 8, 16, etc.), food supply always grows only arithmetically, by simple addition (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, etc.). Thus it is inevitable that there will be more people than food to nourish them, resulting in misery for the masses—enmeshed as they were in a continuous “struggle for existence,” a notion that would later prove inspiring to Charles Darwin as he worked on his theory of evolution.

This dire situation was not caused by bad government, and could not be solved by political reform. It was due to both nature and human nature, neither of which could be altered. On the one hand, Malthus argued, there is a limit to how much food can be grown on a given amount of fertile land. On the other, mankind has an inescapable need to eat, and an unavoidable desire for sex, a desire leading to procreation. Limiting family size by the use of condoms or other artificial means was not an option in those days—at least not in the opinion of a clergyman like Malthus. Even decades later, a seventeen-year-old John Stuart Mill (the future philosopher and economist) would be arrested in a London park on obscenity charges for distributing pamphlets discussing birth control. As late as 1920 the Church of England’s annual Lambeth Conference condemned all “unnatural means of the avoidance of conception” (married Anglicans were finally given theological permission to use condoms a decade after that). There was always sexual abstinence within marriage, but Malthus did not have high hopes that people—especially in the lower
classes—would submit themselves to it. Population would therefore inevitably increase beyond the amount of food needed to sustain it, and the poorest people would watch their children starve.

One thing that would not help the poor, the Reverend Malthus knew, was to give them more food or money. This would only give them the resources to have more children, or keep alive those already born, perpetuating the evil consequences of pauperism by increasing the population.
¹¹

Malthus’s
Essay
focused attention sharply on the pauper problem. He had declared the situation inevitable, and claimed that the old solution was part of the problem. People began to wonder what else could be done.

They began to seek answers from the discipline of political economy, which seemed to hold the key to putting the nation’s financial affairs in order, thereby solving the problem of poverty. Malthus himself was named the first Professor of Political Economy in England, in 1806 (at the East India Company College at Haileybury, where generations of imperial diplomats and merchants were trained, exporting their Malthusian views to the colonies). But since most of the later writers on economics accepted Malthus’s population principle, their prescriptions did not hold out too much promise of a better life, especially for the poor. As that ever-cranky Thomas Carlyle would later put it, the science of political economy was “dreary, stolid, dismal, and without hope for this world or the next”; it was, indeed, a “dismal science.”
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