It is perhaps not surprising to find that nearly all nineteenth–century romantic critics of political economy should have honoured Malthus with the cream of their virulence and indignation. Ruskin, echoing and distilling Carlyle's reaction against ‘Paralytic Radicalism’ and the ‘Benthamee–Malthusian dismal science’, wrote that ‘In all the ranges of human thought I know none so melancholy as the speculations of political economists on the population question’. He had singled out political economy for attack because he believed that ‘nothing in history had ever been so disgraceful to human intellect as the acceptance among us of the common doctrines of political economy as a science’.

Like most of his early and mid–nineteenth–century romantic partners, Ruskin felt that ‘gloom and misanthropy have become the characteristics of the age in which we live’, and that the Malthusian ‘doctrine of despair’, which had ‘cast a slur upon the face of nature’, was largely to blame. In a letter of 1871, Ruskin put his finger on what he believed was the real nerve of his mental dejection; his words, it may be noted, closely resemble those of Darwin's book–writing Devil's Chaplain: ‘Of all things that oppress me, this sense of the evil working of nature herself – my disgust at her barbarity – clumsiness – darkness – bitter mocking of herself – is the most desolating’.