The publication, in 1798, of T. R. Malthus’s An essay on the principle of population, marked a turning point in contemporary attitudes to the English poor laws. Malthus’s Essay condemned the institutional framework established by the 1601 Act for the Relief of the Poor for generating unsustainable population growth. The apparent failure of the poor laws to remove the poor’s distress was not, Malthus claimed, due to fraud or mismanagement, as other critics of the system had argued, but was an intrinsic feature of their design and operation. The fundamental weakness of the poor laws – especially in the wake of the Speenhamland decision of 1795 to vary able-bodied relief according to family size and bread prices – was their tendency to ‘increase population without increasing the food for its support’ by enabling poor men to ‘marry with little or no prospect of being able to support a family in independence.’ Malthus argued that the ‘prospect of parish provision’ was so powerful a stimulus to marriage that population would inevitably and inexorably outpace the means of subsistence, thereby depressing not just household-level, but also aggregate-level, living standards. Welfare transfer payments reinforced the ‘want of frugality observable among the poor’. For Malthus, the poor were a class of people who stood in stark contrast to ‘petty tradesmen and small farmers’ because the poor ‘seldom think of the future’ and lacked ‘both the power and the will to save’.

Malthus’s claims concerning the labouring poor’s susceptibility to improvident marriages and fertility-driven welfare-dependency resonated powerfully with parliamentarians and political economists in the thirty years or so prior to the passage of the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act. Historians have disagreed over how far the ‘new’ poor law should be seen as a wholly Malthusian measure. But there can be little doubt that the Poor Law Commissioners agreed with Malthus’s first Essay in regarding the poor as powerless to resist post-Speenhamland incentives to marry and multiply. As the authors of the Report put it, under the existing system the income of a single man ‘does not exceed a bare subsistence; but he only has to marry, and it increases. Even then it is unequal to the support of a family; but it rises on the birth of every child.