Brian Cooper. Family Fictions and Family Facts: Harriet Martineau, Adolphe Quetelet, and the Population Question in England, 1798-1859. London and New York: Routledge, 2007. ISBN: 0415150582. Price US$130.

Brian Cooper’s book, Family Fictions and Family Facts: Harriet Martineau, Adophe Quetelet, and the Population Question in England, 1798-1859, is an extremely ambitious examination of the intersection of the idea of family with issues of classification, aggregation, and scientific methodology in the first half of the nineteenth century. While Cooper’s book is firmly grounded in the history of economic thought (it is a part of the Routledge Studies in the History of Economics series), it is also heavily indebted to the interdisciplinary cultural and epistemological histories of Michel Foucault and Mary Poovey. Cooper identifies a series of tensions that animate the discourses of family, political economy, and population in the wake of Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population: real versus ideal, individual versus aggregate, and agency versus determinism. By using these tensions as his organizing lens, Cooper is able to construct an exceedingly fresh and valuable narrative of the Malthusian legacy, one that links the familial ideals of domestic realism with the philosophical, mathematical, and statistical abstractions of economic man, “l’homme moyen” or “average man,” and the 1851 census. While not as argumentatively ambitious as Catherine Gallagher’s recent revisionary history of Malthus in nineteenth-century Britain, The Body Economic: Life, Death, and Sensation in Political Economy and the Victorian Novel, Cooper’s book is as far-reaching in its generic and discursive scope, extending its inquiry from Petty’s political arithmetic to George Eliot’s “Janet’s Repentence,” and from Hannah More’s conduct books to popularizations of the 1851 Census. The first three chapters of Cooper’s book lay the groundwork for the readings and conclusions of the final four. In his first chapter Cooper lays out his three central lines of inquiry: he will examine attempts to define and classify the family, the moral and policy imperatives built into the problem of aggregation, and the generic differences between the kinds of text that engage with the population issue. Next, in his long second chapter, Cooper constructions a dense overview of the legal and discursive context of the late-eighteenth-century family. Beginning with an analysis of the 1753 Marriage Act, Cooper goes on to discuss eighteenth-century debates about virtue and the passions in Britain’s emergent commercial society and to link these debates to new gender roles for the middle and working classes. Cooper uses these discussions to demonstrate the way that the family became the crucial site for questions of the moral, economic, and political welfare of the social body by the turn of the century, even before Malthus’s Essay focalized the issue through population principle. Cooper then analyzes a range of texts—and genres of texts—that attempt to transform the “real” into the “ideal” through moral education and reform. Along with the language of class that emerged during this period, new representative types were developed which centered on self-regulation and a balance between sense and sensibility. While masculine and feminine ideals were increasingly organized through a separate spheres ideology that constructed them as complementary, both sexes needed to moderate their passions. By constructing ideal types and enjoining individuals to aspire to these types in their own lives, early nineteenth-century discourses sought to improve the social, economic, and political welfare of the nation. However, while the basic ideal of the self-regulated individual was common to these discourses, in other ways, these texts differed dramatically. Some texts, such as educational texts for the Irish, aimed their instruction directly at the poor whereas others were directed at the middle-class, such as Jane Marcet’s Conversations on Political Economy, with the idea that the working classes would learn through emulating their betters. While devotional texts focused on …