Grand Pursuit

by Sylvia Nasar

But Joseph Chamberlain with gloom and seriousness, with his absence of any gallantry or faculty for saying pretty nothings, the simple way in which he assumes, almost asserts, that you stand on a level far beneath him and that all that concerns you is trivial; that you yourself are without importance in the world except in so far as you might be related to him; this sort of courtship (if it is to be called courtship) fascinates, at least, my imagination.49

  Beatrice half expected Chamberlain to declare himself before the end of the London season, but no offer of marriage was forthcoming. Disappointed, Beatrice returned to Standish, where she “dreamt of future achievement or perchance of—love.”50 In September, Chamberlain’s sister, Clara, invited her to visit Chamberlain’s London house. Again Beatrice assumed that Chamberlain would propose. “Coming from such honest surroundings he surely must be straight in intention,” she told herself.51 Again, he did not, even though his intentions had become a topic of discussion within the Potter family. Beatrice tried to lower her own and her sisters’ expectations: “If, as Miss Chamberlain says, the Right Honorable gentleman takes ‘a very conventional view of women,’ I may be saved all temptation by my unconventionality. I certainly shall not hide it.”52

  • • •

  In October, while Beatrice was at Standish obsessing over Chamberlain, the Liberal Pall Mall Gazette excerpted a first-person pamphlet about London’s East End by a Congregational minister.53 The series exposed deplorable housing conditions in gruesome detail that scandalized and galvanized the middle classes. Like Henry Mayhew’s eyewitness accounts of poverty in the 1840s and 1850s, “The Bitter Cry of Outcast London” chronicled crowding, homelessness, low wages, disease, dirt, and starvation. But as Gertrude Himmelfarb points out, its shock value depended even more on its hints of promiscuity, prostitution, and incest:

  Immorality is but the natural outcome of conditions like these. . . . Ask if the men and women living together in these rookeries are married, and your simplicity will cause a smile. Nobody knows. Nobody cares. . . . Incest is common; and no form of vice and sensuality causes surprise or attracts attention.54

  The immediate effect of the sensational expose was to goad Lord Salisbury, the prime minister, and Joseph Chamberlain into a debate over the cause of the crisis and the government’s response. The Tory leader and major landowner in the East End blamed London’s infrastructure boom for overcrowding, while Chamberlain placed the blame on urban property owners, whom he wanted to tax to pay for worker housing. Significantly, both the Tory and the Radical assumed that the responsibility for the housing crisis belonged to the government.

  Beatrice dismissed the Pall Mall series as “shallow and sensational” and joined Spencer in regretting its political impact.55 She recognized, however, that its first-person testimony and personal observations accounted for the extraordinary reception. She had, as she reminded herself, been led into tenements not by the spirit of charity but by the spirit of inquiry. The stupendous reaction to “The Bitter Cry”—and Spencer’s hope that someone who shared his views would produce an effective rebuttal—made her eager to test her own powers of social diagnosis.

  Beatrice decided to begin on relatively familiar ground by visiting her mother’s poor relations in Bacup, in the heart of the cotton country. These included her beloved Dada, who had married the Potters’ butler. It is a measure of the independence Beatrice enjoyed that she could undertake such a project. To avoid embarrassing her family and rendering her interviewees speechless, she went to Lancashire not as one of the “grand Potters” but merely as “Miss Jones.” After a week, she wrote to her father, “Certainly the way to see industrial life is to live amongst the workers.”56

  She found what she had prepared herself to find: “Mere philanthropists are apt to overlook the existence of an independent working class and when they talk sentimentally of ‘the people’ they mean really the ‘ne’er do weels.’ ”57 She decided to write a piece about the independent poor. When she saw Spencer at Christmas, he urged her to publish her Bacup experiences. Actual observation of the “working man in his normal state” was the best antidote to “the pernicious tendency of political activity” on the part of Tories as well as Liberals toward higher taxes and more government provision.58 Spencer promised to talk to the editor of the magazine The Nineteenth Century. Naturally, Beatrice, was extremely gratified, but she was also secretly amused that “the very embodiment of the ‘pernicious tendency’ ” had not only captured his protégé’s heart but was also about to invade the Potter family circle.59

  Beatrice had invited Chamberlain and his two children to Standish at the New Year. She could see no way to resolve her divided feelings without a face-to-face meeting and she was sure that he must feel the same way: “My tortured state cannot long endure,” she wrote in her diary. “The ‘to be or not to be’ will soon be settled.”60 Instead, the visit proved horribly awkward. The more Beatrice resisted Chamberlain’s political views, the more forcefully he reiterated them, leading him to complain after one heated match that he felt as if he had been giving a speech. “I felt his curious scrutinizing eyes noting each movement as if he were anxious to ascertain whether I yielded to his absolute supremacy,” Beatrice noted. When Chamberlain told her that he merely desired “intelligent sympathy” from women, she snidely accused him in her mind of really wanting “intelligent servility.” Once again, he left without proposing.61

  • • •

  “If you believe in Herbert Spencer, you won’t believe in me,” Chamberlain had flung at Beatrice during their last exchange.62 If he hoped to convert her, he was mistaken.

  When Beatrice was a girl, her father used to tease Spencer for his habit of “walking against the tide of churchgoers” in the village near the Potter estate. “Won’t work, my dear Spencer, won’t work,” Richard Potter would murmur.63 But for two decades or more, Spencer had an entire generation of thinking men and women following his lead. His Social Statics, published within three years of the revolutions of 1848 throughout Europe, had celebrated the triumph of new economic and political freedoms over aristocratic privilege and made minimal government and maximum liberty the creed of middle-class progressives. Alfred Marshall imbibed more evolutionary theory from Spencer than from Darwin. Karl Marx sent Spencer a signed copy of the second edition of Das Kapital in the hopes that the philosopher’s endorsement would boost its sales.64

  By the early 1880s, however, Spencer was again walking against the tide. His latest book, The Man Versus the State, was a sweeping indictment of the steady growth of government regulation and taxation:

  Dictatorial measures, rapidly multiplied, have tended continually to narrow the liberties of individuals; and have done this in a double way. Regulations have been made in yearly-growing numbers, restraining the citizen in directions where his actions were previously unchecked, and compelling actions which previously he might perform or not as he liked; and at the same time heavier public burdens, chiefly local, have further restricted his freedom, by lessening that portion of his earnings which he can spend as he pleases, and augmenting the portion taken from him to be spent as public agents please.65

  His brief for laissez-faire struck the reading public as a last-ditch defense of an outmoded, reactionary, and increasingly irrelevant doctrine. As Himmelfarb explains, not only were most thinking Victorians moving away from, or at least questioning, laissez-faire, but many now regretted that they had ever embraced it. She cites Arnold Toynbee, the Oxford economic historian, who apologized to a working-class audience: “We—the middle classes, I mean not merely the very rich—we have neglected you; instead of justice we have offered you charity.”66

  When Spencer’s book appeared in 1884, he and Beatrice were closer than ever, spending several hours a day together. “I understand the working of Herbert Spencer’s reason; but I do not understand the reason of Mr. Chamberlain’s passion,” she admitted.67 She sent her signed copy of The Man Versus the State to the mistress of Girton College at Cambridge with a no
te that shows that she remained the most ardent of Spencer’s disciples. Referring to relief for the jobless, public schools, safety regulations, and other instances of large-scale “state intervention,” she wrote, “I object to these gigantic experiments . . . which flavor of inadequately—thought-out theories—the most dangerous of all social poisons . . . the crude prescriptions of social quacks.”68

  Yet, she was ambivalent. Chamberlain had forced her to recognize that “social questions are the vital questions of today. They take the place of religion.”69 So while she was not prepared to embrace the new “time spirit” overnight, she was not ready to dismiss it out of hand, much less give up its virile and forceful proponent.70

  When Chamberlain’s sister invited her to visit Highbury, his massive new mansion in Birmingham, Beatrice went at once, assuming that the invitation originated with her chosen lover. But as soon as she arrived she was struck by the incompatibility of their tastes. She found nothing to praise about the “elaborately built red-brick house with numberless bow windows” and could barely repress a shudder when confronted with its vulgar interior of “elaborately-carved marble arches, its satin paper, rich hangings and choice watercolors . . . forlornly grand. No books, no work, no music, not even a harmless antimacassar, to relieve the oppressive richness of the satin-covered furniture.”

  On Beatrice’s first day there, John Bright, an elder statesman of the Liberal Party, regaled her with reminiscences of her mother’s brilliance as “girl-hostess” to the teetotalers and Anti–Corn Law League enthusiasts who visited the Heyworth house forty years earlier, recalling Laurencina’s political courage during the anti–Corn Law campaign. The old man’s expression of admiration for her mother’s political faculty and activism made Chamberlain’s insistence that the women in his house have no independent opinions seem even more despotic. But Chamberlain’s egotism attracted Beatrice. That evening at the Birmingham Town Hall, she watched him seduce a crowd of thousands and dominate it completely. Beatrice mocked the constituency as uneducated and unquestioning, hypnotized by Chamberlain’s passionate speaking and not his ideas, but seeing “the submission of the whole town to his autocratic rule,” she admitted that her own surrender was inevitable. Chamberlain would rule the same way at home and even her own feelings would betray her. (“When feeling becomes strong, as it would do with me in marriage, it would mean the absolute subordination of the reason to it.”) Even knowing that Chamberlain would make her miserable, Beatrice was caught. “His personality absorbs all my thought,” she wrote in her diary.

  The next morning, Chamberlain made a great point of taking Beatrice on a tour of his vast new “orchid house.” Beatrice declared that the only flowers she loved were wildflowers, and feigned surprise when Chamberlain appeared annoyed. That evening, Beatrice thought she detected in his looks and manner an “intense desire that I should think and feel like him” and “jealousy of other influences.” She took this to mean that his “susceptibility” to her was growing.71

  • • •

  In January 1885, Chamberlain was launching the most radical and flamboyant campaign of his career. He enraged his fellow Liberals by warning his working-class constituents that the franchise wouldn’t lead to real democracy unless they organized themselves politically. He scandalized Conservatives by ratcheting up the rhetoric of class warfare with the famous phrase “I ask what ransom property will pay for the security which it enjoys?”72 Having administered Birmingham on the bold principle of “high rates and a healthy city,” Chamberlain took advantage of his cabinet position to demand universal male suffrage, free secular education, and “three acres and a cow” for those who preferred individual production on the land to work for wages in the mine or the factory. These were to be paid for by higher taxes on land, profits, and inheritances. Once again Beatrice went to Birmingham and sat in the gallery while he delivered a fiery peroration, and the next day, she again experienced the humiliation of rejection. He did not propose.

  Beatrice’s obsessive, conflicted passion continued to torment her. She despised herself for being infatuated with a domineering man, but also for failing to conquer him. She had dared to hope for a life combining love and intellectual achievement. She had, at different times, been ready to sacrifice one for the sake of the other. Now it seemed to her that she had been deluded about her own potential from the start. “I see clearly that my intellectual faculty is only mirage, that I have no special mission” and “I have loved and lost; but possibly by my own willful mishandling, possibly also for my own happiness; but still lost.”73

  In her dejected state, she marveled that she had ever aspired to win an extraordinary man like Chamberlain and tortured herself with what might have been: “If I had from the first believed in that purpose, if the influence which formed me and the natural tendency of my character, if they had been different, I might have been his helpmate. It would not have been a happy life; it might have been a noble one.”74 On the first of August, she made her will: “In case of my death I should wish that all these diary-books, after being read (if he shall care to) by Father, should be sent to Carrie Darling [a friend]. Beatrice Potter.”75

  Somehow, she recovered from the blow. By the general election in early November 1885, suicide no longer dominated her thoughts, and she could feel a bit of her energy returning. As she watched her father set off for the polls to cast his vote, she was once again plotting her career as social investigator. That is when fate landed her another blow that threatened to bring independent action “to a sudden and disastrous end.”76 Richard Potter was brought back to Standish from the polls, having suffered a devastating paralytic stroke that did not, however, kill him.

  As always, Beatrice poured her despair into her diary. “Companionizing a failing mind—a life without physical or mental activity—no work. Good God, how awful.”77 On New Year’s Day, she drafted another will, begging the reader to destroy her diary after her death. “If Death comes it will be welcome,” she wrote bitterly. “The position of an unmarried daughter at home is an unhappy one even for a strong woman: it is an impossible one for a weak one.”78

  Now, her old obsession with how she was to live, what purpose she would achieve, and whom she would love seemed like the purest hubris. “I am never at peace with myself now,” she wrote in early February 1886. “The whole of my past life looks like an irretrievable blunder, the last two years like a nightmare! . . . When will pain cease?”79

  • • •

  The answer came a few days later in the form of a mighty roar that seemed to come from society’s hidden depths. By noon on Monday, February 8, a crowd of ten thousand had braved fog and frost to assemble in Trafalgar Square. Some 2,500 police ringed the square’s perimeter. They estimated that two-thirds of the crowd consisted of unemployed workmen, the rest radicals of every conceivable stripe. A Socialist speaker, chased off the base of Admiral Nelson’s statue earlier that morning, clambered back up unhindered by the authorities. He waved a red flag defiantly and fired up the crowd with denunciations of “the authors of the present distress in England.”80 On behalf of his listeners, he demanded that Parliament provide public works jobs for “the tens of thousands of deserving men who were out of work through no fault of their own.”81 The audience cheered and swelled throughout the afternoon until it had grown fivefold.

  The rally ended peaceably, but then the demonstrators began pouring into the main streets of the West End—Oxford Street, St. James Street, the Pall Mall—“cursing the authorities, attacking shops, sacking saloons, getting drunk, and smashing windows.” The police were not only caught off guard but grossly outnumbered. For three hours or more, a “hooting howling mob” ruled the West End. Hundreds of shops were looted, anyone who looked like a foreigner was beaten, a Lord Limerick was pinned to the railings of his club, and carriages in Hyde Park were overturned and robbed. In addition, all street traffic in central London came to a standstill, Charing Cross Station was completely paralyzed, and by nightfall, St. Ja
mes Street and Piccadilly were rivers of broken glass in which bits of jewelry, boots, clothing, and bottles bobbed.82

  The riot sent a shudder of fear through London’s wealthy West End. Though not a single life was lost in the riot and only a dozen rioters were arrested, most store owners complied with a police warning to keep their shops shuttered on Tuesday. A New York Times reporter derided the police’s lack of preparedness—by Wednesday they were in a position to stop further riots should they occur, “what the police in Boston or New York would have promptly done—Monday afternoon”—sympathetically noting that this was the worst rioting London had seen since the infamous anti-Catholic riots of 1780.83 Londoners agreed that there had not been looting on such a scale since Victoria took the throne nearly fifty years before, just after the first Reform Act passed.84 The queen pronounced the riot “monstrous.”85

  The queen’s assertion that the riot constituted “a momentary triumph for socialism” was almost certainly untrue.86 But the episode did stimulate a good deal of activism and calls for action. Worried and conscience-stricken Londoners poured £79,000 into the Lord Mayor’s relief fund for the unemployed and demanded that the money be dispensed. Beatrice’s cousin Maggie Harkness began to plot a novel that she planned to call Out of Work.87 Joseph Chamberlain, now a member of Prime Minister William Gladstone’s new cabinet, set off a heated controversy by floating a public works scheme for the East End. Beatrice, exiled to the Potters’ country estate and responsible not only for her father’s care but also for a troubled younger sister and her father’s equally troubled business affairs, was jolted out of her depression long enough to fire off a letter to the editor of the Liberal Pall Mall Gazette challenging the prevailing view of the causes and likely remedies for the crisis.

  Beatrice braced herself for polite rejection. A letter from the journal’s editor arrived by return post—too soon, she was sure, to contain any other message. But when she tore it open, she found a request for permission to publish “A Lady’s View of the Unemployed” as an article under her byline. Beatrice shouted for joy. Her first real “bid for publicity” was a success; her thoughts and words had been judged worth listening to.88 She had to believe that it was “a turning point in my life.”89