Grand Pursuit

by Sylvia Nasar

  Ten days after the riot, Beatrice had the pleasure of reading her own words in print for the first time: “I am a rent collector on a large block of working-class dwellings situated near the London Docks, designed and adapted to house the lowest class of working poor.” She had tried to make just two points. Her first was that, contrary to what most philanthropists and politicians supposed, unemployment in the East End, “the great centre of odd jobs and indiscriminate charity,” was the result not of “the national depression of trade” but of a dysfunctional and lopsided labor market. As traditional London trades such as shipbuilding and manufacturing had moved away, record numbers of unskilled farm laborers and foreign immigrants had been attracted by false or exaggerated reports of sky-high wages and jobs going begging. Her second point followed from the first: advertising public works jobs would inevitably attract more unskilled newcomers to the already overcrowded labor market, swelling the ranks of the jobless and depressing the wages of those who had work.90

  One week after her piece appeared, she was reading another letter that made her heart pound and her hands shake. Chamberlain complimented her article and wanted to solicit her advice. As president of the Local Government Board, he was now responsible for poor relief. Would she meet to advise him on how to modify his plan to eliminate its pitfalls?91 Her pride still hurt and fearing further humiliation, Beatrice refused to meet Chamberlain and instead sent him a critique of his plan. Chamberlain’s response was a repetition of his “ransom” argument. As he put it, “the rich must pay to keep the poor alive.”92 He had taken from his experiences as the employer of thousands of workers the belief that government inaction in the face of widespread distress was no longer an option. The rules of governing were changing, irrespective of which party was in power. As wealth grew in tandem with the political power of the impoverished majority, a moral and political imperative to act where none had existed previously had emerged. Once the means to alleviate distress were available—and, more important, once the electorate knew that such means existed—doing nothing was no longer an option. Laissez-faire might have defined the moral high ground in the poorer, agrarian England of Ricardo’s and Malthus’s day, but any attempt to follow the precepts articulated in The Man Versus the State in this day and age was immoral, not to mention politically suicidal. He wrote: “My Department knows all about Paupers . . . I am convinced however that the suffering of the industrious non-pauper class is very great . . . What is to be done for them?”93

  Beatrice was unmoved. “I fail to grasp the principle that something must be done,” she persisted. Instead of proposing modifications, she advised him to do nothing. “I have no proposal to make except sternness from the state, and love and self-devotion from individuals,” she wrote. She could not resist adding, half mockingly, half flirtatiously, that

  It is a ludicrous idea that an ordinary woman should be called upon to review the suggestion of her Majesty’s ablest Minister, . . . especially when I know he has a slight opinion of even a superior woman’s intelligence . . . and a dislike to any independence of thought.94

  Chamberlain defended himself against her charges of misogyny and acknowledged that some of her objections were sound. Still, he did not disguise how repellent he found her underlying attitude:

  On the main question your letter is discouraging; but I fear it is true. I shall go on, however, as if it were not true, for if we once admit the impossibility of remedying the evils of society, we shall all sink below the level of the brutes. Such a creed is the justification of absolute, unadulterated selfishness.95

  Chamberlain did as he promised, ignoring Beatrice’s advice and embarking on one of the “gigantic experiments” of which Spencer so disapproved. The public works program that Chamberlain pushed through was relatively modest in scale and lasted only a few months, but some historians judge it to have been a major innovation.96 For the first time, government was treating unemployment as a social calamity rather than an individual failure and taking responsibility for aiding the victims.

  • • •

  When Chamberlain indicated that he was tired of their epistolary bickering, Beatrice impulsively fired off an angry confession that she loved him—to her instant and bitter regret. “I have been humbled as far down as a woman can be humbled,” she told herself.97 A doctor’s suggestion that she take her father to London during the season saved her life. Instead of slipping back into her old depression and reaching for the laudanum bottle, she moved her household to York House in Kensington. Toward the end of April 1886, Beatrice joined her cousin Charlie Booth, a wealthy philanthropist, in the most ambitious social research project ever carried out in Britain.

  Beatrice’s cousin was in his forties, a tall and gawky figure with “the complexion of a consumptive girl” and a deceptively mild manner.98 People who didn’t know Charles Booth took him for a musician, professor, or priest—almost anything except what he was, the chief executive of a large transatlantic shipping company. By day he busied himself with share prices, new South American ports, and freight schedules. By night he turned to his real passions, philanthropy and social science. He and his wife, Mary, a niece of the historian Thomas Babington Macaulay, were an unpretentious, active, and intellectually curious couple. Political Liberals like the Potters and Heyworths, they were part of the “British Museum” crowd of journalists, union leaders, political economists, and assorted activists. Though Beatrice sometimes wrinkled her aquiline nose at the Booths’ casual housekeeping and odd guests, she spent as much time at their haphazard mansion as she could.

  Like other civic-minded businessmen, Booth had long been active in his local statistical society and shared the Victorian conviction that good data were a prerequisite for effective social action. When Chamberlain was mayor of Birmingham, he had done a survey at his behest and they had become friends. His finding that more than a quarter of Birmingham’s school-age children were neither at home nor in school had led to a spate of legislation. In the early 1880s, when poverty amid plenty was again becoming the rallying cry for critics of contemporary society, he was struck by the widespread “sense of helplessness” that well-intentioned people felt in the face of an apparently intractable problem and a bewildering array of conflicting diagnoses and prescriptions. The trouble, he thought, was that political economists had theories and activists had anecdotes, but neither could supply an unbiased or complete description of the problem. It was as if he had been asked to reorganize South American shipping routes without the benefit of maps.

  The previous spring, Booth had been outraged by an assertion by some Socialists that more than one-quarter of London’s population was destitute. Suspecting but unable to prove that the figure was grossly exaggerated, he had been goaded into taking action. He determined that he would survey every house and workshop, every street and every type of employment, and learn the income, occupation, and circumstances of every one of London’s 4.5 million citizens. Using his own money, he would create a map of poverty in London.

  Unlike Henry Mayhew, whom Beatrice admired, Booth had the vision, managerial experience, and technical sophistication to carry out this extraordinary plan. His first step, after consulting friends such as Alfred Marshall, who was teaching at Oxford at the time, and Samuel Barnett of the settlement house Toynbee Hall, was to recruit a research team. Beatrice accepted his invitation to attend the first meeting of the Board of Statistical Research at the London branch of his firm. She was, of course, the only woman. Booth explained that he aimed to get a “fair picture of the whole of London society” and presented them with an “elaborate and detailed plan” that involved the use, among other things, of truant officers as interviewers and census returns and charity records as cross-checks.99 He wanted to start with the East End, which contained 1 million out of London’s 4 million inhabitants:

  My only justification for taking up the subject in the way I have done is that this piece of London is supposed to contain the most destitute population in England, an
d to be, as it were, the focus of the problem of poverty in the midst of wealth, which is troubling the minds and hearts of so many people.100

  Beatrice was deeply impressed that Booth had launched the ambitious undertaking singlehandedly. She could imagine herself taking on a similarly pioneering role in the future. This was, she realized, “just the sort of work I should like to undertake . . . if I were free.”101 She decided to apprentice herself to her cousin, so to speak, devoting as much time and absorbing as much knowledge as caring for her family would allow. Her role was not going to be collecting statistics. Instead she was to go into workshops and homes, make her own observations, and interview workers—starting with London’s legendary dockworkers.

  When the Potters returned to their country estate, Beatrice took advantage of her enforced isolation to fill a gap in her education. Augmenting statistics with personal observation and interviews seemed essential to her, but she grasped that good observation was impossible without some theory to separate the wheat from the chaff. Mayhew had failed to produce lasting insights because he had gathered facts indiscriminately. The need for some sort of framework made her eager to learn some economics and especially to learn how economic ideas had evolved, since “each fresh development corresponded with some unconscious observation of the leading features of the contemporary industrial life.”102

  After a day or two of fitful reading, Beatrice complained that political economy was “most hateful drudgery.”103 A mere two weeks later, however, she was satisfied that she had “broken the back of economical science.”104 She had finished—or at least skimmed—Mill’s A System of Logic and Fawcett’s Manual of Political Economy and was convinced that she had “gotten the gist” of what Smith, Ricardo, and Marshall had to say. By the first week of August, she was putting the finishing touches on a critique of English political economy. Except for Marx, whose work she read in the fall, the leading political economists were guilty of treating assumptions as if they were facts, she argued, chiding them for paying too little attention to collections of facts about actual behavior. She sent her indictment to Cousin Charlie, hoping that he would help her get it published. To her chagrin, Booth wrote back suggesting that she put the piece away and return to it in a year or two.

  • • •

  A year later, after she had completed her study of dockworkers, Booth took Beatrice to an exhibition of pre-Raphaelite artists in Manchester. Beatrice was so moved by the paintings that she resolved to turn her next study—of sweatshops in the tailoring trades—into a “picture” too. It occurred to her that if she wanted to “dramatize” her account, she would have to go underground. “I could not get at the picture without living among the actual workers. This I think I could do.”105

  Preparing for her debut role as a working girl took months. She spent the summer at Standish, immersed in “all the volumes, Blue Books, pamphlets and periodicals bearing on the subject of sweating that I could buy or borrow.”106 In the fall, she lived in a small East End hotel for six weeks while she spent eight to twelve hours a day at a cooperative tailoring workshop, learning how to sew. At night, when she wasn’t too exhausted to fall into her bed, she went out to fashionable West End dinner parties.

  By April 1888, she was ready to begin her underground investigation. She moved to a shabby East End rooming house. The next morning she threw on a set of shabby old clothes and went off on foot “to begin life as a working woman.” In a few hours, she got her first taste of job hunting.

  It gave her, she confessed, “a queer feeling.” As she wrote in her diary, “No bills up, except for ‘good tailoress’ and at these places I daren’t apply, feeling myself rather an imposter. I wandered on, until my heart sank with me, my legs and back began to ache, and I felt all the feeling of ‘out o’ work.’ At last I summoned up courage.”107

  “It don’t look as if you have been ’customed to much work,” she heard again and again. Still, twenty-four hours later, in spite of her fear that everyone saw through her disguise and her awkward attempts to drop her h’s, Beatrice was sitting at a large table making a clumsy job of sewing a pair of trousers. Her fingers felt like sausages, and she had to rely on the kindness of a fellow worker, who, though she was paid by the piece, took the time to teach Beatrice the ropes, and of the “sweater” who sent out a girl to buy the trimmings that workers were expected to supply themselves.

  The woman whose motto was “A woman, in all the relations of life, should be sought,” gleefully transcribed the lyrics of a work girls’ song:

  If a girl likes a man, why should she not propose?

  Why should the little girls always be led by the nose?108

  As soon as the gas was lit, the heat was terrific. Beatrice’s fingers were sore and her back ached. “Eight o’clock by the Brewery clock,” cried out a shrill voice.

  For this she received a shilling, the first she had ever earned. “A shilling a day is about the price of unskilled women’s labor,” she recorded in her diary when she got back to the rooming house.

  She was back at 198 Mile End Road at eight thirty the next morning. She sewed buttonholes on trousers for a couple of days before “leaving this workshop and its inhabitants to work on its way day after day and to become to me only a memory.”109

  • • •

  News of Beatrice’s exploit spread quickly. In May, a House of Lords committee that was conducting an investigation of sweatshops invited her to testify. The Pall Mall Gazette, which covered the hearing, described her in glamorous terms as “tall, supple, dark with bright eyes” and her manner in the witness chair as “quite cool.”110 In the hearing, Beatrice slipped into her childhood habit of fibbing and claimed that she had spent three weeks instead of three days in the sweatshop. Fear of exposure kept her in an agony of suspense for weeks afterward. But when “Pages of a Workgirl’s Diary” was published in the liberal journal the Nineteenth Century, in mid-October, its success was delicious. “It was the originality of the deed that has taken the public, more than the expression of it.”111 All the same, Beatrice admitted, an invitation to read her paper at Oxford made her ridiculously happy. (“If I have something to say I now know I can say it and say it well.”112) Just before New Year’s, despite a bad cold that kept her in bed, Beatrice was luxuriating in mentions in the daily papers and “even a bogus interview . . . telegraphed to America and Australia.”113

  Beatrice now felt emboldened to embark on a project that was hers alone. Ever since her week as “Miss Jones” in Bacup among the hand-loom weavers, she had been drawn to the idea of writing a history of the cooperative movement. Even the shock of reading in the Pall Mall Gazette that Joseph Chamberlain had been secretly engaged to a twenty-five-year-old American “aristocrat”—“a gasp—as if one had been stabbed—and then it was over”114—did not prevent Beatrice from plunging into Blue Books once more. Her cousin Charlie tried to convince her to write a treatise about women’s work instead. So did Alfred Marshall, whom she met for the first time at Oxford and who invited her to lunch with him and Mary. He greatly admired her “Diary,” he said. When she seized the opportunity to ask him what he thought of her new project, he told her dramatically that “if you devote yourself to the study of your own sex as an industrial factor, your name will be a household word two hundred years hence; if you write a history of Co-operation, it will be superseded or ignored in a few years.”115

  Beatrice, who preferred spending her time with men rather than with other women, and who suspected that Marshall thought her unqualified to write about one of his favorite subjects, had no intention of taking such advice. The matter was clinched when she impulsively joined with other socially prominent women in signing a petition opposing female suffrage. “I was at that time known to be an anti-feminist,” she later explained.116

  • • •

  In fact, Beatrice was changing her mind about a great many things. Notwithstanding her spirited defense to Chamberlain of her laissez-faire philosophy, she was beginning to have
doubts about her parents’ and Spencer’s libertarian creed. She and the old philosopher still saw each other often, but their disagreements were now so violent that they talked less and less about politics. In any case, she was spending more and more of her time with her cousin Charlie.

  When Booth published the first volume of Labour and Life of the People in April 1889, the Times said it “draws the curtain behind which East London has been hidden from view,” and singled out Beatrice’s chapter on the London dockworkers for praise.117 In June of that year, Beatrice attended a cooperative congress, where she became convinced that “the democracy of Consumers must be complemented by democracies of workers” if workers could ever hope to enforce hard-won agreements on pay and working hours.118 The dramatic and wholly unexpected victory in August 1889 of striking London dockworkers, universally believed to be too egotistical and desperate to band together, impressed her greatly. “London is in ferment: Strikes are the order of the day, the new trade unionism with its magnificent conquest of the docks is striding along,” Beatrice wrote in her diary.

  The socialists, led by a small set of able young men (Fabian Society) are manipulating London Radicals, ready at the first check-mate of trade unionism to voice a growing desire for state action; and I, from the peculiarity of my social position, should be in the midst of all parties, sympathetic with all, allied with none.”119

  Instead of witnessing these stirring sights firsthand, Beatrice was far away in a hotel in the country, tethered to her semicomatose father, “exiled from the world of thought and action of other men and women.” She worked on her book, but without any conviction that she could ever complete it. She was “sick to death of grappling with my subject. Was I made for brain work? Is any woman made for a purely intellectual life? . . . The background to my life is inexpressibly depressing—Father lying like a log in his bed, a child, an animal, with less capacity for thought and feeling than my old pet, Don.”120