Grand Pursuit

by Sylvia Nasar

  As her frustration grew at being unable to sustain a career while nursing her father, Beatrice was more and more inclined to identify the plight of women with the oppression of workers. She thought about the houses of “all those respectable and highly successful men” and her sisters, to whom she remained close, had married:

  Then . . . I struggle through an East End crowd of the wrecks, the waifs and strays, or I enter a debating society of working men and listen to the ever increasing cry of active brains doomed to the treadmill of manual labor—for a career in which ability tells—the bitter cry of the nineteenth century working man and the nineteenth century woman alike.121

  The previous fall, when her father had told her, “I should like to see my little Bee married to a good strong fellow,” Beatrice wrote in her journal, “I cannot, and will never, make the stupendous sacrifice of marriage.”122

  • • •

  Beatrice became aware of Sidney Webb months before she met him. She read a book of essays published by the Fabian Society, a Socialist group that intended to win power the same way a Roman general named Fabius had won the Carthaginian war; gradually and with guerrilla tactics rather than head-on battles. She told a friend that “by far the most significant and interesting essay is by Sidney Webb.”123 Sidney returned the compliment in a review of the first volume of the Booth survey: “The only contributor with any literary talent is Miss Beatrice Potter.”124

  Their first encounter took place in Maggie Harkness’s rooms in Bloomsbury. Beatrice had asked her cousin if she knew of any experts on cooperatives, and Maggie immediately thought of a Fabian who seemed to know everything. For Sidney, it was love at first sight, though he left their first meeting more despondent than euphoric. “She is too beautiful, too rich, too clever,” he said to a friend.125 Later he comforted himself with the thought that they belonged to the same social class—until Beatrice corrected him. True, blue-collar men amused her. She enjoyed talking and smoking with union activists and cooperators in their cramped flats. But the self-importance of working men who, having “risen . . . within their own class,” show up at London dinners and “introduce themselves as such without the least uneasiness for their reception” provoked her inner snob.126 Beatrice thought Sidney looked like a cross between a London cardsharp and a German professor and mocked his “bourgeois black coat shiny with wear” and his dropped h’s. Unaccountably, she found that something about this “remarkable little man with a huge head on a tiny body” appealed to her.127

  As his “huge head” indicated, Sidney was indeed a great brain. Like Alfred Marshall, he was very much a son of London’s lower-middle class and had risen on the tide that was lifting white-collar workers. Born three years after Beatrice, he grew up over his parents’ hairdressing shop near Leicester Square. His father, who moonlighted as a freelance bookkeeper in addition to cutting hair, was a radical democrat who had supported John Stuart Mill’s parliamentary campaign. Sidney’s mother, who made all the important decisions in the family, was determined that Sidney and his brother would grow up to be professionals. With a prodigious memory, a head for numbers, and a talent for test taking, Sidney excelled in school, got hired by a stockbroker at sixteen, and was offered a partnership in the firm at twenty-one. Instead of accepting, he took a civil service examination and won an appointment in the Colonial Office. By then he had been bitten by the political bug and realized that he was more interested in power than in money. He continued to collect scholarships and degrees including one in law from the University of London, according to the Webbs’ official biographer, Royden Harrison. By the time of the Trafalgar Square Riot and the subsequent Tory electoral victory, Sidney had found his true vocation as the brains of the Fabian Society.

  The Fabians were odd ducks. Sidney embraced “collective ownership where ever practicable; collective regulation everywhere else; collective provision according to need for all the impotent and sufferers; and collective taxation in proportion to wealth, especially surplus wealth.” But Fabian Socialism was associated mostly with local government and small-scale projects such as dairy cooperatives and government pawnshops. The Fabians’ strategy differed from that of most other Socialist groups as well. Eschewing both electoral politics and revolution, they sought to introduce Socialism gradually by “impregnating all the existence of forces of society with Collectivist ideals and Collectivist principles.”128

  When Sidney was elected to the Fabian steering committee in 1887, the society had sixty-seven members, an annual income of £32, and a reputation for being a good place for pretty women to meet brilliant men and vice versa. The English historian G. M. Trevelyan described the Fabians as “intelligence officers without an army.” They did not aspire to become a political party in Parliament. Instead, they hoped to influence policies, “the direction of the great hosts moving under other banners.”129 Sidney, who had concluded that “nothing in England is done without the consent of a small intellectual yet practical class in London not 2,000 in number” and that electoral politics was a rich man’s game, called the Fabian strategy of infiltrating the establishment “permeating.”130

  Sidney’s best friend and partner in crime was George Bernard Shaw, a witty Irish sprite of a man who dashed off theater reviews and acted as the Fabians’ chief publicist. By the mid-1890s, the former Dublin rent collector and City of London stockbroker was convinced that social problems had economic origins. He proceeded to devote the second half of the 1890s to “mastering” economics. He and Sidney were both trying to work out what they believed and where to direct their energies. They attended regular meetings of a group organized by several professional economists at City of London College. Their studies led them to reject both utopian Socialism and Marxist Communism. They called their goal Socialism, but it was Socialism with property, Parliament, and capitalists and without Marx or class warfare. They wished to tame and control the “Frankenstein” of free enterprise rather than to murder it, and to tax the rich rather than to annihilate them.131

  • • •

  Within a few weeks of meeting Sidney for the first time, Beatrice was beginning to think that “a socialist community in which there will be individual freedom and public property” might be viable—and attractive. “At last I am a socialist!” she declared.132 Beatrice had caught the spirit of the times that prompted William Harcourt, a Liberal MP, to exclaim during the 1888 budget debate, “We are all socialists now.”133 As for Sidney, she was beginning to think of him as “one of the small body of men with whom I may sooner or later throw in my lot for good and all.”134

  At first, Beatrice had taken Sidney’s obvious infatuation for granted and had been happy to let her intellectual dependence on him grow. When he confessed that he adored her and wanted to marry her, she had responded with a lecture against mixing love with work. She had insisted on being his collaborator, not his wife, and had banned any further allusion to “lower feelings.”135

  In 1891, Beatrice was again living in London for the season, nervously waiting for her book on cooperatives to appear in print and worrying about a series of lectures she had agreed to deliver. Sidney announced that he was quitting the civil service. He had no life other than work and felt “like the London cabhorse who could not be taken out of his shafts lest he fall down.”136 He once again brought up the forbidden topic, promising that if she relented he would let her live the outdoorsy, abstemious, hardworking, intensely social life she wanted. He suggested they write a book on trade unions together. After a year of telling Sidney “I do not love you,” Beatrice finally said “yes.”137

  When Sidney sent Beatrice a full-length photograph of himself, she begged him to “let me have your head only—it is your head only that I am marrying . . . It is too hideous for anything.”138 She dreaded telling her family and friends. “The world will wonder,” Beatrice wrote in her diary.

  On the face of it, it seems an extraordinary end to the once brilliant Beatrice Potter . . . to marry an ugly little man with no
social position and less means, whose only recommendation so some may say is a certain pushing ability. And I am not “in love,” not as I was. But I see something else in him . . . a fine intellect and a warmheartedness, a power of self-subordination and self-devotion for the common good.139

  Beatrice insisted that the engagement was to be a secret as long as her father was alive. Only her sisters and a few intimate friends were told. The Booths reacted coolly, and Herbert Spencer promptly dropped her as literary executor, a position that had once been a source of great pride to Beatrice.

  Richard Potter died a few days before Beatrice’s thirty-fourth birthday on New Year’s Day, 1892. He bequeathed his favorite daughter an annual income of £1,506 a year and “incomparable luxury of freedom from all care.”140 After the funeral, Beatrice spent a week at her prospective mother-in-law’s “ugly and small surroundings” in Park Village near Regents Park. On July 23, 1892, Beatrice and Sidney were married in a registry office in London. Beatrice recorded the event in her diary: “Exit Beatrice Potter. Enter Beatrice Webb, or rather (Mrs.) Sidney Webb for I lose alas! both names.”141

  • • •

  When George Bernard Shaw paid his first extended visit to the newlyweds more than a year later, in the late summer of 1893, Beatrice sized him up as vain, flighty, and a born philanderer, but “a brilliant talker” who “liked to flirt and was therefore a delightful companion.” While Sidney was the “organizer” of the Fabian junta, she put Shaw down as its “sparkle and flavour.”142

  Shaw’s first play, Widowers’ Houses, had been put on at the Royalty Theatre the previous December, and now he was at work on a new play that operated on the same formula: taking one of Victorian society’s “unspeakable subjects,” in this case a reviled profession, and turning it into a metaphor for the way the society really worked.143

  All the past year the press had been full of stories about the Continent’s legal brothels—high-end men’s clubs where business was conducted—in which English girls were lured into sexual slavery. As usual, Shaw was recasting a social problem as an economic problem, and he wrote to another friend that “in all my plays my economic studies have played as important a part as knowledge of anatomy does in the works of Michael Angelo.”144 His character Mrs. Warren, who runs a high-end brothel in Vienna, is a practical businesswoman who understands that prostitution isn’t about sex but about money. Just as he had wanted the audience to see that the slumlord of Widowers’ Houses was not a villain but a symptom of a social system in which everyone was implicated, he now wished them to understand that in a society that drives women into prostitution, there were no innocents. “Nothing would please our sanctimonious British public more than to throw the whole guilt of Mrs. Warren’s profession on Mrs. Warren herself,” wrote Shaw in a preface, “Now the whole aim of my play is to throw that guilt on the British public itself.”145

  It was Beatrice who suggested that Shaw “should put on the stage a real modern lady of the governing class” rather than a stereotypical sentimental courtesan.146 The result was Vivie Warren, the play’s heroine and Mrs. Warren’s Cambridge-educated daughter. Like Beatrice, Vivie is “attractive . . . sensible . . . self-possessed.” Like Beatrice, Vivie escapes her class and sexual destiny. In the Guy de Maupassant story “Yvette,” which supplied Shaw with his plot, birth is destiny. “There’s no alternative,” says Madame Obardi, the prostitute mother to Yvette, heroine of the story, but in the world that Vivie Warren inhabits—late Victorian England—there is an alternative. The discovery of Mrs. Warren’s real business and the true source of the income that had paid for her daughter’s Cambridge education shatter Vivie’s innocence. But instead of killing herself or resigning herself to following in her mother’s footsteps, Vivie takes up . . . accounting. “My work is not your work, and my way is not your way,” she tells her mother. As with Beatrice, the choice not to repeat history was hers. In the final scene of Mrs. Warren’s Profession, Vivie is alone onstage, at her writing desk, buried luxuriously in her “actuarial calculations.”

  Meanwhile, the real-life Vivie was living with her husband in a ten-room house a stone’s throw from Parliament. She was joined in the library nearly every morning by Sidney and Shaw. The three of them drank coffee, smoked cigarettes, and gossiped while they edited the first three chapters of her and Sidney’s book on trade unions.

  • • •

  Herbert George Wells, the wildly popular science-fiction writer, turned the Fabian trio into a quartet for a while before falling out with the Webbs. Afterward he satirized them in his 1910 novel The New Machiavelli, as Altiora and Oscar Bailey, a London power couple who steadfastly acquire and publish knowledge about public affairs in order to gain influence as the “centre of reference for all sorts of legislative proposals and political expedients.” Having grown up among the ruling class like Beatrice, Altiora “discovered very early that the last thing influential people will do is work.” Indolent but brilliant, she marries Oscar for his big forehead and industrious work habits, and under her steerage they become “the most formidable and distinguished couple conceivable.” “Two people . . . who’ve planned to be a power—in an original way. And by Jove! They’ve done it!” says the narrator’s companion.147

  The term think tank, which connotes the growing role of the expert in public policy making, wasn’t coined until World War II. Even then, according to the historian James A. Smith, think tank referred to a “secure room in which plans and strategies could be discussed.”148 Only in the 1950s and 1960s, after Rand and Brookings became familiar names, was think tank used to evoke private entities employing researchers, presumably independent and objective, that dispensed free, nonpartisan advice to civil servants and politicians. Yet a think tank is exactly what Beatrice and Sidney were—perhaps the very first and certainly one of the most effective—from the moment they married. “Of this they were unselfconsciously proud,” mocked Wells. “The inside of the Baileys’ wedding rings were engraved ‘P.B.P., Pro Bono Publico.’”

  The Webbs shrewdly realized that experts would become more indispensable the more ambitious democratically elected governments became. They shared the vision of a new mandarin class: “From the mere necessities of convenience elected bodies must avail themselves more and more of the services of expert officials . . . We want to suggest that these expert officials must necessarily develop into a new class and a very powerful class . . . We consider ourselves as amateur unpaid precursors of such a class.”149 This insight led them to found the London School of Economics, intended as a training ground for a new class of social engineers, and the New Statesman weekly newspaper.

  Their “almost pretentiously matter-of-fact and unassuming” house at 41 Grosvenor Road, chosen by Beatrice, advertised their priorities. To stay fit, their daily regimen was Spartan. Middle-class comfort was sacrificed for the sake of books, articles, interviews, and testimony. In an era of coal scuttles and cold running water, the Webbs generally employed three research assistants but only two servants. “All efficient public careers,” says Altiora in Wells’s novel, “consist in the proper direction of secretaries.”150 Beatrice set for herself the task of converting England from laissez-faire to a society planned from the top down. To this end, they plotted ambitious research projects and organized their lives almost entirely to meet deadlines. The Webbs’ friends debated “as to which of the two is before or after the other,” but according to Wells, “[S]he ran him.”151 She was the CEO of the Webb enterprise; part visionary, part executive, and part strategist. Wells was sure that their joint career as idea brokers was “almost entirely her invention.” In his view, Beatrice was “aggressive, imaginative, and had a great capacity for ideas” while Sidney “was almost destitute of initiative and could do nothing with ideas except remember and discuss them.”152

  Standing with her back to the fire, Beatrice glowed with “a gypsy splendor of black and red and silver all her own.” Even while caricaturing her in his novel, Wells was forced to admit th
at Beatrice was beautiful, elegant, and “altogether exceptional.” The other women he had met at Grosvenor House were either “severely rational or radiantly magnificent.”153 Beatrice was the only one who was both. Even as she talked of budgets, laws, and political machinations, she signaled her femininity by wearing outrageously expensive, flirty shoes.

  A daddy’s girl, Beatrice had always adored powerful men, flirting, and political gossip. The Fabians’ strategy of permeation gave her an excuse to indulge all three. “I set myself to amuse and interest him, but seized every opportunity to insinuate sound doctrine and information” is a typical account of dining with a prime minister. Past, present, and future prime ministers were among her regular celebrity guests. Not in the slightest partisan, she was as happy to entertain a Tory as a Liberal. “But all of these have certain usefulness,” she observed pragmatically.154

  The think tank became a political salon at night. Once a week, the Webbs had a dinner for a dozen or so people. Once a month, they had a party for sixty or eighty. Guests did not come for the food. The Webbs practiced strict household economy to afford more research assistants, and Beatrice took more satisfaction in disciplining than in indulging her appetite.155 Like Altoria, Beatrice fed her guests “with a shameless austerity that kept the conversation brilliant.”156 The price of attendance, said R. H. Tawney, an economic historian and frequent guest, was “participation in one of the famous exercises in asceticism described by Mrs. Webb as dinners.”157 Yet everyone angled for invitations, and 41 Grosvenor Road was a center for quite an astonishing amount of political and social activity. One “brilliant little luncheon” that Beatrice regarded as “typical of the ‘Webb’ set . . . in its mixture of opinions, classes, interests” included the Norwegian ambassador to London, a Tory MP, a Liberal MP, George Bernard Shaw, Bertrand Russell, the philosopher and future Nobel laureate, and a baroness who entertained every major politician and writer of the time.158 Wells’s novel identified Beatrice’s singular skill as a hostess and its importance to the Webbs’ career. “She got together all sorts of interesting people in or about the public service. She mixed the obscurely efficient with the ill-instructed famous and the rudderless rich, and got together in one room more of the factors in our strange jumble of a public life than had ever met easily before.”159