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Chapter III Miss Potter’s Profession: Webb and the Housekeeping State

She yearned for something by which her life might be filled with action at once rational and ardent; and since the time was gone by for guiding visions . . . what lamp was there but knowledge?

—George Eliot, Middlemarch¹

Every year in March, the “upper ten thousand” descended on London like a vast flock of extravagantly plumed and exotic migratory birds.² During the three or four months of the London “season,” Britain’s elite devoted itself to an elaborate mating ritual. Mornings were spent riding along Rotten Row or the Ladies’ Mile in Hyde Park. Afternoons were for repairing to Parliament or to clubs for the males of the species, shopping and paying social calls for the wives and daughters. In the evenings everyone met at operas, dinner parties, and balls that provided opportunities for magnificent displays. Every few days, an obligatory race, regatta, cricket match, or gallery opening introduced a slight variation to the schedule.

As with so much else in Victorian high society, this frenetic and seemingly frivolous pursuit of pleasure was serious business: during the season, which began when Parliament resumed its session, London became the epicenter of the global marriage market. Wealthy parents thought of giving a daughter two or three London seasons in the same way as sending a son to Oxford or Cambridge. The expense and effort of participating in this extraordinarily intricate mating dance were certainly comparable. If the family had no permanent “town” house, an imposing mansion had to be found at a fashionable address. A vast quantity of expensive items had to be purchased and conveyed, what with “the stable of horses and carriages . . . , the elaborate stock of garments . . . , [and] all the commissariat and paraphernalia for dinners, dances, picnics and weekend parties” considered de rigueur. Needless to say, socializing on so ambitious a scale demanded an executive to oversee “extensive [plans], a large number of employees and innumerable decisions”—in other words, the lady of the household.³

These were the reflections that occupied Beatrice Ellen Potter, Bo or Bea to her family, the eighth of nine daughters of a rich railway tycoon from Gloucester named Richard Potter. The carriage she was sharing with her father on a raw February afternoon in 1883 rolled to a stop in front of an imposing terrace of tall, cream-colored Italianate villas. The slender young woman with an air of command surveyed number 47 Princes Gate coolly. It was meant to serve as the social headquarters of the sprawling Potter clan, which included her six married sisters and their large families, for the season. The five-story mansion had a sumptuous façade with Ionic columns, Corinthian pilasters, tall windows, and swags of fruit and flowers, and it faced Hyde Park. At the back, visible through French doors, was an expanse of terraced lawn furnished with classical statues and enormous pots with masses of scarlet pelargoniums tumbling over their sides. The houses on either side of theirs were similarly grand. Her father had chosen Princes Gate precisely so they would be flanked by neighbors as wealthy and powerful as he. Junius Morgan, the American banker, leased number 13. Joseph Chamberlain, a Manchester industrialist turned Liberal politician and the father of Neville Chamberlain, had taken number 40 for the season. It was a perfect setting for Potter’s brilliant daughter.

At twenty-five, Beatrice was the veteran of more than half a dozen London seasons but had never been in love. Until now, her duties had consisted of enjoying herself at some fifty balls, sixty parties, thirty dinners, and twenty-five breakfasts before society packed up and retreated to the country in July.⁴ She’d had nothing whatsoever to do with “all that elaborate machinery”⁵ that was required backstage. This year would be different. Beatrice had been the only one of the Potter sisters, except for thirteen-year-old Rosie, who was still living at home in Gloucester when their mother died the previous spring. Suddenly she was promoted to lady of her father’s house.

Before leaving Gloucester, Beatrice had made a solemn vow “to give myself up to Society, and make it my aim to succeed therein.”⁶ By “succeed,” she meant marry an important man, as each of her older sisters had done, although her use of “give myself up” suggests that the price of success was self-immolation. The latest to do so had been her favorite sister, Kate, who had waited until the advanced age of thirty-one to marry a prominent Liberal economist and politician, Leonard Courtney, currently serving as Treasury secretary. Her father did not doubt that Bo would follow suit. Besides beauty, breeding, and a large fortune, she had the gift of commanding attention. Her long, graceful neck, fiercely intelligent eyes, and glossy black hair made people seeing her for the first time across a crowded room think of a beautiful, slightly dangerous black swan. Men were charmed by her, especially when they realized that she refused to take them seriously.

For a while after the Potters’ arrival, all was chaos and confusion. More retainers, extra horses, and additional carriages appeared. When the servants finally withdrew and her father had gotten some supper, Beatrice went upstairs and found the bedroom in the back of the mansion that she had determined would be hers. Now she could think of something besides seating plans and menus—namely, the books that she had brought to read; the things she meant to learn. Beatrice saw nothing inherently contradictory in her various desires and duties. After all, a happily married woman sat on the throne, and George Eliot reigned as the most successful writer of the day. When Beatrice was eighteen, she had spent more time studying Eastern religions than preparing for her “coming out.”

Her bedroom window overlooked the Victoria and Albert Museum. It suddenly struck her that the great monument to human ingenuity stood in the very center of London yet managed to remain wonderfully “undisturbed by the rushing life of the great city.”⁷ Beatrice wondered whether she might do the same, maintaining a Buddhist-like detachment in crowded drawing rooms and theaters. Might she not she fulfill society’s expectations while still cultivating the “thoughtful” part of her life, the part that drove her to constantly to ask herself, “How am I to live and for what object?”⁸

The question of her destiny had preoccupied Beatrice since her fifteenth birthday. Her mother and sisters had always regarded her obsession as unhealthy. Wasn’t it enough to simply be “one of the fashionable Miss Potters who live in grand houses and beautiful gardens and marry enormously wealthy men?”⁹ Had Beatrice been the heroine of a Victorian novel, its author would have felt obliged to offer some justification for making the question of her destiny the “center of interest.” In The Portrait of a Lady, published in 1881, Henry James had done exactly that: “Millions of presumptuous girls, intelligent or not intelligent, daily affront their destiny, and what is it open to their destiny to be, at the most, that we should make an ado about it?” James asked in his preface.¹⁰ Before middle-class women had viable alternatives to early marriage and motherhood, and the Married Women’s Property Act of 1882 gave them the right to their own incomes, the recurring question in The Portrait of a Lady—“Well, what will she do?”—could hardly have merited a reader’s interest.

“You are young, pretty, rich, clever, what more do you want?” Beatrice’s cousin Margaret Harkness, the novelist daughter of a poor country parson, had asked with a trace of exasperation when they were at school together. “Why cannot you be satisfied?”¹¹ Like James’s heroine Isabel Archer, Beatrice had been brought up with an unusual freedom to travel, read, form friendships, and satisfy her “great desire for knowledge” and “immense curiosity about life.” Beatrice preferred the company of men and took it for granted that most would fall under her spell, but like Isabel she had no desire to “begin life by marrying.”¹² She was as interested in winning recognition for her intellectual achievements as for her feminine charms. Each passing year made her longing for a “real aim and occupation” more urgent.¹³ She was conscious of “a special mission” and believed with all her heart that she was meant to live “a life with some result.”¹⁴ Like Dorothea in Middlemarch, Beatrice yearned for principles, “something by which her life might be filled with action at once rational and ardent.”¹⁵

Beatrice’s identity was shaped by having been born into Britain’s “new ruling class,”¹⁶ and her mind by having been “brought up in the midst of capitalist speculation” and “the restless spirit of big enterprise.”¹⁷ As the historian Barbara Caine notes, Beatrice distinguished her class not by wealth but by the fact that it was “a class of persons who habitually gave orders, but who seldom, if ever, executed the orders of other people.”¹⁸ Her grandfathers were both self-made men. Her father had lost the lion’s share of his inheritance in the crash of 1848, only to quickly recoup his losses by supplying tents to the French army during the Crimean War. By the time Beatrice was born in 1858, Richard Potter had amassed a third fortune from timber and railways and had become a director (and future chairman of the board) of the Great Western Railway. More entrepreneur and speculator than hands-on manager, Potter once toyed with a scheme to build a waterway to rival the Suez Canal. His business interests were scattered from Turkey to Canada, and he and his family were constantly traveling. The Potters’ Gloucester estate, Standish, as grand and impersonal as a hotel, was filled with an ever-changing contingent of visiting relatives, guests, employees, and hangers-on.

Though Richard Potter began to vote Conservative in middle age, he was never a stereotypical Tory plutocrat. His father, a wholesaler in the cotton industry, was for a time a Radical member of Parliament and had helped found the Manchester Guardian¹⁹ (“our organ,” as Beatrice used to say).²⁰ Intellectually engaged, broad-minded, and convivial, he counted scientists, philosophers, and journalists among his closest friends. Herbert Spencer, the most lionized intellectual in England in the 1860s and 1870s and a former railway engineer and Economist editorialist, called Richard Potter “the most lovable being I have yet seen.”²¹ Even the latter’s cheerful indifference to Spencer’s philosophical interests could not squelch Spencer’s lifelong adoration.

It is almost axiomatic that behind every extraordinary woman there is a remarkable father. Potter encouraged Beatrice and her sisters to read and gave them free run of his large library. He made no effort to restrict their discussion or friendships. He enjoyed their company so much that he rarely took a business trip without one or another as a companion. Beatrice claimed that “he was the only man I ever knew who genuinely believed that women were superior to men, and acted as if he did.”²² She gave him credit for her own “audacity and pluck and my familiarity with the risks and chances of big enterprises.”²³

In some ways, Laurencina Potter was even more unusual than her husband, bearing even less resemblance to the plump and placid mothers that populate Trollope novels than her husband did to the stereotypical businessmen. When Spencer met the Potters for the first time shortly after their marriage, he thought they were “the most admirable pair I have ever seen.”²⁴ As he got to know them better, he was surprised to learn that Laurencina’s perfectly feminine, graceful, and refined personage hid “so independent a character.”²⁵ In contrast to her easygoing husband, Laurencina was cerebral, puritanical, and discontented. Born Heyworth, she came from a family of liberal Liverpool merchants who educated her no differently from her brothers; that is, trained her in mathematics, languages, and political economy. As a young woman, she became a local celebrity and the subject of newspaper articles as a result of the zeal with which she canvassed against the Corn Laws. Decades later, Beatrice was used to seeing pamphlets on economic issues appear on her dressing table.

Laurencina was a very unhappy woman. The cause of her frustration was not hard for her daughter to divine. She had envisioned a married life of “close intellectual comradeship with my father, possibly of intellectual achievement, surrounded by distinguished friends.”²⁶ Instead, for the first two decades after her marriage, she was almost always pregnant or nursing an infant and banished to the company of women and children while her husband traveled on business and dined with writers and intellectuals. Her real ambition had been to write novels, and she did publish one, Laura Gay, before the demands of family life overwhelmed her.

When Laurencina’s ninth child and only son, Dickie, was born, she devoted herself completely to him. But when the boy died of scarlet fever at age two, she became severely depressed and withdrew from her other children. Beatrice, who was seven at the time, recalled her mother as “a remote personage discussing business with my father or poring over books in her boudoir.” As a consequence of her mother’s coldness, Beatrice came to believe that “I was not made to be loved; there must be something repulsive about my character.” Moody, self-dramatizing, and inclined to fib and exaggerate, she had also inherited the Heyworths’ tendency to Weltschmerz and suicide. Two of Laurencina’s relatives had died by their own hand. “My childhood was not on the whole a happy one,” reflected Beatrice as an adult. “Ill-health and starved affection and the mental disorders which spring from these, ill temper and resentment, marred it . . . Its loneliness was absolute.”²⁷ Beatrice herself had toyed with bottles of chloroform even as a child.

Rebuffed by her mother, a biographer says, Beatrice sought affection “below stairs” among the servants who helped keep the Potter household running. She and her older sisters were especially close to Martha Jackson, or Dada as they called her, who took care of the children. Dada, Beatrice learned much later, was actually a relative from a branch of her mother’s family who were poor but respectable Lancashire hand-loom weavers. Caine credits Dada with planting in Beatrice the notion of original sin that gave her the determination to do good and the identification she felt all her life with the “respectable” working poor. But it was Laurencina’s example that inspired her to write. On her fifteenth birthday, Beatrice began a journal that she kept until her death. “Sometimes I feel as if I must write, as if I must pour my poor crooked thoughts into somebody’s heart, even if it be into my own.”²⁸

Among the intellectuals who frequented the Potter house were the biologist Thomas Huxley; Sir Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin’s; and other proponents of the new “scientific” point of view that was undermining traditional beliefs. By the time Beatrice was in her teens, Spencer, who shared the Potters’ background as dissenting Protestants, had become Laurencina’s closest confidant and the dominant intellectual influence in the household.

Spencer, who coined the term “survival of the fittest,” was a bigger celebrity in the 1860s than Charles Darwin. His notion that social institutions, like animal or plant species, were evolving—and therefore could be observed, classified, and analyzed like plants or animals—had captured the public’s imagination. One of the earliest exponents of evolution, Spencer was a radical individualist who opposed slavery and supported women’s suffrage. His antipathy toward government regulation and high taxes appealed to the upwardly mobile middle and lower-middle classes. His popularity was further bolstered by his refusal to rule out absolutely the existence of God.

Fame, however, had not agreed with Spencer. In uncertain health and prone to hypochondria, he had grown increasingly reclusive and eccentric with age. When not at his club or alone in his rooms, he turned to the company of the Potters and their children. A frequent guest at the Potters’ Gloucester estate, he delighted in liberating the Potter sisters from their governesses while chanting, “Submission not desirable.”²⁹ Often he would lead them off to gather specimens to illustrate one or another of his ideas about evolution. In the summers, when the Potters were at their Cotswold retreat, he would lead the way through beech groves and old pear orchards, dressed in white linen from head to toe, carrying a parasol. Trailing behind would be a “very pretty and original group”³⁰ of tall, slender girls with boyishly short black hair, dressed in pale muslins and carrying buckets and nets. From time to time, the party stopped to dig for fossils. The old railway cuts or limestone quarries of Gloucester once lay under shallow, warm seas and thousands of years later yielded a choice collection of ammonites, crinoids, trilobites, and echinoids. The girls did not take their hyperrational friend too seriously. “Are we descended from monkeys, Mr. Spencer?” they would chorus amid giggles. His unvarying reply—“About 99 percent of humanity have descended and one percent have ascended!”—elicited more peals of mirth as well as, occasionally, volleys of decaying beech leaves aimed at the philosopher’s “remarkable headpiece.”³¹

The most bookish and moodiest of the sisters, Beatrice developed a lasting fascination with the workings of Spencer’s remarkable mind. Spencer encouraged Beatrice by telling her that she was a “born metaphysician,” comparing her to his idol, George Eliot, drawing up reading lists, and urging her to pursue her intellectual ambitions. Without his support, Beatrice might have submitted to the kind of life that convention—and at times her own heart—demanded.

Beatrice’s formal education was shockingly skimpy. Like that of many upper-class young women, it was limited to a few months at a fancy finishing school, in part because of her own frequent illnesses, both imaginary and real, and in part because even Richard Potter, liberal as he was by the standards of the time, never thought of sending her to university. She was therefore largely educated at home—that is to say, self-taught and free to read even books that had been banned from public libraries. “I am, as Mother says, too young, too uneducated, and worst of all, too frivolous to be a companion to her,” she wrote in her diary. “But, however, I must take courage, and try to change.”³² Penny-pinching in most things, Laurencina was openhanded when it came to buying newspapers and magazines. Beatrice plunged into religion, philosophy, and psychology, her mother’s interests. Her schoolgirl reading included George Eliot and the fashionable French philosopher and pioneering sociologist Auguste Comte.

Because Beatrice was given unlimited access to her father’s library and her mother’s journals, she was exposed in a way few girls were to the religious and scientific controversies that dominated the late Victorian era. “We lived, indeed, in a perpetual state of ferment, receiving and questioning all contemporary hypotheses as to the duty and destiny of man in this world and the next,” she recalled. By the time Beatrice was eighteen and about to come out, she had substituted for the old Anglican faith Spencer’s new doctrine of “harmony and progress.” She had also embraced her mentor’s libertarian political creed and his ideal of the “scientific investigator.” The image of the latter aroused her “domineering curiosity in the nature of things” and “hope for a ‘bird’s eye view’ of mankind” as well as her secret ambition to write “a book that would be read.”³³

After three weeks at Princes Gate, Beatrice was suffering from the “rival pulls on time and energy.”³⁴ After a particularly tedious dinner party, she fumed that “Ladies are so expressionless.”³⁵ She no longer understood why “intelligent women wish to marry into the set where this is the social regime.”³⁶ She poured her discontents into her diary: “I feel like a caged animal, bound up by the luxury, comfort, and respectability of my position.”³⁷

Beatrice longed for work as well as love, but she was beginning to wonder whether her chances of having it all were any better than poor Laurencina’s. When Isabel Archer insisted that “there are other things a woman can do,” she was thinking, presumably, of the small but growing ranks of self-supporting female professionals who could befriend whomever they pleased, talk about whatever they liked, live in lodgings, and travel on their own.

But such women gave up a great deal, Beatrice realized upon reflection. When she encountered the daughter of the notorious Karl Marx in the refreshment room of the British Museum, Eleanor Marx was “dressed in a slovenly picturesque way with curly black hair flying about in all directions!” Beatrice was taken by Eleanor’s intellectual self-confidence and romantic appearance but repelled by the latter’s bohemian lifestyle. “Unfortunately one cannot mix with human beings without becoming more or less connected with them,” she told herself.³⁸ She adored her cousin Margaret Harkness, the future author of In Darkest London, A City Girl, and other social novels. Maggie lived on her own in a seedy one-room flat in Bloomsbury and had tried teaching, nursing, and acting before discovering her talents as a writer. Her family was horrified, and Maggie had been forced to break off all contact with them, something Beatrice could no more imagine than she could picture immigrating to America. She wished that she could be more contented. “Why should I, wretched little frog, try to puff myself into a professional? If I could rid myself of that mischievous desire to achieve . . .”³⁹

Once again Spencer came to the rescue by suggesting that Beatrice take her older sister’s place as a volunteer rent collector in the East End. She could prepare for a career of social investigation while continuing her private studies. Like Alfred Marshall a generation before, Beatrice found herself drawn to London. She went off to a meeting of the Charity Organization Society, a private group dedicated to “scientific” or evidence-based charity and the gospel of self-help. “People should support themselves by their own earnings and efforts and . . . depend as little as possible on the state.”⁴⁰ Women had traditionally been responsible for visiting the poor, but by the 1880s social work was becoming a respectable profession for spinsters and married women without children. The attractions were manifold. Beatrice observed: “It is distinctly advantageous to us to go amongst the poor . . . We can get from them an experience of life which is novel and interesting; the study of their lives and surrounding gives us the facts whether with we can attempt to solve the social problems.”⁴¹ Shortly afterward she thought, “If I could only devote my life to it . . .”⁴² Yet, as of a few months earlier, Beatrice had made only two or three visits to the Katherine Houses in Whitechapel. “I can’t get the training that I want without neglecting my duty,” she sighed.⁴³

One night that same month, Beatrice lay awake until dawn, too excited to sleep. Her partner at a neighbor’s dinner party had been Joseph Chamberlain, the most important politician in England and the most commanding and charismatic man she had ever met.

Chamberlain was twenty-two years older than Beatrice and twice widowed, but he radiated youthful vigor and enthusiasm. Powerfully built with thick hair, a piercing gaze, and a curiously seductive voice, he was a natural leader. He had made a large fortune as a manufacturer of screws and bolts before moving into politics as the reform-minded mayor of Birmingham. For four years, he “parked, paved, assized, marketed, Gas and Watered and improved”⁴⁴ the grimy factory town into a model metropolis. After spending several years rebuilding the Liberal Party’s crumbling political machine, he was rewarded with a cabinet post.

By the time Beatrice met Chamberlain, he had become the bad boy of English politics. His studied elegance—contrived with a monocle, a bespoke suit, and a fresh orchid on his lapel—hardly fit his rabble-rouser image. But in the stormy debates of that year, Chamberlain had focused voters’ attention on the twin issues of poverty and voting rights. He had used his cabinet post to campaign for universal male suffrage, cheaper housing, and free land for farm laborers. He infuriated Conservatives by inviting the party’s leader, Lord Salisbury, to visit Birmingham—only to serve as the keynote speaker at a rally protesting his presence. His rivals called him the “English Robespierre” and accused him of fomenting class hatred. Queen Victoria demanded that Chamberlain apologize after insulting the royal family at a working-class demonstration. Herbert Spencer told Beatrice that Chamberlain was “a man who may mean well, but who does and will do, an incalculable amount of mischief.”⁴⁵

As a disciple of Spencer’s, Beatrice disapproved of virtually everything Chamberlain stood for, especially his populist appeals to voters’ emotions. Nonetheless, he excited her. “I do, and don’t, like him,” she wrote in her diary. Sensing danger, she warned herself sternly that “talking to ‘clever men’ in society is a snare and delusion . . . Much better read their books.”⁴⁶ She did not, however, follow her own advice.

Given that the Potters and Chamberlain were neighbors at Princes Gate, it was inevitable that the controversial Liberal politician and the fashionable, if slightly unconventional, Miss Potter should be constantly thrown together. The second time they met was that July, at Herbert Spencer’s annual picnic. After spending the entire evening in conversation with Chamberlain, Beatrice admitted, “His personality interested me.”⁴⁷ A couple of weeks later, she found herself seated between Chamberlain and an aristocrat with vast estates. “Whig peer talked of his own possessions, Chamberlain passionately of getting hold of other people’s—for the masses,” she joked. Though she found his political views distasteful, she was captivated by his “intellectual passions” and “any amount of purpose.” Beatrice thought to herself: “How I should like to study that man!”⁴⁸

Beatrice was fooling herself. The social investigator and detached observer had already lost her footing and slipped into the “whirlpool” of emotions to which she was irresistibly drawn but that she could neither comprehend nor control. She agonized over whether or not she would be happy as Chamberlain’s wife. Used to charming the men around her, she was unsatisfied by easy conquests. Starved for affection as a child, she longed to capture the attention of a man who was focused not on her but on some important pursuit. Chamberlain, who wanted to be prime minister, demanded blind loyalty from followers and family alike, and seduced crowds the way other men seduced women. He was the most powerful personality Beatrice had ever encountered. Might he not relish a strong mate?

She tried to analyze his peculiar fascination for her: “The commonplaces of love have always bored me,” she wrote in her diary.

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 note 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. James 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

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, and 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

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 1880s 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, hard-working, 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 unself-consciously 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 that 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