Grand Pursuit: A Story of Economic Genius

She poured her discontents into her diary: “I feel like a caged animal, bound up by the luxury, comfort, and respectability of my position.”

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.

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 . . .”

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.”

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.”

Shortly afterward she thought, “If I could only devote my life to it . . .”

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.

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”

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.”

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.”

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.”

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!”

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.

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.”

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.’ ”

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.

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.

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.”

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.

“If you believe in Herbert Spencer, you won’t believe in me,” Chamberlain had flung at Beatrice during their last exchange.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.”

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.”

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.

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.

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?”

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.