Grand Pursuit: A Story of Economic Genius

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.

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.”

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.”

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.”

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.”

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.”

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.”

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.

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.