Grand Pursuit: A Story of Economic Genius. Sylvia Nasar
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only that there are 20,000 people out of employment at the East End, as it is paraded in every newspaper. It is that, in every parish, not less than twice and sometimes five times the usual number are on the Poor Law books. It is that all the workhouses are hospitals. It is that the ragged schools instead of being able to give one meal a day are in danger of being shut up. And this all over Marylebone, St. Pancras, the Strand, and the South of London.5
Bread riots broke out in Greenwich, and bakers and other small shopkeepers threatened to arm themselves against angry mobs.6 In May, thousands of East End residents battled mounted police in Hyde Park, ostensibly to show their support for the Second Reform Act and the workman’s right to vote, but mostly to vent their frustration and fury at the rich.7
Middle-class Londoners could hardly avoid knowing of the distress in their midst, for they were living in the new information age, bombarded by mail deliveries five times a day, newspapers, books, journals, lectures, and sermons. A new generation of reporters inspired by the examples of Henry Mayhew, Charles Dickens, and other journalists of the 1840s filled the pages of the Daily News, the Morning Star, the Pall Mall Gazette, the Westminster Review, Household Words, the Tory Daily Mail, and the liberal Times with sensational eyewitness accounts and firsthand investigations in the East End. Reporters disguised themselves as down-and-out workmen and spent nights in the poorhouse in order to describe its horrors. Robert Giffen, editor at the liberal Daily News, was becoming one of the foremost statisticians of his day. His first major academic article had celebrated the tripling of national wealth between 1845 and 1865, but his second, written in 1867, was markedly different in tone and point of view, an attack on harshly regressive tax proposals that fell on the “necessaries of the poor.” What upset Giffen about the 1866–67 depression, writes his biographer Roger Mason, is that its chief victims had mostly worked, had saved, and had obeyed the law while the more fortunate had donated generously to charity. But virtue had not sufficed to prevent widespread misery.8
The resurgence of hunger, homelessness, and disease in the midst of great wealth radicalized the generation that had grown up during the boom and had taken affluence and progress for granted. Playwrights wrote dramas with proletarian heroes. Poets published works of social criticism. Professors and ministers used their pulpits to denounce British society. Typical of such jeremiads was that of the blind Liberal reformer Henry Fawcett, who held a chair in political economy at the University of Cambridge:
We are told that our exports and imports are rapidly increasing; glowing descriptions are given of an Empire upon which the sun never sets, and of a commerce which extends over the world. Our mercantile marine is ever increasing; manufactories are augmenting in number and in magnitude. All the evidences of growing luxury are around us; there are more splendid equipages in the parks and the style of living is each year becoming more sumptuous . . . But let us look on another side of the picture; and what do we then observe? Side by side with this vast wealth, closely contiguous to all this sinful luxury there stalks the fearful specter of widespread poverty, and of growing pauperism! Visit the greatest centres of commerce and trade, and what will be observed? The direst poverty always accompanying the greatest wealth!9
Filled with Christian guilt and the desire to do good, university graduates who had earlier anticipated becoming missionaries in remote corners of the empire were discovering that a great deal of good needed to be done at home. William Henry Fremantle, the author of The World as the Subject of Redemption, became the vicar in one of London’s poorest parishes, St. Mary’s, that year. A walk through the East End during the cholera epidemic convinced Thomas Barnardo, a member of an evangelical sect, to build orphanages for pauper children instead of going to China to convert the Chinese. A similar experience inspired “General” William Booth, the author of In Darkest England and the Way Out, to organize a Salvation Army. Samuel Barnett, an Oxford scholar, founded the University Settlers Association to encourage university students to live among the poor running soup kitchens and evening classes.
Missionaries in their own land, these young men and women strove to be scientific rather than sentimental. Their vocation was not dispensing charity but converting the poor to middle-class values and habits. As Edward Denison, an Oxford graduate, remarked in 1867: “By giving alms you keep them permanently crooked. Build school-houses, pay teachers, give prizes, frame workmen’s clubs; help them to help themselves.”10
A young man with delicate features, silky blond hair, and shining blue eyes boarded the Glasgow-bound Great Northern Railway at London’s Euston Station. It was early June 1867. He was carrying only a walking stick and a rucksack crammed with books. His fellow passengers might have taken him for a curate or schoolmaster on a mountaineering holiday. But when the train reached Manchester, the young man put his rucksack on, jumped down onto the platform, and disappeared in the crowd.
Before resuming his journey north to the Scottish highlands, Alfred Marshall, a twenty-four-year-old mathematician and fellow of St. John’s College in Cambridge, spent hours walking through factory districts and the surrounding slums “looking into the faces of the poorest people.” He was debating whether to make German philosophy or Austrian psychology his life’s work. These were his first steps away from metaphysics and the beginning of a dogged pursuit of social reality. He later said that these walks forced him to consider the “justification of existing conditions of society.”11
In Manchester, Marshall found the smoky brown sky, muddy brown streets, and long piles of warehouses, cavernous mills, and insalubrious tenements—all within a few hundred yards of glittering shops, gracious parks, and grand hotels—that novels such as Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South had led him to expect. In the narrow backstreets he encountered sallow, undersized men and stunted, pale factory girls with thin shawls and hair flecked with wisps of cotton. The sight of “so much want” amid “so much wealth” prompted Marshall to ask whether the existence of a proletariat was indeed “a necessity of nature,” as he had been taught to believe. “Why not make every man a gentleman?” he asked himself.12
Marshall, who lacked the plummy accent and easy manners of other fellows of St. John’s College, sometimes compared his discovery of poverty to that of original sin and his ultimate embrace of economics to a religious conversion. But although poverty first occurred to him as a subject of study after the panic of 1866, the implication that he had had to wait until then to look into the faces of poor people was grossly misleading.13 His maternal grandfather was a butcher and his paternal grandfather a bankrupt. His father and uncles started life as penniless orphans. William Marshall had put down “gentleman” as his occupation on his marriage license, but he had never risen above the modest position of cashier at the Bank of England. His son Alfred was born not, as he later intimated, in an upscale suburb but in Bermondsey, one of London’s most notorious slums, in the shadow of a tannery. When the Marshalls moved to the lower-middle-class Clapham, they took a house opposite a gasworks.
Thanks to his precocious intelligence and his father’s efforts to convince a director of the bank to sponsor his education, Marshall was admitted to Merchant Taylors’, a private school in the City that catered to the sons of bankers and stockbrokers. From the age of eight, he commuted daily by omnibus, ferry, and foot through the most noxious manufacturing districts and slums bordering the Thames. Marshall had been looking into the faces of poor people all his life.
In Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, published in 1861, the year Marshall graduated from Merchant Taylors’, the diminutive orphan hero, Pip, makes what he describes as a “lunatic confession.” After swearing his confidante to absolute secrecy three times over, he whispers, “I want to be a gentleman.”14 His playmate Biddy is as nonplussed as if Pip, on the verge of being apprenticed to a blacksmith, had expressed ambitions to become the Pope. Indeed, to make his hero’s mad dream come true, Dickens had to invent convicts on a foggy moor, a haughty heiress, a haunted mansion, a mysterious legacy, and a secret benefactor. Even in an age that celebrated the self-made man, the notion that a boy like Pip—never mind the whole mass of Pips—could join the middle class was understood to be the stuff of pure fantasy or eccentric utopian vision, as divorced from real life as Dickens’s phantasmagoric novel. As an editorialist for the Times observed dryly in 1859, “Ninety nine people in a hundred cannot ‘get on’ in life but