Grand Pursuit: A Story of Economic Genius. Sylvia Nasar
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there will be some very wealthy men. But there will be no clearly marked gradation of classes. There will be nothing like what Mill calls so strongly marked line of demarcation between the different grades of laborers as to be almost equivalent to the hereditary distinction of caste.
Explaining how individual choices might add up to social good—the very thing that Carlyle denied was possible—Marshall defined two types of moral education. One was characteristic of England, where, he claimed, “the peaceful molding of character into harmony with the conditions by which it is surrounded, so that a man . . . will without conscious moral effort be impelled on that course which is in union with the actions, the sympathies and the interests of the society amid which he spends his life.” In America, by contrast, mobility had opened up a second route to moral evolution, namely, “the education of a firm will by the overcoming of difficulties, a will which submits every particular action to the judgment of reason.”96
Most Victorian social commentators, including Karl Marx, feared that the industrial system was not merely destroying traditional social relations and livelihoods but deforming human nature through “ignorance, brutalization, and moral degradation.”97 In America, Marshall saw another possibility: “It appears to me that on the average an American has the habit of using his own individual judgment more consciously and deliberately, more freely and intrepidly, with regards to questions of Ethics than an Englishman uses his.”
Marshall seemed to be talking about mankind in general, but he was also talking about himself. He had developed a firm will by overcoming all sorts of difficulties—a tyrant of a father, genteel poverty, and the oppressive strictures of class. He had broken with authority—by losing his religious belief and defying his father’s wishes that he enter the ministry. Now he felt that his own independence would lead not to his downfall but to great things. What he witnessed in America filled him with hope. “Such a society may degenerate into licentiousness and thence into depravity. But in its higher forms it will develop a mighty system of law, and it will obey law . . . Such a society will be an empire of energy.”98
“I have been rather spoilt” when it comes to “go” and a “strong character” in women,” Marshall had written in a letter from America. In another, he described his “riveting evening” with Miss Nunn, confessing that he found her naïveté “mingled with enterprise” charming. But he added that “for steady support I would have the strength that has been formed by daring and success.”99 Apparently he was thinking of Mary Paley, who had triumphed over the Tripos in his absence.
When they got engaged on his return to Cambridge, Marshall was thirty-four and Mary twenty-six. He was a rising star of the “New Economics.” She was a college lecturer. Marshall’s view of marriage was inspired by intellectual partnerships such as those of George Eliot and George Lewes and Thomas and Jane Carlyle. “The ideal of married life is often said to be that husband and wife should live for each other. If this means that they should live for each other’s gratification it seems to me intensely immoral,” Marshall wrote in an essay. “Man and wife should live, not for each other but with each other for some end.”100 For Mary, who had entered her first engagement “out of boredom,” this was a thrilling vision. Like the other unusual, idiosyncratic Victorian marriages Phyllis Rose describes in Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages, the secret of Alfred Marshall and Mary Paley’s alliance lay in their “telling the same story.”101 The couple immediately decided to make Mary’s textbook a joint project and spent most of their engagement working on it.
They were married at the Parish Church in Ufford, next to the “rambling old house, its front covered with red and white roses,” where Mary had grown up. Mary wore no veil, only jasmine in her hair. In a gesture that proclaimed their untraditional views and high expectations, bride and groom contracted themselves out of the “obey clause.”102
By marrying, Marshall forfeited his fellowship at St. John’s. He and Mary flirted briefly with the notion of teaching at a boarding school, but when the principalship of a newly founded redbrick college in Bristol—the first experiment in coeducation in Britain—suddenly became vacant, they leapt at the opportunity. When they moved to Bristol in 1877, Mary had a tennis court installed and most of the rooms papered with Morris while Marshall chose the secondhand furniture and piano. But she was soon back in the classroom, lecturing on economics and tutoring women students.
Underwritten by Bristol’s business community, University College was to provide “middle and working class men and women with a liberal education.”103 Though strapped for funds, the college managed, during the Marshall’s tenure, to offer day and evening classes to some five hundred students, sponsor public lectures in working-class neighborhoods, provide technical instruction to textile workers, and run a work-study program jointly with local businesses for engineering students. Marshall’s administrative duties were heavy and so was his teaching load. His regular classes, attended by a mix of small businessmen, trade unionists, and women, were “less academic than those at Cambridge . . . a mixture of hard reasoning and practical problems illuminated by interesting sidelights on all sorts of subjects,” a student recalled.104 Marshall “spoke without notes and his face caught the light from the window while all else was in shadow. The lecture seemed to me the most wonderful I had ever heard. He told of his faith that economic science had a great future in furthering the progress of social improvement and his enthusiasm was infectious.”105 The couple continued to work on The Economics of Industry most afternoons, took long walks, and played many games of lawn tennis. One friend referred to “their perfect happiness.”106
Marshall later said that reading Marx convinced him that “economists should investigate history; the history of the past and the more accessible history of the present.”107 But it was Dickens and Mayhew who inspired him to go into factories and industrial towns to interview businessmen, managers, trade union leaders, and workers. “I am greedy for facts,” he used to say.108 He wanted to write for men and women engaged in the “ordinary business of life.”109
He was convinced that he would have to blend theory, history, and statistics, as Marx had done in Das Kapital. But he was instinctively aware that his audience would require useful practical conclusions and a generous sprinkling of direct observation. He was too much of a scientist to theorize without verifying facts, or to rely on secondhand descriptions.
Marshall made a commitment to study the particulars of every major industry. He gathered data on wage rates by occupation and skill level. He paid a great deal of attention to Mill’s “arts of production”110—manufacturing techniques, product design, management—although he admitted that the constant effort of business owners to improve their products, production methods, and suppliers was hard to capture in formal theories. He was particularly interested in how the family-owned, privately held firm functioned versus the increasingly important joint stock company or corporation. Marshall participated in commissions and learned societies and sat on the board of a London charity, carried on a huge scientific correspondence, and, with Mary as an active partner, devoted several weeks each summer to fieldwork.
On one such quest, Mary’s notes refer to “14 different towns, mines, iron and steel works, textile plants, and [the] Salvation Army.”111 The itinerary was extraordinarily ambitious: Coniston copper mines, Kirby slate quarries, Barrow docks, iron and steel works, Millom iron mines, Whitehaven coal mines close to the sea, Lancaster, and Sheffield. Marshall invented a device for organizing and retrieving information from his personal database. His “Red Book” was a homemade notebook sewn together with thread. Each page contained data on a variety of topics, ranging from music to technology to wage rates, arranged in chronological order. Marshall had only to stick a pin through one of the points on a page to see what other developments had occurred simultaneously.
In contrast to the majority of Victorian intellectuals, Marshall admired the entrepreneur and the worker. Carlyle, Marx, and Mill considered modern production to be an unpleasant necessity, labor to be degrading and debilitating, businessmen to be predatory and philistine, and urban life to be vile. Mill considered Communism superior to competition in every respect but two (motivation and tolerance for eccentricity) and looked forward