Grand Pursuit: A Story of Economic Genius. Sylvia Nasar
Читать онлайн книгу.
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