Grand Pursuit: A Story of Economic Genius. Sylvia Nasar
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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.”45
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.”46 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.”47 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!”48
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.49
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.”50 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.51 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.”52
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.53 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.54
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.55 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.”56
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.’ ”57 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.58 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.59
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.”60 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.61
“If you believe in Herbert Spencer, you won’t believe in me,” Chamberlain had flung at Beatrice during their last exchange.62 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.63 But for two decades or more, Spencer had an entire generation of thinking men and women following his lead. His Social Statics,