Grand Pursuit: A Story of Economic Genius. Sylvia Nasar
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and made minimal government and maximum liberty the creed of middle-class progressives. Alfred Marshall imbibed more evolutionary theory from Spencer than from Darwin. Karl Marx sent Spencer a signed copy of the second edition of Das Kapital in the hopes that the philosopher’s endorsement would boost its sales.64
By the early 1880s, however, Spencer was again walking against the tide. His latest book, The Man Versus the State, was a sweeping indictment of the steady growth of government regulation and taxation:
Dictatorial measures, rapidly multiplied, have tended continually to narrow the liberties of individuals; and have done this in a double way. Regulations have been made in yearly-growing numbers, restraining the citizen in directions where his actions were previously unchecked, and compelling actions which previously he might perform or not as he liked; and at the same time heavier public burdens, chiefly local, have further restricted his freedom, by lessening that portion of his earnings which he can spend as he pleases, and augmenting the portion taken from him to be spent as public agents please.65
His brief for laissez-faire struck the reading public as a last-ditch defense of an outmoded, reactionary, and increasingly irrelevant doctrine. As Himmelfarb explains, not only were most thinking Victorians moving away from, or at least questioning, laissez-faire, but many now regretted that they had ever embraced it. She cites Arnold Toynbee, the Oxford economic historian, who apologized to a working-class audience: “We—the middle classes, I mean not merely the very rich—we have neglected you; instead of justice we have offered you charity.”66
When Spencer’s book appeared in 1884, he and Beatrice were closer than ever, spending several hours a day together. “I understand the working of Herbert Spencer’s reason; but I do not understand the reason of Mr. Chamberlain’s passion,” she admitted.67 She sent her signed copy of The Man Versus the State to the mistress of Girton College at Cambridge with a note that shows that she remained the most ardent of Spencer’s disciples. Referring to relief for the jobless, public schools, safety regulations, and other instances of large-scale “state intervention,” she wrote, “I object to these gigantic experiments . . . which flavor of inadequately—thought-out theories—the most dangerous of all social poisons . . . the crude prescriptions of social quacks.”68
Yet, she was ambivalent. Chamberlain had forced her to recognize that “social questions are the vital questions of today. They take the place of religion.”69 So while she was not prepared to embrace the new “time spirit” overnight, she was not ready to dismiss it out of hand, much less give up its virile and forceful proponent.70
When Chamberlain’s sister invited her to visit Highbury, his massive new mansion in Birmingham, Beatrice went at once, assuming that the invitation originated with her chosen lover. But as soon as she arrived she was struck by the incompatibility of their tastes. She found nothing to praise about the “elaborately built red-brick house with numberless bow windows” and could barely repress a shudder when confronted with its vulgar interior of “elaborately-carved marble arches, its satin paper, rich hangings and choice watercolors . . . forlornly grand. No books, no work, no music, not even a harmless antimacassar, to relieve the oppressive richness of the satin-covered furniture.”
On Beatrice’s first day there, John Bright, an elder statesman of the Liberal Party, regaled her with reminiscences of her mother’s brilliance as “girl-hostess” to the teetotalers and Anti–Corn Law League enthusiasts who visited the Heyworth house forty years earlier, recalling Laurencina’s political courage during the anti–Corn Law campaign. The old man’s expression of admiration for her mother’s political faculty and activism made Chamberlain’s insistence that the women in his house have no independent opinions seem even more despotic. But Chamberlain’s egotism attracted Beatrice. That evening at the Birmingham Town Hall, she watched him seduce a crowd of thousands and dominate it completely. Beatrice mocked the constituency as uneducated and unquestioning, hypnotized by Chamberlain’s passionate speaking and not his ideas, but seeing “the submission of the whole town to his autocratic rule,” she admitted that her own surrender was inevitable. Chamberlain would rule the same way at home and even her own feelings would betray her. (“When feeling becomes strong, as it would do with me in marriage, it would mean the absolute subordination of the reason to it.”) Even knowing that Chamberlain would make her miserable, Beatrice was caught. “His personality absorbs all my thought,” she wrote in her diary.
The next morning, Chamberlain made a great point of taking Beatrice on a tour of his vast new “orchid house.” Beatrice declared that the only flowers she loved were wildflowers, and feigned surprise when Chamberlain appeared annoyed. That evening, Beatrice thought she detected in his looks and manner an “intense desire that I should think and feel like him” and “jealousy of other influences.” She took this to mean that his “susceptibility” to her was growing.71
In January 1885, Chamberlain was launching the most radical and flamboyant campaign of his career. He enraged his fellow Liberals by warning his working-class constituents that the franchise wouldn’t lead to real democracy unless they organized themselves politically. He scandalized Conservatives by ratcheting up the rhetoric of class warfare with the famous phrase “I ask what ransom property will pay for the security which it enjoys?”72 Having administered Birmingham on the bold principle of “high rates and a healthy city,” Chamberlain took advantage of his cabinet position to demand universal male suffrage, free secular education, and “three acres and a cow” for those who preferred individual production on the land to work for wages in the mine or the factory. These were to be paid for by higher taxes on land, profits, and inheritances. Once again Beatrice went to Birmingham and sat in the gallery while he delivered a fiery peroration, and the next day, she again experienced the humiliation of rejection. He did not propose.
Beatrice’s obsessive, conflicted passion continued to torment her. She despised herself for being infatuated with a domineering man, but also for failing to conquer him. She had dared to hope for a life combining love and intellectual achievement. She had, at different times, been ready to sacrifice one for the sake of the other. Now it seemed to her that she had been deluded about her own potential from the start. “I see clearly that my intellectual faculty is only mirage, that I have no special mission” and “I have loved and lost; but possibly by my own willful mishandling, possibly also for my own happiness; but still lost.”73
In her dejected state, she marveled that she had ever aspired to win an extraordinary man like Chamberlain and tortured herself with what might have been: “If I had from the first believed in that purpose, if the influence which formed me and the natural tendency of my character, if they had been different, I might have been his helpmate. It would not have been a happy life; it might have been a noble one.”74 On the first of August, she made her will: “In case of my death I should wish that all these diary-books, after being read (if he shall care to) by Father, should be sent to Carrie Darling [a friend]. Beatrice Potter.”75
Somehow, she recovered from the blow. By the general election in early November 1885, suicide no longer dominated her thoughts, and she could feel a bit of her energy returning. As she watched her father set off for the polls to cast his vote, she was once again plotting her career as social investigator. That is when fate landed her another blow that threatened to bring independent action “to a sudden and disastrous end.”76 Richard Potter was brought back to Standish from the polls, having suffered a devastating paralytic stroke that did not, however, kill him.
As always, Beatrice poured her despair into her diary. “Companionizing a failing mind—a life without physical or mental activity—no work. Good God, how awful.”77 On New Year’s Day, she drafted another will, begging the reader to destroy her diary after her death. “If Death comes it will be welcome,” she wrote bitterly. “The position of an unmarried daughter at home is an unhappy one even for a strong woman: it is an impossible one for a weak one.”78
Now, her old obsession with how she was to live, what purpose she would achieve, and whom she would love seemed like the purest hubris. “I am never at peace with myself now,” she wrote in early February 1886. “The whole of my past life looks like an irretrievable