Grand Pursuit: A Story of Economic Genius. Sylvia Nasar
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of the Trafalgar Square Riot and the subsequent Tory electoral victory, Sidney had found his true vocation as the brains of the Fabian Society.
The Fabians were odd ducks. Sidney embraced “collective ownership where ever practicable; collective regulation everywhere else; collective provision according to need for all the impotent and sufferers; and collective taxation in proportion to wealth, especially surplus wealth.” But Fabian Socialism was associated mostly with local government and small-scale projects such as dairy cooperatives and government pawnshops. The Fabians’ strategy differed from that of most other Socialist groups as well. Eschewing both electoral politics and revolution, they sought to introduce Socialism gradually by “impregnating all the existence of forces of society with Collectivist ideals and Collectivist principles.”128
When Sidney was elected to the Fabian steering committee in 1887, the society had sixty-seven members, an annual income of £32, and a reputation for being a good place for pretty women to meet brilliant men and vice versa. The English historian G. M. Trevelyan described the Fabians as “intelligence officers without an army.” They did not aspire to become a political party in Parliament. Instead, they hoped to influence policies, “the direction of the great hosts moving under other banners.”129 Sidney, who had concluded that “nothing in England is done without the consent of a small intellectual yet practical class in London not 2,000 in number” and that electoral politics was a rich man’s game, called the Fabian strategy of infiltrating the establishment “permeating.”130
Sidney’s best friend and partner in crime was George Bernard Shaw, a witty Irish sprite of a man who dashed off theater reviews and acted as the Fabians’ chief publicist. By the mid-1890s, the former Dublin rent collector and City of London stockbroker was convinced that social problems had economic origins. He proceeded to devote the second half of the 1880s to “mastering” economics. He and Sidney were both trying to work out what they believed and where to direct their energies. They attended regular meetings of a group organized by several professional economists at City of London College. Their studies led them to reject both utopian Socialism and Marxist Communism. They called their goal Socialism, but it was Socialism with property, Parliament, and capitalists and without Marx or class warfare. They wished to tame and control the “Frankenstein” of free enterprise rather than to murder it, and to tax the rich rather than to annihilate them.131
Within a few weeks of meeting Sidney for the first time, Beatrice was beginning to think that “a socialist community in which there will be individual freedom and public property” might be viable—and attractive. “At last I am a socialist!” she declared.132 Beatrice had caught the spirit of the times that prompted William Harcourt, a Liberal MP, to exclaim during the 1888 budget debate, “We are all socialists now.”133 As for Sidney, she was beginning to think of him as “one of the small body of men with whom I may sooner or later throw in my lot for good and all.”134
At first, Beatrice had taken Sidney’s obvious infatuation for granted and had been happy to let her intellectual dependence on him grow. When he confessed that he adored her and wanted to marry her, she had responded with a lecture against mixing love with work. She had insisted on being his collaborator, not his wife, and had banned any further allusion to “lower feelings.”135
In 1891, Beatrice was again living in London for the season, nervously waiting for her book on cooperatives to appear in print and worrying about a series of lectures she had agreed to deliver. Sidney announced that he was quitting the civil service. He had no life other than work and felt “like the London cabhorse who could not be taken out of his shafts lest he fall down.”136 He once again brought up the forbidden topic, promising that if she relented he would let her live the outdoorsy, abstemious, hard-working, intensely social life she wanted. He suggested they write a book on trade unions together. After a year of telling Sidney “I do not love you,” Beatrice finally said “yes.”137
When Sidney sent Beatrice a full-length photograph of himself, she begged him to “let me have your head only—it is your head only that I am marrying . . . It is too hideous for anything.”138 She dreaded telling her family and friends. “The world will wonder,” Beatrice wrote in her diary.
On the face of it, it seems an extraordinary end to the once brilliant Beatrice Potter . . . to marry an ugly little man with no social position and less means, whose only recommendation so some may say is a certain pushing ability. And I am not “in love,” not as I was. But I see something else in him . . . a fine intellect and a warmheartedness, a power of self-subordination and self-devotion for the common good.139
Beatrice insisted that the engagement was to be a secret as long as her father was alive. Only her sisters and a few intimate friends were told. The Booths reacted coolly, and Herbert Spencer promptly dropped her as literary executor, a position that had once been a source of great pride to Beatrice.
Richard Potter died a few days before Beatrice’s thirty-fourth birthday on New Year’s Day, 1892. He bequeathed his favorite daughter an annual income of £1,506 a year and “incomparable luxury of freedom from all care.”140 After the funeral, Beatrice spent a week at her prospective mother-in-law’s “ugly and small surroundings” in Park Village near Regents Park. On July 23, 1892, Beatrice and Sidney were married in a registry office in London. Beatrice recorded the event in her diary: “Exit Beatrice Potter. Enter Beatrice Webb, or rather (Mrs.) Sidney Webb for I lose alas! both names.”141
When George Bernard Shaw paid his first extended visit to the newlyweds more than a year later, in the late summer of 1893, Beatrice sized him up as vain, flighty, and a born philanderer, but “a brilliant talker” who “liked to flirt and was therefore a delightful companion.” While Sidney was the “organizer” of the Fabian junta, she put Shaw down as its “sparkle and flavour.”142
Shaw’s first play, Widowers’ Houses, had been put on at the Royalty Theatre the previous December, and now he was at work on a new play that operated on the same formula: taking one of Victorian society’s “unspeakable subjects,” in this case a reviled profession, and turning it into a metaphor for the way the society really worked.143
All the past year the press had been full of stories about the Continent’s legal brothels—high-end men’s clubs where business was conducted—in which English girls were lured into sexual slavery. As usual, Shaw was recasting a social problem as an economic problem, and he wrote to another friend that “in all my plays my economic studies have played as important a part as knowledge of anatomy does in the works of Michael Angelo.”144 His character Mrs. Warren, who runs a high-end brothel in Vienna, is a practical businesswoman who understands that prostitution isn’t about sex but about money. Just as he had wanted the audience to see that the slumlord of Widowers’ Houses was not a villain but a symptom of a social system in which everyone was implicated, he now wished them to understand that in a society that drives women into prostitution, there were no innocents. “Nothing would please our sanctimonious British public more than to throw the whole guilt of Mrs. Warren’s profession on Mrs. Warren herself,” wrote Shaw in a preface, “Now the whole aim of my play is to throw that guilt on the British public itself.”145
It was Beatrice who suggested that Shaw “should put on the stage a real modern lady of the governing class” rather than a stereotypical sentimental courtesan.146 The result was Vivie Warren, the play’s heroine and Mrs. Warren’s Cambridge-educated daughter. Like Beatrice, Vivie is “attractive . . . sensible . . . self-possessed.” Like Beatrice, Vivie escapes her class and sexual destiny. In the Guy de Maupassant story “Yvette,” which supplied Shaw with his plot, birth is destiny. “There’s no alternative,” says Madame Obardi, the prostitute mother to Yvette, heroine of the story, but in the world that Vivie Warren inhabits—late Victorian England—there is an alternative. The discovery of Mrs. Warren’s real business and the true source of the income that had paid for her daughter’s Cambridge education shatter Vivie’s innocence. But instead of killing herself or resigning herself to following in her mother’s footsteps, Vivie takes up . . . accounting. “My work is not your work, and my way is not your way,” she tells