Unceasing War on Poverty: Beatrice & Sidney Webb and their world

By Michael Ward

This engaging biography of Sidney and Beatrice Webb, ‘Unceasing War on Poverty’, takes the reader into the world of the Webbs, the remarkable couple who changed Britain, inspiring a generation to fight for a better society.
Born in the 1850s, they came from very different backgrounds. They married in 1892 - but only after Beatrice had previously experienced a long, unhappy relationship. Their fifty-year partnership produced books and reports rather than children. Many of the reforms the Webbs demanded were enacted after their deaths. The hated Poor Law was abolished, and a National Health Service was established, transforming millions of lives. Michael Ward’s fascinating book details their methods: meticulous research, private persuasion and hospitality, barnstorming public campaigning, and hard political organisation. They created and shaped institutions - the Fabian Society, the London School of Economics, and the ‘New Statesman’ - which flourish to this day. Their work is central to understanding change in twentieth century British politics and society.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Conrad Press
• Release date: Mar 29, 2024
• ISBN: 9781839787249

Book preview

9781839787249.jpg

Unceasing war on poverty:

Beatrice and Sidney Webb and their world

Michael Ward

Unceasing War on Poverty Beatrice and Sidney Webb and their world

Published by The Conrad Press in the United Kingdom 2024

Tel: [phone]

www.theconradpress.com

[e-mail]

ISBN 9781839787249

Copyright © Michael Ward 2024

Although every precaution has been taken in preparing this book, the publisher and author assume no responsibility for errors or omissions. Neither is any liability assumed for damages resulting from the use of information contained herein.

All rights reserved.

Typesetting and Cover Design by: Charlotte Mouncey, www.bookstyle.co.uk

Jacket includes image attributed to Bertha Newcombe, ‘Problems of Trade Unionism’, 1881. Wellcome Collection. (CC BY 4.0)

The Conrad Press logo was designed by Maria Priestley.

By their work, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, more widely than any others of their generation, changed for the better the condition of the masses of the people. In field after field of social endeavour we are today reaping the fruits of the seed which they sowed in the minds and hearts of men and women. They declared an unceasing war on poverty.

(Address by Clement Attlee, 12.12.1947, when the ashes of Beatrice and Sidney Webb were interred in Westminster Abbey).

PREFACE

They made a striking couple.

Beatrice Potter was tall and slim; Sidney Webb short and stout. Beatrice was one of the nine daughters of Richard Potter (sometime chairman of the Great Western Railway) and his wife Lawrencina. Sidney’s mother, Elizabeth, ran a hairdressing salon off London’s Leicester Square; his father, Charles, kept the books for the business.

Together Beatrice and Sidney formed an enduring partnership. They wrote books together; they travelled the world together. Sidney supported Beatrice when she sat on government committees; Beatrice supported Sidney when he became a County Councillor, a member of parliament, a cabinet minister, and finally a peer. In 1909, in their fifties, they launched a two-year, raging, tearing propaganda campaign for the abolition of the Poor Law.

Early in their relationship, Beatrice noted in her diary that:

We are both second-rate minds: but we are curiously combined – I am the investigator, and he the executor. ¹

After both had died in the 1940s, their ashes were placed in Westminster Abbey. Their extensive papers were deposited in the archives at the London School of Economics (LSE), which they had established in 1894.

While researching this book, I often worked in the LSE archives. I would travel on the London Underground Northern Line to Leicester Square – arriving in a neighbourhood the Webbs knew well. I would leave the station by the Cranbourn Street exit; immediately facing me was the Westminster City Council green ceramic plaque which marks the site of Sidney’s mother’s hairdressing business, and where he was born.

Turning left along Cranbourn Street, I would cross St Martin’s Lane, where Sidney first went to school, and continue along Long Acre, on to Great Queen Street, past the original offices of the New Statesman, started by the Webbs in 1913.

On the corner of Great Queen Street and Kingsway stands the Kingsway Hall Hotel. This replaces Kingsway Hall, built in 1912; in the Webbs’ lifetime it was often used for Fabian lectures. After Sidney died in 1947, it was the setting for his memorial meeting.

Then I would turn on to Kingsway itself – a wide street, constructed by the London County Council (LCC) in its first flush of municipal confidence and pride before 1914. Sidney was an LCC member from 1892 to 1910. Projects like Kingsway were funded through ‘betterment’ – acquisition of more land than was required for the road itself, so that sites on Kingsway could be sold on long leases for commercial development.

Walking down Kingsway, after a few hundred yards I would arrive at Aldwych, and at LSE itself. The School now occupies a large site, with some buildings fronting on to Kingsway. Sidney secured the original LSE site (on permanent loan, for a peppercorn rent) on Clare Market, a side street, as part of the LCC improvement scheme.

The Fabian Society – the left of centre political think-tank, of which Sidney was an early member and Beatrice also became a leading member – was based nearby. The first Fabian office (from 1891) was at 276 The Strand; later, they moved to Clifford’s Inn, close to LSE.

Many of the regular Fabian meetings were held at Essex Hall, a Unitarian chapel just off the Strand; Fabian members would gather in local cafes before meetings. One evening in February 1906 two recent Fabian recruits, Arthur Colegate and his friend Clifford Sharp (later the first editor of the New Statesman) celebrated Colegate’s 22nd birthday:

…dinner at the Strand Cabin and then went on to Essex Hall, Strand to hear a paper by H.G. Wells on The Faults of the Fabian … ²

When in 1909 the Webbs set up the National Campaign for the Prevention of Destitution (NCPD), campaigning for the implementation of their Minority Report on the Poor Laws, offices were rented in nearby Norfolk Street. The campaign was unsuccessful, and in 1911 Beatrice and Sidney took a sabbatical year and travelled round the world. When they got back, the Fabians organized a welcome home dinner and soiree, at the Holborn restaurant on the corner of Kingsway and New Oxford Street. ³

The first meeting of the New Statesman board took place in the NCPD office. The Fabian Research Bureau – established by Beatrice in 1912 – was also based there.

Sidney and Beatrice themselves lived a mile away, in a house overlooking the Thames. In the years before 1914 this small corner of London was the heart of their political world. Beatrice wrote in her diary in 1913 that their lives were centred on

…the three offices, of the Fabian, the National Committee and Research Department, and the New Statesman; and it is with the inhabitants of these that we spend our outdoor life… ⁴

Their relationship was both personal and political; Beatrice called it a working comradeship or the firm of Webb. Their friend Bertrand Russell said that they became

…the most completely married couple I have ever known…

The newspaper editor Alfred Gardiner said that Sidney and Beatrice were the ablest couple in London. He thought they had virtually abandoned their separate identities. Either could speak for both: they spoke, not of ‘I’ but of ‘we’. H G Wells, who caricatured the Webbs in his novel The New Machiavelli, observed the same behaviour.

Their talk of ‘we’ was not confined to their work and their opinions: it applied also to their personal lives, their food, and their health. For Russell, Beatrice’s indiscriminate use of ‘we’

…was one of the delights of their friends. ⁵

For much of her adult life Beatrice ate very little. An obsessive dieter and a borderline anorexic, she experienced several nervous breakdowns. Despite their closeness, her success in enforcing her dietary regime on Sidney was limited.

In September 1903. Beatrice and Sidney, and Bertrand and Alys Russell, went on a cycling holiday together in Normandy. Tensions were emerging between the Russells, which would lead before long to their separation. But both Webbs enjoyed themselves; the mixture of exercise and sightseeing left them rested and fit rather than tired.

Russell noticed that Beatrice did not stop trying to manage Sidney’s diet. According to Russell, Beatrice stayed in her room in the mornings; she could not bear the sight of the others eating breakfast. Sidney came down for rolls and coffee but was not allowed butter. Beatrice sent the chambermaid down to the breakfast room with a stern warning:

We do not have butter for Sidney’s breakfast.’⁶

I first heard this anecdote from my parents; it was the first I knew of the Webbs. The source is Russell’s autobiography, the first volume of which appeared in 1967. Maybe my parents borrowed the autobiography from the library; maybe they saw the story in a review. I was in my teens, about to go and study philosophy, politics and economics. They must have thought it was the sort of thing I would appreciate – perhaps even remember – anyhow, they passed it on.

By the time I came to research this book my mother was in her mid-90s; she would ask what I was doing; I would bring her up to date with my latest discoveries about Sidney and Beatrice and their world. Her invariable response would be

We do not have butter for Sidney’s breakfast.

I next came across the Webbs as an undergraduate student. One of my final year papers in 1972 was ‘Industrial Relations and Labour Economics’; I was taught by Bill McCarthy, who also chaired the Fabian Society’s research committee. Bill told his students to read the Webbs’ Industrial Democracy, with its clear exposition of trade union methods. More than 70 years after its first publication, it remained, (and still remains) an authoritative source.

After I graduated, my first job was based at Toynbee Hall, the East London settlement established by Canon Samuel Barnett and his wife Henrietta in 1884. Sidney and Beatrice knew the Barnetts well; their protegee, and lifetime friend, William Beveridge, became Sub Warden of Toynbee in 1904, after leaving Oxford. Clement Attlee became Secretary of Toynbee in 1909. Toynbee Hall has been – and remains – a great incubator for social policy. Later, I studied in the evenings – as Sidney had done – at Birkbeck, where I completed an MA in Economic and Social History.

In 1981 I was elected to the Greater London Council (GLC) – successor to the LCC. I had a grand office in the 1920s splendour of County Hall, which Beatrice had called

…the LCC palace on the river. ⁷

Sidney was a role model: where he had built the Council’s education role from scratch, my job was to create an economic development programme. My methods were like Sidney’s: close study of arcane corners of local government legislation and careful exploitation of little-known sources of local government finance, all backed up as necessary with Counsel’s Opinion, provided in accordance with meticulously drafted instructions.

One of my tasks at County Hall was to identify, and sell off, assets the Council no longer required, in order to generate funds to support new investment programmes. By then the Council had owned the freeholds of the office blocks on Kingsway for eighty years or more. Selling those freeholds to the firms that occupied the offices raised a lot of money to support the capital programme of the 1980s GLC.

Gradually, over the years, I collected copies of the Webbs’ books. It was always interesting to see which individuals or institutions now considered they could manage without the Webb canon. My copies of the History of Local Government had belonged to the Inner London Education Authority, which had inherited them from the education library of the London County Council. A copy of Problems of Modern Industry came from the library of the Manchester Guardian. The two-volume Soviet Communism: a new civilization was from Transport House Birmingham – regional headquarters of the Transport and General Workers Union. My copy of Beatrice’s first book, The Cooperative Movement in Great Britain, had belonged to Rochdale Public Libraries.

I have a couple of books from the Webbs’ own library. The first is one of the printed evidence volumes for the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws, embossed in gold letters ‘Mrs Sidney Webb’. The other is the First World War diary of Beatrice’s sister Kate – printed privately in 1927. I found my copy in an Oxfam shop, a few hundred yards from Grosvenor Road, the Webbs’ London home. An inscription on the flyleaf tells me that it had been given away by the Webbs at a big family party in 1937.

Before the party, Beatrice had spent weeks sorting their library:

…the books had overflown onto tables and chairs so that those I sought were hopelessly out of sight – whilst those we did not want were piling up in front. ⁸

So she sorted out the duplicates to give away at the party.

Another sister, Georgina, wrote a history of the Potters, their father’s family; what is now my copy carries the bookplate of Stafford and Isobel Cripps.

I acquired the books; sometimes I read them. After Mrs Thatcher abolished the GLC in 1986, I moved to Manchester. I continued to work on local economic development, establishing and running the Centre for Local Economic Strategies (CLES). I stayed 13 years in Manchester; my two children were born there. In 2000 we all moved to London; I spent the next three and a half years setting up and leading the London Development Agency – the Mayor of London’s economic development agency, part of the restored fabric of London government, taking over where the LCC and the GLC had left off.

In 2009, the centenary of Beatrice’s Minority Report on the Poor Law, I heard, through the Smith Institute (named after John Smith, not Adam) of an opportunity to produce a commemorative pamphlet for the Webb Memorial Trust. I was commissioned to write it; the result, Beatrice Webb, her quest for a Fairer Society, was launched at LSE in 2011. The Trust then generously supported my proposal to write a new biography.

But why a new life of the Webbs?

A new appraisal of the Webbs and their role is overdue. Much has been written about them, little of it recent. The most recent general life of both Sidney and Beatrice is that by Lisanne Radice, published in 1984. (Beatrice and Sidney Webb: Fabian Socialists). Attempts by the Webbs’ executors, the Passfield Trustees, to commission a comprehensive official biography were unsuccessful. With the passage of time, there is important material on the Webbs now available that was either closed to, or not easily accessible to previous writers.

But the overriding reason for a fresh appraisal of Sidney and Beatrice Webb and their work must be that the world has changed out of all recognition since they died in the 1940s, and since earlier biographies appeared.

Previous writers – whether from the Webbs’ own circle like Mary Agnes Hamilton, or Margaret Cole, or writers from within the Fabian tradition – tended to see one great achievement: the Webbs’ role in the evolution of Britain’s welfare state – and one great error: their uncritical stance towards the Soviet Union in the 1930s.

Beveridge wrote that

The Webbs did much to make Britain as we know it today. ⁹

Radice, in her 1984 study, concludes that

With Lloyd George and Beveridge, Beatrice and Sidney Webb can justly be said to be the founders of the modern welfare state. ¹⁰

The excuses and explanations offered for the Webbs’ devotion to the Soviet Union in their later years are many and various. Radice pleads in mitigation that Sidney and Beatrice were very old at the time, arguing that Soviet Communism was

…the work not of two ruthless totalitarians but of two gullible septuagenarians. ¹¹

Others point out that the Webbs were not unique in turning away from social democratic reformism in the 1930s: many others on the British left travelled the same route. After the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, Russia, wrote Margaret Cole, had become …the hope of the world. ¹²

The Webbs had not been early enthusiasts for the Bolsheviks. Their faith was rooted in the gradual, nonviolent transformation of society. What changed was their overwhelming disappointment at the record of the second MacDonald minority Labour government, its failure to deal with mass unemployment, and its ultimate collapse in the financial crisis of August 1931. By 1931 they had begun to doubt, not just the inevitability of gradualness, but even the possibility of gradualness. ¹³

Sidney and Beatrice inspired many of the reforms of the 1945 Labour government. At the reinterment of their ashes in 1947, Prime Minister Clement Attlee said that the Webbs, more than any others of their generation

…changed for the better the condition of the masses of the people. ¹⁴

It was Attlee’s 1945 Labour government that finally abolished the Poor Law, forty years after the Minority Report. Attlee’s own first job in politics had been as a young organiser for the Webbs’ Poor Law campaign. Sidney and Beatrice inspired a generation of young people, moving the issues of poverty and destitution to the centre of the political agenda. Their ideas contributed to the development of policies for full employment and the establishment of the National Health Service. They helped develop the form in which public ownership of major industries was established.

George Dangerfield, in The Strange Death of Liberal England (1935) identifies the young poet Rupert Brooke (who died of septicaemia, in April 1915, on the way to fight at Gallipoli) as a central figure in the political changes of the Edwardian period. Dangerfield describes how Brooke fell under the spell of Beatrice and Sidney. Brooke – and many of his generation – were inspired by their arguments

…the strong prose, the vigorous thought, the feeling that infuses the whole of lives given up to the betterment of mankind…¹⁵

Dangerfield suggests that the Webbs’ conclusions were meagre – but it was the language and advocacy that mattered to their audience. By the time war came, Brooke’s own socialism had faded. While it lasted, he put his faith in the goodness of man.

Seventy-five years after Sidney’s death, the legacy of 1945 is far from intact. In the 1960s and 1970s, the insistent voices of a new generation of campaigners – many linked to LSE or the Fabian Society, with the New Statesman as a ready platform – forced public attention on the fact that poverty had not been abolished for all time, and demanded new reforms.

In the 1980s, many of the industries that had been nationalised in the 1940s were returned to the private sector. Others have shrunk or even vanished, in the face of environmental and economic change.

This is not to diminish the scale of the achievements of the 1945 government. But few political problems – poverty, destitution, economic efficiency – are solved for all time. 1945 was not the end of history; returning to the 1945 programme would not be an adequate or appropriate response to the challenges of the twenty first century.

The Webbs built their career and their reputation on a readiness to investigate the facts – tiresome, difficult, awkward facts. Their successors must investigate new problems, develop new solutions – and not be afraid to recognize that the world has changed. There is a strong and important radical tradition of campaigning and protest. But Sidney and Beatrice were willing to face the difficult problems of the real world.

And the Soviet Union, extolled by the Webbs, has now been gone for more than thirty years. Like Sidney and Beatrice, there were many who, in the 1930s, 40s and 50s closed their eyes to the brutality of the regime.

So it must be time to move on from a simplistic verdict on the Webbs: ‘welfare state good, Soviet Union bad’. Instead, I have tried to examine their lives as a whole, looking at the families, backgrounds, relationships, and friendships that shaped them, and the institutions they created – the Fabian Society, the London School of Economics, and the New Statesman. All three institutions have, after all, outlasted, not just their founders, but the 1945 social programme and the Soviet Union. I consider their research work and their writing, and Sidney’s record in local government and as a minister.

Sidney and Beatrice were ready to challenge received ideas, including those on the left – what Beatrice called the shibboleths of collectivism. When they were planning the establishment of LSE in 1894, she noted:

…reform will not be brought about by shouting. What is needed is hard thinking. ¹⁶

Sidney and Beatrice made provision for their executors to commission an official biography. This project started, but was never completed. Beatrice thought the Trustees might select some unemployed intellectual. In fact, in 1948, they chose the LSE historian (and old friend of the Webbs) R H Tawney.

Tawney started work, but was soon disillusioned. He found out that one of the trustees, Margaret Cole, was producing her own book – The Webbs and their Work. Tawney complained that this

…made the work of the contemporary biographer both more difficult and less useful. ¹⁷

Harold Laski, another trustee, supported Tawney, assuring him that he had

…deep loyalty and affection to the Webbs, and I feel as though Mrs Cole has taken over their legacy as a permanent source of income. ¹⁸

The efforts of supportive trustees to persuade Tawney to reconsider were unsuccessful, and he withdrew from the project.

There the question of the authorised biography rested for nearly twenty years. The Trustees controlled access to the Webb papers; Eric Hobsbawm, writing his PhD thesis on the Fabians, was not permitted to use the papers; the policy, only slowly relaxed, was that the papers would not be available to other researchers until the official biography had been published. ¹⁹

Margaret Cole, with Beatrice’s niece Barbara Drake, edited Beatrice’s second autobiographical book, Our Partnership, published in 1948. She also edited two sets of extracts from Beatrice’s diaries, which appeared in 1952 and 1956.

In the 1980s a much fuller (though still selective), 4 volume, edition of the diaries was published, edited by Norman and Jeanne MacKenzie; the MacKenzies also complied a three-volume edited selection of letters by Sidney and Beatrice.

In the 1960s, the Trustees returned to the official biography, appointing the social historian Royden Harrison to write it. Harrison’s experience paralleled Tawney’s: the trustees did not tell Harrison about the Tawney episode – he read about it in the archives. Harrison then learned that Beatrice’s niece Kitty Muggeridge was working on a life of Beatrice. When he asked the trustees why they had not told him about the Muggeridge project, they told him he had never asked. He also learned that another book, Jeanne MacKenzie’s, A Victorian Courtship, was under way. Harrison wrote that

Amidst these numerous challenges, I felt the Webbs to be less pressing than others might have done. ²⁰

Harrison completed his first volume, taking the story up to 1905; it was published in 2000. It is scholarly, thoroughly researched, and objective. Paul Foot (no Fabian) praised the book’s

…deep historical understanding and its rich sense of humour. ²¹

Harrison died, aged 75, in 2002, without completing the second volume. Neither attempt by the Passfield Trustees to produce an official biography of both succeeded. No other life of both has appeared since Radice’s book in 1984, although a study of their ideas and their contribution to sociology, economics and politics was published in 2022. (Reisman, D Sidney and Beatrice Webb, An academic biography; Cham, Switzerland, Palgrave Macmillan, 2022.)

Arundel, December 2023

---

1 Beatrice Webb Diary 7 July 1891

2 LSE Library; Colegate Diaries; LSE Coll Misc 741/1; 9 February1906

3 LSE Library; Fabian Society Executive Committee minute book, 10 Mar 1911 - 24 Jan 1913; 19 April 1912

4 Beatrice Webb Diary 13 July 1913

5 Russell, B; Autobiography; London, Unwin, 1978; p 75

6 Russell, B; Autobiography; London, Unwin, 1978; p 75

7 Beatrice Webb Diary, 30.06.1938

8 Beatrice Webb Diary, 05.05.1937

9 Cole, Margaret, Editor; Beatrice Webb’s Diaries 1912 – 1924; introduction by Lord Beveridge, p vi; London, Longmans Green, 1952

10 Radice, L; Beatrice and Sidney Webb: Fabian Socialists; London, Macmillan, 1984; p 7

11 Radice, L; Beatrice and Sidney Webb: Fabian Socialists; London, Macmillan, 1984; p 309

12 Cole, Margaret; Growing up into revolution; London, Longmans, 1949; p 96

13 See Beatrice Webb Diary, 04.02.1931

14 Daily Herald, 13.12.1947

15 Dangerfield, George; The strange death of Liberal England, 1910-1914; New York, Capricorn Books, 1961; p430

16 Beatrice Webb Diary 21.09.1894

17 R H Tawney to Alexander Carr Saunders, 22 December 1948; LSE Library TAWNEY 24/2

18 Harold Laski to RH Tawney, 24 March 1949; LSE Library TAWNEY 24/2

19 See Evans, Richard J; Eric Hobsbawm, a life in history; London, Little Brown, 2019; p245; and Goldman, Lawrence; The life of R H Tawney; London, Bloomsbury, 2013

20 Harrison, R J; The Life and Times of Sidney and Beatrice Webb; 1858-1905: the formative years; London, Macmillan, 2000; p xi

21 Foot, Paul; review in The Guardian, 4 March 2000

Chapter One: Introduction

PROPHETS

Beatrice and Sidney Webb were at the heart of British politics from the 1880s to the 1940s. Their lives were committed to building a political movement capable of challenging for, and holding, national power. They developed the ideas, conducted and encouraged the research, designed the organisational structures, wrote the policies, and identified the people to staff and run that movement. They played a significant part in reshaping British politics, away from a Liberal-Conservative two party system to one dominated by Labour and the Conservatives. They shaped and inspired the political generation that assumed power in 1945.

In the seventy-five years since their ashes were interred together in Westminster Abbey (the first, and so far the only couple to be commemorated together in this way), their reputations have fluctuated. As in their lifetimes, they have drawn criticism from left and right. They have been seen as dour; insensitive to culture, art, and music; incurably bureaucratic; authoritarian; and committed above all to the expansion of the state.

Each formidable as an individual, Sidney and Beatrice made an extraordinary couple. George Bernard Shaw (GBS) said theirs was a perfect collaboration. One contemporary described them as

…two typewriters that clicked as one… ²²

The Liberal Herbert Samuel said that Sidney and Beatrice’s partnership

…developed over the course of years into a kind of dual personality. ²³

BEGINNINGS

They grew up in different worlds, he in central London, she in Gloucestershire. Both families – the capitalist Potters, the tradespeople Webbs – could just about be called middle class – but they were at distant extremes of the bourgeois spectrum.

Sidney and Beatrice met in January 1890. In the years before they met, Beatrice worked, in East London and elsewhere, as a social reformer, a housing manager, and a writer. She described herself as a social investigator, and contributed to Charles Booth’s monumental study of the Life and Labour of the people of London. At first, she was close to the Charity Organisation Society (COS), originators of the division of the poor into deserving and undeserving, before rejecting COS orthodoxy in the late 1880s. As a young woman, she built up a circle of close women friends of her own generation, among them her cousin, the novelist Margaret Harkness, Carrie Darling and Ella Pycroft.

In the 1870s Beatrice spent a year at school with Harkness, who subsequently trained as a nurse before becoming a writer. Harkness introduced Beatrice to the world of the British Museum Reading Room, workplace and home-from-home for other young women writers. Carrie Darling cared for the children of Beatrice’s sister Mary and later became a teacher. Ella Pycroft worked alongside Beatrice in East London, afterwards working in Gloucestershire, teaching young women cookery and domestic economy.

This group of friends travelled together. They shared their accommodation, and their secrets. They confided in each other and counselled each other. In times of emotional crisis, they supported each other. What the four had in common was that each was trying to establish an independent working life, depending neither on their parents or a husband for support.

In summer 1888 Ella Pycroft stayed with Beatrice; both read a magazine article about glorified spinsters – a

…new race of women not looking for or expecting marriage. ²⁴

The article drew a distinction between glorified spinsters and old maids: the glorified spinsters were young, middle-class women, following independent careers of their own. Beatrice began to use the expression glorified spinster to describe her own economic and social position and that of her close women friends.

Sidney started work as a clerk in the City when he was 16. He attended night schools, passed examinations, and won prizes. He competed successfully in the Civil Service examinations, joining the War Office as a Man Clerk in 1878, when he was 19. He rose rapidly through the ranks; in 1881, through further examinations, he reached the senior civil service – at the same age as his contemporaries who arrived at this point via Oxford or Cambridge.

In 1880s Britain a new wave of socialist organisations emerged; Sidney joined one of them, the Fabian Society. His friendships were drawn from work colleagues and from the Fabians; in the 1880s his closest companion was the Fabian writer, George Bernard Shaw (GBS). Sydney Olivier was a civil service colleague who became a Fabian; Graham Wallas was an Oxford friend of Olivier’s.

Beatrice and Sidney’s emotional experiences before they met were as different as their social origins. In the mid-1880s, Beatrice went through a long, tortured, unhappy relationship with the Liberal – later Unionist – MP and minister Joseph Chamberlain. Sidney had known his own disappointments; GBS told Margaret Cole that whenever Sidney fell in love, he would come out in spots.

From their first meeting in 1890, Sidney ardently pursued Beatrice; she, scarred by her experience with Chamberlain, was more cautious. Their courtship lasted two and a half years; for the first eighteen months the outcome was uncertain. But they eventually married in July 1892. Some of their friends – like Liberal MP Richard Haldane – congratulated them; others – including Ella Pycroft and Charles Booth – disapproved.

THREE INSTITUTIONS

From the 1880s, Sidney worked to grow the Fabian Society as a policy organisation; later, Beatrice also took a leading role on the Fabian Executive Committee. In 1894, they used a bequest left to the Fabians to found the London School of Economics (LSE) as a social sciences university. In 1913 they started the weekly left journal, the New Statesman. Beatrice sometimes referred to the LSE and the New Statesman as their children.

These three institutions – the think-tank, the university, and the newspaper – provided the background against which the new political movement could grow. All three continue to flourish in the 21st century – long after the deaths of their founders.

Around those institutions, they cultivated a network of people to sustain and develop the movement. That network was nurtured by the Webbs’ generous, if frugal, hospitality at their homes, first in London, subsequently in Hampshire.

FROM PERMEATION, VIA SOCIAL DEMOCRACY, TO A NEW CIVILIZATION

Their approach to politics evolved. Up to 1912 their method was permeation – achieving change through existing political parties. Before 1906, Sidney worked with leading Conservatives and Liberals to achieve major reform and expansion of secondary education. When in 1905 Beatrice was appointed to a Royal Commission on the Poor Laws, she and Sidney hoped to repeat this success. Beatrice and her allies produced a substantial Minority Report, calling for the break-up of the Poor Law. They hoped for the same success on welfare policies as Sidney had achieved on education. But there was no Poor Law legislation in the years before the First World War.

Acknowledging this defeat, they took a break, and then announced that permeation was finished. They decided to back the emerging Labour Party; Beatrice called it

…a poor thing, but our own…²⁵

In the years that followed they worked to grow Labour’s capacity, to the point where it could form a government for the first time. With the leading trade union MP Arthur Henderson (‘Uncle Arthur’), who led the party in the war years, Sidney wrote Labour’s constitution and its policies.

After the war, Sidney became an MP, and in 1923 Chairman of the Party. He thought that, before long, Labour would gain the support of a majority of the electorate. He spoke of the inevitable gradualness of Labour’s programme of change.

But Labour did not win a majority at any of the 1920s general elections. It did form minority governments in 1924 and from 1929 to 1931, under Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald; Sidney was a Minister in both. The dominant political issue was mass unemployment; the 1924 government had no answer – and the party did not develop a policy response while in opposition from 1924 to 1929.

In the second MacDonald Labour government (1929-1931), Sidney, (now in the House of Lords as Colonial Secretary), was a diligent and effective departmental minister. But politics was dominated by the persistence of mass unemployment, and the lack of any serious policy to deal with it. Trade declined after the 1929 Wall Street crash; crisis followed upon crisis; government report followed upon government report.

Neither the Cabinet, nor the Webbs, knew what to do. In August 1931, faced with calls for deep cuts in public spending, the Government split apart. MacDonald formed a National Government with Conservatives, Liberals, and a handful of Labour defectors. Sidney and Beatrice had long been ambivalent towards MacDonald. Bertrand Russell thought they had hated him from very early days.²⁶ Even before the government collapsed, they began to doubt inevitable gradualness. The ideas they had developed over the previous twenty years were no help; no new thinking was taking place. Their belief in gradual change wavered. Like many others in the west, they convinced themselves that a new civilization was emerging in the Soviet Union.

Their enthusiasm for Russia did not lead them to support the Communist Party of Great Britain; in Britain, the Webbs still backed Labour. The August 1939 pact between Hitler and Stalin shook their faith. They welcomed Churchill’s emergence as Prime Minister in May 1940, and believed Britain should (and would) fight on after France had fallen. In 1941 they were relieved when Hitler’s invasion of Russia made Britain and the Soviet Union allies.

IDEAS

Beatrice and Sidney Webb made a significant contribution to political thought – but they were, above all, political practitioners. Sidney began as a civil servant, later becoming a politician, serving as a county councillor, an MP, a peer – and twice as a cabinet minister. Beatrice was a social investigator, and a caustic chronicler of her times in her diaries and in her two autobiographical books; she served, indefatigably, on government committees and commissions. Both analysed problems, then proposed institutional, practical remedies and policies.

I like the kitchen of life,

wrote Sidney to Beatrice, before they were married

T. Unions and details of administration are more to me than art or literature and I am keenly and absorbingly interested in their work. ²⁷

Leonard Woolf – who both Webbs knew well, and with whom they worked closely from 1913 – wrote that liberty,

…and all large vague political ideas and ideals (except, perhaps, those concerned with equality) …meant very little to them. ²⁸

The partnership of Beatrice and Sidney, starting in 1892, lasted 50 years. From their early years together, they worked in close harmony and evolved their ideas jointly. Their first biographer, Mary Agnes (Molly) Hamilton watched them working; they would review their notes together, reading and discussing them. Then Beatrice’s

…eyes would light up. She would spring to her feet and pace up and down, waving her cigarette. ‘That implies…’ She would then start off on a chain of argument, he swiftly writing the while, using his matchless power of finding appropriate and exactly fitting words… ²⁹

Before they met, Beatrice had studied cooperation; together they researched and published books on trade unionism, and on local government.

Over those 50 years, their views evolved. While they did not develop a unified, unchanging body of thought, they returned to a few key themes. These included:

The role of the state;

The idea of a National Minimum;

The nature of political leadership

The Webbs and the State

In 2015, two business journalists, John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, wrote, in a study of the changing nature of the state, that

Beatrice Webb was the godmother of the welfare state. ³⁰

They argue that, in designing a blueprint for a new form of government intended to provide citizens with a defined, universal minimum of services, Beatrice created.

…a ratchet towards ever bigger government. ³¹

Bertrand Russell thought Beatrice worshipped the state. ³²

The Webbs’ efforts – and they were the efforts of both Sidney and Beatrice – were not confined to social welfare – although social policy was a major field for their work.

Differing views about the proper role of the state separated the rising generation of Liberal politicians in the 1890s from their predecessors. Similar arguments distinguished the Webbs from their antagonists on the 1905 Poor Law Royal Commission. Their friend the historian R H Tawney wrote in 1914 that future social policy issues would turn on the relations between society and the state:

No one now believes in pure individualism. Few are contented with pure collectivism. ³³

In 1889, before Sidney and Beatrice had met, Sidney was one of the group responsible for the book Fabian Essays in Socialism. The six authors declared that, as social democrats, they were convinced of the necessity of

…vesting the organization of industry and the material of production in a State identified with the whole people by complete Democracy. ³⁴

In his chapter, Sidney pointed to the growing role of the state in economic regulation, and to the expansion of government employment. The largest employer of labour in Britain was a government minister – the Postmaster-General. And

…almost every conceivable trade is , somewhere or other, carried on by parish, municipality, or the National Government itself without the intervention of any middleman or capitalist. ³⁵

The Webbs saw state action, collective action, and common ownership as components of a process of continual, gradual change. We do not see, they wrote in their 1920 Constitution for the Socialist Commonwealth of Great Britain,

…any sudden and simultaneous transformation of the Capitalist System. ³⁶

At the LCC Sidney oversaw major expansion of secondary and technical education. This experience helped them develop their view of public services. Services like public health, or universal education

…involved enterprises to which no profit making could usually be attached…³⁷

They saw this as a new form of state; they called it the housekeeping state.

They suggested that an alternative to the profit motive already existed and had evolved over many years at local level. That alternative was to provide services, according to need, through local institutions – councils and Poor Law Guardians. Gradually, feudal structures had been superseded, and the local electorate had become wider and more representative – no longer restricted by property qualifications, but becoming, in Beatrice’s words

…practically inclusive of all adult inhabitants. ³⁸

So they decided to study the development of local government, and to show how local responsibilities – backed by national legislation as necessary – had expanded to cover land drainage, sewers, highways, street lighting, policing, the relief of destitution and the suppression of vagrancy.

They believed that public services should be run by employed, salaried, disinterested experts

…rewarded not by the making of private fortunes, but by public honour and special promotion. ³⁹

Those experts would be guided by

…accurately ascertained and authoritatively reported facts. ⁴⁰

The performance and efficiency of public services would be measured: the results would be publicized. Measurement and Publicity would undermine and eliminate any tendency to autocratic decision making.

The deliberate intensification of this searchlight of public knowledge we regard as the cornerstone of successful democracy. ⁴¹

When in the 1930s Sidney and Beatrice visited the Soviet Union to assess progress under communism, they concluded that measurement and publicity were essential tools to judge the success of change; they thought the Communist government understood this.

During the First World War, Sidney’s energies were concentrated on the War Emergency Workers National Committee – set up by trade unions and other labour organisations to monitor the impact of the war on the living conditions of families. After the government had introduced conscription into the armed services, some committee members called for conscription of wealth as well as conscription of labour: the government should seize bank accounts, savings, land, and investments.

Sidney argued that the tax system could be used instead of outright seizure – a graduated levy, like the already-existing Death Duties, on capital wealth. He thought this preferable to the government taking over all 300,000 farms, or local councils managing 500,000 shops.

While the wartime coalition did not adopt this proposal, as the capital levy it became central to Labour Party policy between the wars. It was a new and different insight into how social democrats might use the power of the state, with taxation as the main instrument of redistribution.

There were many contemporaries who did not share the Webbs’ faith in the role and potential of the state.

Hilaire Belloc – Catholic writer, poet, and from 1906 to 1910 a Liberal MP – was critical of the expansion of the state in the Edwardian period. Some of the proposals Belloc opposed were supported by the Webbs – like minimum wage legislation; others – such as the 1911 National Insurance Act – they also opposed. Belloc became directly critical of the Webbs, arguing that there was a drift towards a new serfdom, a servile state:

That arrangement of society in which so considerable a number of the families and individuals are constrained by positive law to labour for the advantage of other families and individuals as to stamp the whole community with the mark of such labour we call THE SERVILE STATE. ⁴²

Belloc’s position was not just that he disapproved of the expansion of the state. He also identified a superior, patronising, authoritarian strand in the Webbs’ ideas. In the Edwardian years Belloc frequently contributed to the New Age – a radical weekly magazine, run by Alfred Orage and Arthur Penty. Opposing the Minority Report, Belloc described the Webbs’ proposals as

…a scheme drawn up by Mr Sidney Webb, the statistician, with the aid of his wife, for dealing with the lives of people much poorer than themselves. ⁴³

By the early 1920s, supporters of this critique of the state had divided into two groups. Orage and Penty had been early supporters of the Guild Socialist movement, in which GDH Cole later played a leading role, and which had a divisive impact on the Fabian Society. Belloc worked closely with GK Chesterton; Shaw, with whom they frequently debated, nicknamed them the Chesterbelloc.

Together, Chesterton and Belloc formed the Distributist movement – later the Distributist League – which stressed the importance of individual proprietors. Some Fabians – among them Hilary Pepler and, later, Henry Slesser – became Distributists.

In a poem published in 1924, Pepler summarized his differences from the Webbs:

We are for the PLEBS

Said the Webbs,

The Mess they are in

Wants organisin’

They shall toil while we spin

Any number of webs. ⁴⁴

This criticism, blending opposition to the role of the state with attacks on the perceived authoritarianism of the Webbs’ approach, was shared, not only by the Chesterbelloc, but also by some of the Guild Socialists. In the First World War period, GDH and Margaret Cole, (later enthusiastic Webb supporters) and the young research group around them, caricatured the Webb position in a Gilbert and Sullivan parody:

Hey, dee, hey, dee, for Measurement and Publicity

We’ll thoroughly regiment everybody,

And send up the stock of the State, O! ⁴⁵

Not everyone agreed that the Webbs were focused exclusively on the expansion of the state. In 1920, John Squire, (a Cambridge Fabian; later one of the original New Statesman editorial team), reviewing a new edition of the Webbs’ History of Trade Unionism, wrote that Sidney and Beatrice, while they did not see eye-to-eye with Guild Socialists.

…still less do they see eye-to-eye with that fabulous monster who stalks through the writings and speeches of both Revolutionaries and Conservatives – the bureaucratic Fabian Webb, harbinger of the Servile State. ⁴⁶

After the deaths of both Webbs, R H Tawney, delivering a memorial lecture, said that the conventional portrait of Sidney and Beatrice

…conspiring to submit every human activity to the centralized control of an omni-competent State… ⁴⁷

was a caricature. Very little of their research and writing was about the central state; they concentrated on local, decentralized institutions and agencies such as the cooperative movement, trade unions, and local government. Later generations used the expression ‘civil society’ to describe such institutions

The National Minimum

In Industrial Democracy (1897), their second trade union book, Sidney and Beatrice floated the concept of the National Minimum. They showed that a central trade union objective was the establishment of the ‘common rule’ for each industry or sector – a floor level for wages, hours and working conditions. Employers would remain free to exceed that level, but not to fall below it. Unions had various methods at their disposal to achieve that objective, including negotiation with employers or groups of employers, and using parliamentary legislation to regulate the sector.

Having established the idea of the common rule, Sidney and Beatrice then suggested that it should be extended to the community as a whole, thus establishing a National Minimum. Legislation already restricted and controlled working conditions in particular industries – but, they argued, issues like child labour would be better regulated across the entire economy. A policy for child labour should have two aspects – statutory controls on pay, working hours, and physical conditions, but educational and welfare provision as well

…we must regard the boy or girl, not as an independent wealth-producer to be satisfied by a daily subsistence, but as the future citizen and parent, for whom, up to twenty-one, proper conditions of growth and education are of paramount importance. ⁴⁸

The idea of a National Minimum, first developed by Sidney and Beatrice, was taken up by the Fabians, then by the Trades Union Congress (TUC), and then by the Labour Party. It began with wages and working conditions – but from the start was about more than simply a minimum wage.

At first, Beatrice and Sidney, when they were trying to influence or permeate all political parties, saw the National Minimum as a policy to be advocated for the Liberals and Conservatives. When, from 1912, they began to concentrate more and more exclusively on Labour, it became a central element of the programme they urged on Labour.

The Webbs lost no opportunity to make the case for the National Minimum. In December 1900, they spent a delightful Sunday with Bertrand and Alys Russell, and the rising Liberal MP Richard Haldane, when, Beatrice wrote, they pressed for the

…policy of a National Minimum of Health, Education and Efficiency. ⁴⁹

The Boer War revealed that much of the British working population was in poor physical condition; this raised questions of national efficiency. In 1902 the Webbs established a group, the Coefficients, to discuss

…the aims, policy and methods of Imperial Efficiency at home and abroad. ⁵⁰

As well as Russell (who soon resigned) and Haldane, members of the group included H G Wells, and the Conservative Leo Amery. A year after the Coefficients began to operate, Sidney led a discussion on

…how far is it possible by legislative regulation to maintain a Minimum Standard of National well-being? ⁵¹

At first, the Webbs had advocated a National Minimum as a matter of social justice; after the Boer War they began to justify it also on grounds of efficiency. Writing in 1904, Beatrice described it as the policy of

…creating an artificial bottom to society by collective regulation and collective expenditure…⁵²

In 1905 the Fabians established a committee to work out how to implement a minimum wage. Sidney argued that the Committee should take a wider approach to its brief, arguing for

…the Legal Enforcement of a Minimum Standard of Life… ⁵³

He pointed out that minimum legally enforceable standards already existed for education (ages 5-14); sanitation; leisure; and subsistence – for children and, through the Poor Law, for poor people. The Committee recommended that a minimum wage should be introduced, with the participation of trade unions and employers, area by area and sector by sector.⁵⁴

Sidney returned to the issue with a lecture in May 1908, subsequently published under the title The Necessary Basis of Society. He argued that any modern industrial society – socialist or individualist – must formulate and enforce a National Minimum

…below which the individual, whether he likes it or not, cannot, in the interests of the well-being of the whole, ever be allowed to fall. ⁵⁵

Regulation of working time would enforce a national minimum of leisure; public health action, and if necessary, municipal construction, would enforce a national minimum of sanitation – covering water, drainage, and housing. There should be a National Minimum of Child Nurture – not just schools, but

…everything required for the healthy, happy rearing of the citizen that is to be. ⁵⁶

Their evangelism for the National Minimum had some impact; in September 1912, Beatrice went to the TUC conference. Overall, she found it not very different from the conferences she had attended twenty years before. But there was a new outlook. Beatrice noted, in the lofty tone she sometimes adopted, that

The ordinary Trade Unionist has got the National Minimum theory well fixed in his slow solid head – it has taken twenty years to mature… ⁵⁷

During the 1914-1918 war, Sidney became close to the Labour leadership; for the first time, a Labour government seemed a real possibility. He led the work of drafting Labour’s first, comprehensive, national policy statement – Labour and the New Social Order. ⁵⁸ This systematic plan for social reconstruction was based on four principles – the first of which was the universal enforcement of the National Minimum. (The others were democratic control of industry, a revolution in national finance, and surplus wealth for the common good). The National Minimum now meant

…the securing to every member of the community, in good times and bad alike (and not only to the strong and able, the well-born or the fortunate, of all the requisites of healthy life and worthy citizenship. ⁵⁹

The Labour governments of the 1920s had neither the resources, nor the political headroom, to legislate for the National Minimum. Nor had they any serious policy response to mass unemployment. The Webbs now came to understand that Labour needed a broader economic policy and must draw on a wider range of advice.

In the mid-1920s, Sidney and Beatrice came to know Maynard Keynes, who in a 1926 article called for greater cooperation between Labour and the Liberals. Beatrice saw the piece, and followed it up with a letter to Keynes; the approach upon which the Webbs and the Fabians had been working since the 1890s

… the working out of a national minimum of civilized life, so far as regulation and public services can secure it, is now exhausted…⁶⁰

New research was needed on the control of capitalist enterprise; Beatrice thought that she and Sidney were too old for this entirely new task.

Perhaps, even if the Webbs had felt equal to the task, it was just too soon.

Philip Snowden – Labour’s financially orthodox Chancellor in 1924 and again between 1929 and 1931 – had little interest in new approaches. Keynes continued to advise Lloyd George’s Liberals; he did become a member of the 1929 government’s Economic Advisory Council, but his views were little heeded.

Political Leadership

The Webbs – especially Beatrice – took a close interest in political leadership. They argued consistently that public services should be run by educated, trained experts. But leaders were needed as well as experts. Beatrice wrote of a vocation of leadership.

Often she referred to her elite of leaders as Samurai. This was less an allusion to Japanese history than a reference to a futuristic novel by HG Wells, A Modern Utopia (1905), in which Wells described an ideal society run by the Samurai – a disinterested governing elite. Wells and the Webbs were close while he was writing the book. In April 1905, Wells stayed overnight with Sidney and Beatrice; he sent a copy of the book in advance, and Beatrice congratulated him on it.

In A Modern Utopia, Wells describes the Samurai as a voluntary, non-hereditary nobility. Drawn from both men and women, they were rational, advanced and scientifically trained., and would live an austere life. In Wells’ novel, a traveller from earth arrives at this ideal society – this modern Utopia. Hearing about the Samurai, he wonders

Will they be a caste? A race? an organization in the nature of a church? ⁶¹

The religious parallels particularly appealed to Beatrice. In 1908, visiting a Salvation Army colony for unemployed people, Beatrice compared the Salvationists to a Samurai caste. For her the most interesting fact was the Salvation Army itself:

In respect to personal character all these men and women constitute a Samurai caste – that is they are men and women selected for their power of subordinating themselves to their cause, most assuredly a remarkable type of ecclesiastic… A beautiful spirit of love and personal service… ⁶²

The other religious group towards which Beatrice turned as a potential model for the vocation of leadership was the Jesuits. In 1908, Beatrice was impressed by the fervent, brilliant Cambridge students who had recently joined the Fabians. One was Hugh Dalton, the future Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer, who she thought astute and thoughtful,

…a sort of lay Jesuit – preparing for political life. ⁶³

One aspect of the Soviet Union that attracted Beatrice in the 1930s was the leadership provided by the Communist Party. She had always been interested in religion; she thought, before their journey to Russia and Ukraine in 1932, that the Party was becoming like a religious order:

…it has its Holy Writ, its prophets and its canonised saints; it has its Pope, yesterday Lenin and today Stalin; it has its code of conduct and its discipline; it has its creed and its inquisition. ⁶⁴

In their book, Soviet Communism: a new civilisation, Beatrice and Sidney devote a chapter to the vocation of leadership. They again compare the role of the Communist Party to the role of a religious order, like the Jesuits, in a catholic country.

In Moscow in May 1932, they had a formal interview in the Communist Party headquarters with Stetzky, the Secretary responsible for cultural policy. Beatrice thought him a very Jesuitical personage, who

…gave me the answers that were for my own good and did not necessarily express the facts or his opinion of the facts. ⁶⁵

ARTS, MUSIC, AND CULTURE

Anthony Crosland, a Labour cabinet minister in the 1960s and 1970s, thought the Webbs were indifferent

…to all forms of art or culture, their lack of temptation towards any of the emotional or physical pleasures of life, the consequent priggish puritanism…

No, I shouldn’t have liked the Webbs. ⁶⁶

Crosland was not the first person to see the Webbs as lacking in culture, taste, or judgment. Beatrice’s sister Rosie thought she

had little or no taste for art and did not care for poetry. ⁶⁷

H G Wells, a frequent guest at their London home in the Edwardian years, lampooned Sidney and Beatrice as Oscar and Altiora Bailey in his novel The New Machiavelli, writing that, at least sometimes, they seemed

…to prefer things harsh and ugly. ⁶⁸

Even Margaret Cole – who as a young woman had been an opponent of the Webbs, later coming to admire them – described Sidney as a contented philistine.⁶⁹

In fact, their engagement with art and culture was more complex. Beatrice knew her own limitations; before their marriage, she wrote to Sidney:

Dearest, we will try to have a little culture – but it will be difficult and I fear you will not have the wife to favour the growth of it. I am supremely ignorant, except in my own subjects. All I do bring is a humble reverence for those other subjects… ⁷⁰

Later, Beatrice wrote that, in their early years together, they had not the time, the energy, or the means for music, drama, literature, picture galleries, or architecture. Their experience of beauty came from their walking and cycling trips at home and abroad. Otherwise, they got their culture at one remove, through their friendship with Shaw.

Beatrice was certainly capable of expressing sharp aesthetic judgments. The first time she visited the Chamberlain family home, in Birmingham, Beatrice concluded that there was

…much taste and all very bad.⁷¹

The luxury was ostentatious; it made Beatrice

…long for a bare floor and a plain deal table. ⁷²

Ten years later Sidney and Beatrice set about creating their own London home, at 41 Grosvenor Road, on the Thames embankment. They stayed there 30 years, moving in 1923 to Passfield Corner, in Hampshire. They chose a pre-Raphaelite, arts and crafts look. Beatrice worked hard to decorate and furnish the house, aiming for beautiful surroundings, but without self-indulgence.

Beatrice’s wallpaper and furniture came from William Morris; political differences were not permitted to override aesthetic choice. She spent days over my curtains and toured second hand shops looking for charming pieces of furniture. She tried to persuade herself that she needed beautiful things to work with; Sidney’s view was that they must work in order to deserve the choices they had made.

In 1919 Rosie stayed with them at Grosvenor Road for a week. She found Beatrice

…a strange mixture of idealism and practical common sense, of asceticism and love of luxury. ⁷³

Sidney was more appreciative of poetry than Beatrice; during their courtship, he read aloud to her. They lay on the grass in Epping Forest while Sidney read her poems by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. In a letter, he asked

Did you credit me with knowing my Rossetti? ⁷⁴

Sidney’s first present to Beatrice was an edition of Rossetti’s poems.

Years later, recalling Rupert Brooke’s time as an active Fabian, Beatrice wrote that she was

poetry blind…like some persons are colour blind. ⁷⁵

Margaret Cole thought Beatrice never grasped poetry: Beatrice’s closest approach to poetry was when Cole came upon her

…swaying in time to the voice of James Joyce reading Anna Livia Plurabelle. ⁷⁶

Early in their relationship, on a long, late night train journey, Sidney read her William Morris’ Dream of John Ball, as she gradually fell asleep.

Before they met, Sidney and Beatrice were both widely read in English and European literature; both had read Goethe – aged 16, Beatrice started translating Faust. And she enjoyed Hugo’s Les Miserables

The description of the Bishop and of the criminal is simply splendid… ⁷⁷

She spent the winter of 1880/81 on a long trip to Italy. Among other authors, she read George Eliot

…I know no author who is so sad and so uncynical… ⁷⁸

And Balzac

…an utter cynic and complete disbeliever in the progress of human nature… ⁷⁹

In 1887 she discovered Zola’s Au Bonheur des Dames –

…a work of true genius. ⁸⁰

In 1895 Beatrice thought about following her cousin Margaret Harkness, and writing a novel herself:

…after we have ended our stiff work on Trade Unions I would try my hand at pure ‘Fiction’…The truth is, I want to have my ‘fling’! I want to imagine anything I damn please without regard to facts as they are… I want to try my hand at artists work instead of mechanics. I am sick to death of trying to put hideous facts, multitudinous details, exasperating qualifications, into a readable form. ⁸¹

But the fling never materialised.

They kept up to date with contemporary writing – especially when they knew the authors. When HG Wells caricatured them, they laughed. Beatrice did not approve of DH Lawrence. Sidney and Beatrice read novels by both Leonard and Virginia Woolf; in 1915, after reading two by Leonard, they donated their copies to the Fabian club room. Beatrice respected Virginia as

…fastidiously intellectual with great literary artistry, a consummate craftsman ⁸²

But she struggled with Virginia’s writing: she recognised that