I have become a Socialist not because I believe it would ameliorate the conditions of the masses (though I think it would do so) but because I believe that only under communal ownership of the means of production can you arrive at the most perfect form of individual development – at the greatest stimulus to individual effort; in other words complete Socialism is only consistent with absolute individualism. As such, some day, I will stand on a barrel and preach it.

Beatrice Potter, the British heiress who ventured into London slums and dockyards, wrote these words in her diary in 1890. She was born to socialism on her first meeting with Sidney Webb, then civil servant and Fabian socialist. Or rather, as she put it in her diary, she realized then that she had been a socialist all along. There was an element of predestination in her understanding of the phenomenon: the elect were chosen from birth.

Beatrice’s two published diaries, My Apprenticeship and Our Partnership, provide insights into the psychology of a nineteenth-century Anglican collectivist. Reading her recollections, one can’t help but conclude that her illusions about the salutary effects of socialism had a lot to do with her illusions about herself. There is a running conflict with her own womanliness. She wants to commit herself to this bold project of reforming society. On the other hand, she realizes she is not cut out for it, and has painful memories of Joseph Chamberlain, “a sacrament of pain fitting me for a life of loneliness and work.” She seems embarrassed and disappointed in herself for having fallen in love.

Sidney Webb, as it turned out, would dispel this conflict. Before he could do this, she had to overcome her dislike of him. She wrote in her diary:

His tiny tadpole body, unhealthy skin, lack of manner, cockney pronunciation, poverty are all against him. This self-complacent egotism, this disproportionate view of his own position is at once repulsive and ludicrous. 

Webb, born in 1859, was from a modest family. His father was in the inn-keeping business and his mother ran a hairdressing and millinery shop. His mother, Elizabeth Webb, was, according to MacKenzie, ambitious for him and saw that he was sent to Switzerland and Germany for further education. He was always an avid student and eventually studied economics, history and geology at the Birkbeck Literary and Scientific Institute, before employment in the Civil Service as a clerk.

Though he advanced in the Civil Service, Webb’s ambition then at the age of 25 was all for reform. He spent his spare time in political debate, education and propaganda for the Fabians. He joined the Fabian Society in1885, the year after its formation. Facetiously named after the Roman general Quintus Fabius Maximus, who advocated defeating Hannibal’s forces with caution, the Fabians were socialists who rejected revolution. They believed in societal transformation by gradual permeation of institutions and influential circles. The year after he joined, Webb wrote, “Nothing in England is done without the consent of a small intellectual yet practical class in London not 2,000 in number.”

Most members of the Society, which included George Bernard Shaw and Annie Besant, were bourgeois intellectuals caught up in the Late Victorian upwelling of gnostic socialism, esoteric cults and countercultural societies such as the Fellowship of the New Life. This religious socialism was a distinct offshoot of Christianity, applying its humanitarian precepts to salvation on earth instead of in the beyond. The Fabians believed in both moral and social reform. One of the Fabians first accomplishments was the formation of a publication committee. The society began churning out tracts and pamphlets by the thousands; by 1891, they had published 100,000 penny tracts and thousands of free leaflets. These brief single-topic documents with titles such as “Why are the Many Poor?” as well as their public lectures, were critical to their influence. The Fabians were communicators.

The historian G.M. Trevelyan said, “The Fabians were intelligence officers without an army. There was no Fabian party in Parliament – but they influenced the strategy and even the direction of the great hosts moving under other banners.” As Gertrude Himmelfarb writes of the Fabians in Poverty and Compassion: The Moral Imagination of the Late Victorians, they did not confine themselves to educating the general public:

Their mission was to educate and influence people in power rather than to recruit them to their own ranks – to make converts to Fabian policies rather than to the Fabian Society. Sometimes they short-circuited the educational process by a strategy of “permeation,” designed to “permeate,” “penetrate,” and “infiltrate” the institutions of power. The Fabians, said Sidney Webb, were “The Society of Jesus’ of Socialism,” without, he hastened to add, the “mental subjection” or “moral shiftiness” commonly (and erroneously, he thought) associated with the Jesuits. 

Sidney Webb and Beatrice Potter instantly recognized that they were intellectual allies. She was working on various articles on subjects such as “Dock Life in the East End” and sought his assistance. She offered to lend him help in his work with the Fabians. Planning to attend a conference in Glasgow on labor co-operatives, Beatrice invited him to attend too. While they were walking in Glasgow, as MacKenzie recounts in her book A Victorian Courtship, Sidney told Beatrice that he had feelings for her that went beyond their mutual political interests. She instantly discouraged him. He wrote to her the next day:

You tortured me horribly last night by your intolerable ‘superiority.’ Surely an affectation of heartlessness is as objectionable as an affectation of conceit. And you blasphemed horribly against what is highest and holiest in human relations. I could not speak my mind last night but this agony is unendurable. I do  not know how to face another night such as I have passed. Come off somewhere and let us clear up what is more important than all Congresses.

They met again that day and she told him “chances are 100 to 1 that nothing follows but friendship.” They made a working concord to be allies, just friends, instead. She wrote:

One grasp of the hand and we were soon in a warm discussion on some question of Economics.

On her return to London, she went to Westminster Abbey and prayed that their friendship “might raise my life and his to a higher level of Service.” The letters between them that followed are civilized and sensitive. He had not given up hope. She would not relent. She wrote:

I want you to realise that you will be betraying my confidence and trust if you allow yourself to build up a hope…

He wrote:

Your letter is full of mistrust — mistrust of me, mistrust of the not-ourselves which makes for Righteousness, mistrust even of yourself… Whatever harm you can do to me, has been done already. I cannot be any deeper in the stream… because I am through and through yours already… I do not pretend to be indifferent to personal happiness. I think you are wrong to make light of it for yourself. You cannot be at your best without it…. Now you are to me the Sun, the Source of all my work … You are making all things new to me.

The Victorians probed each other’s hearts before they ever crossed physical barriers.

Beatrice wrote:

Let it be as you say, I will not withdraw friendship unless you force me to do so, by treating me otherwise than as a friend … Your letter has touched me deeply but it must be the last word of personal feeling.

It was not the last word of personal feeling. She showed great interest in his work and asked him to share his problems, telling him that the “spiritual function of a woman” was to be the “passive agent bearing a man’s life.” This was from the woman who refused to marry Joseph Chamberlain because he asked for “intellectual sympathy.” The truth was, Beatrice had very conventional notions of a woman’s role. She was not a supporter, for instance, of women’s suffrage and felt the vote was unnecessary, which was an interesting view given her own activism. She held this opinion for good reason. She herself saw how easily it was to have political influence without the vote. She felt women should work behind the scenes. She would later change her mind about the suffrage but only under apparent pressure from political allies.

Sidney reverted to talking of “soul union,” receiving occasional rebukes from her. They spent a day in Epping Forest in the summer of 1890 and afterward he wrote these words to her:

You were so ravissante yesterday, and so angel good, that I had all I could do not to say goodbye in a way which would have broken our Concordat. I had to rush away from you speechless to hold my own. Do not punish me either for the impulse or for my self-control. I have no lover’s arts and if I had, the notion of deliberately planning to ‘win’ your favor is abhorrent to me. Be both as kind to me as you can, and as frank as you know how … You were indeed angel good on Sunday but one thing made me unhappy. I had not realized before that you will one day probably be rich. This is one more barrier between us … Frankly I do not see how I can go on without you. Do not now desert me. Do not despise me because I am at your feet. I feel it hard even to go further away from you.

Beatrice called this tender epistle “abominable:” 

The form and substance of that abominable letter seemed to me prompted, not by a desire to add to my present and future happiness, but simply by an uncontrolled drive to express your own feelings, relieve your own mind, and gain your own end. …. If you value the continuance of our friendship, exercise a little more self-control … do not always be brooding on my effect on your own life and your own feelings. It is truly masculine! I do not quite know what the word Love conveys to a man’s mind; but that is not what we women understand by Love – Love to us has some element of self-control and self-sacrifice….

This from a woman who had bitterly resented Joseph Chamberlain’s coolness to her after she had rejected his initial offer. Sidney and Beatrice continued their correspondence through 1891, with Sidney continuing to press his case when he could. Finally, they met for a political conference n London in May. And, during the train ride home, she relented. She wrote in her diary:

His resolute patient affection, his honest care for my welfare – helping and correcting me – a growing distrust of a self-absorbed life and the egotism of successful work – all these feelings are making for our eventual union – the joining together of our resources – mental and material – to serve together the “commonwealth.”

Beatrice wrote to Sidney before their wedding in July, 1892:

I do miss you. I am glad that we shall soon be married – it does not seem natural to be apart now.

Theirs was a famous partnership. The couple was lampooned by H.G. Wells in his novel The New Machiavelli for their thoroughgoing confidence in their system of bureaucratically-implemented transformation. No stone would be unturned.They vowed to remain childless, for the cause. He went on to become a member of Parliament in 1922 and was raised to the peerage as Baron Passfield. They wrote books, such as The History of Trade Unionism, and government reports. Her Minority Report on Reform of the Poor Law helped establish the parameters of the modern welfare state. They formed a dining club known as The Coefficients, which attracted some of the leading thinkers and statesmen of the Edwardian period. They frequently invited allies to their home but, according to Himelfarb, these were not luxurious affairs. Beatrice believed too much food and drink also hurt the cause. She wrote in her diary:

Physical appetites are to me the devil: they are the signs of the disease that ends in death, the root of the hatred, malice and greed that make the life of man a futility.

We think of socialists today as being indifferent to matters of personal morality. That was not the case with the Fabians, who were moral idealists. Beatrice was impressed with the Soviet Union. There were no couples kissing in Soviet Parks. Sidney Webb called socialism “a call to frugal and earnest living.” But in order to acheive this goal, the predestined would have to exert almost total rational control over the organs and institutions of society, over the unelected many.

As Himmelfarb wrote, theirs was a socialism,

… to be achieved not by class struggle but by permeation and education, a collectivism that was to come about gradually and inexorably, an economic and social revolution that was to be a fundamental moral revolution, a society that was to be organized, planned, and directed so as to be rational, efficient, and scientific – the very model of a Positive society.

The Webbs, who were married for nearly 51 years, would be pleased at the outcome of their efforts today. And yet, one suspects, they would be puzzled and disturbed too. Where is the frugal and earnest living? With government providing so much more, why has the individual not suppressed his animal nature? 

How could the rule of experts not have prevented more kissing in the parks?

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