Beatrice Webb Quotes

The family dinner table strained with conversations about Nietzsche and Hume and Beatrice Webb and Rilke, so that Simon, who had previously got by with paddling in the intellectual shallows, felt permanently out of his depth.

It would be curious to discover who it is to whom one writes in a diary. Possibly to some mysterious personification of one's own identity.

In worldly terms, she was totally innocent; Eve before the fall, with no knowledge of good and evil. She made one realize how necessary the Fall was; without it, there would have been no human drama, and so no literature, no art, no suffering, no religion, no laughter, no joy, no sin and no redemption. Only camera work (towards which Mrs. Dobbs's painting was reaching) and sociology (which her sister, Beatrice Webb, may be said to have invented).

All this was only, in my father's estimation, a means; the end was the Earthly Paradise, the translation of William Morris's 'News from Nowhere' into 'News from Somewhere.' Then Whitman's sense of abounding joy in his own and all creation's sensuality would sweep away the paltry backwaters of bourgeois morality; the horrors of industrial ugliness which Ruskin so eloquently denounced would dissolve, and die forgotten as a dream (phrases from hymns still washed about in my father's mind) as slums were transformed into garden cities, and the belching smoke of hateful furnaces into the cool elegance of electric power. As for the ferocious ravings of my namesake, Carlyle, about the pettifogging nature of modern industrial man's pursuits and expectations -- all that would be corrected as he was induced to spend ever more of his increasing leisure in cultural and craft activities; in the enjoyment of music, literature and art. It was pefectly true -- a point that Will Straughan was liable to bring up at the Saturday evening gatherings -- that on the present form the new citizenry might be expected to have a marked preference for dog-racing over chamber music or readings from 'Paradise Lost,' but, my father would loftily point out, education would change all that. Education was, in fact, the lynchpin of the whole operation; the means whereby the Old Adam of the Saturday night booze-up, and fondness for Marie Lloyd in preference to Beatrice Webb, would be cast off, and the New Man be born as potential fodder for third Programmes yet to come.

Marriage, in short, is a bargain, like buying a house or entering a profession. One chooses it knowing that, by that very decision, one is abnegating other possibilities. In choosing companionship over passion, women like Beatrice Webb and Virginia Woolf made a bargain; their marriages worked because they did not regret their bargains, or blame their husbands for not being something else--dashing lovers, for example. But in writing biographies, or one's own life, it is both customary and misleading to present such marriages, to oneself or to one's reader, as sad compromises, the best of a bad bargain, or scarcely to speak of them at all. Virginia Woolf mentioned that she, who is reticent about nothing, had never spoken of her life with Leonard. but we know that she said of him that when he entered a room, she had no idea what he was going to say, a remarkable definition of a good marriage. Such marriages are not bad bargains, but the best of a good bargain, and we must learn the language to understand and describe them, particularly in writing the lives of accomplished women.

There is a long tradition of thinking about the relationship between the economy and society, starting with the founders of the Fabian Society and the LSE, Beatrice and Sidney Webb. Beatrice spent years collecting data in the poorest parts of London and seeing the impact of deprivation first hand. As a member of the 1909 Royal Commission on the Poor Laws, she authored a dissenting minority report that rejected the harsh system of workhouses and Britain’s piecemeal approach to supporting those in poverty. In it, she argued that a new social contract for the UK would ‘secure a national minimum of civilised life … open to all alike, of both sexes and all classes, by which we meant sufficient nourishment and training when young, a living wage when able-bodied, treatment when sick, and a modest but secure livelihood when disabled or aged’.4 More than one hundred years later, that is still an aspiration in most countries in the world.

The dark side of the Welfare State midwifed by Beatrice Webb and the Fabian socialists is not its superficial purpose of being kind, but its intention of killing with kindness, and thus protecting the interests of the better people, non-violently.

People have debated these matters ever since. Was Keynes merely a speculator in ideas or was he a saviour who brought a diseased world a new hope of health? The Fabian Beatrice Webb wrote: ‘Keynes is not serious about economic problems; he plays a game of chess with it in his leisure hours. The only serious cult with him is aesthetics.’ To Russell Leffingwell, a US Treasury official who negotiated with Keynes at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, Keynes was ‘always perverse, Puckish… a bright boy, shocking his admiring elders by questioning the existence of God, and the Ten Commandments!

Beneath the surface of our daily life, in the personal history of many of us, there runs a continuous controversy between an Ego that affirms and an Ego that denies.

Finding that turnpike mileage tripled in England between 1750 and 1770, Sidney and Beatrice Webb quote “an able and quite trustworthy writer” in 1767 declaring the development “an astonishing revolution. . . . The carriage of grain, coals, merchandise, etc., is in general conducted with little more than half the number of horses with which it formerly was. Journeys of business are performed with more than double expedition, . . . Everything wears the face of dispatch . . . and the hinge which has guided all these movements and upon which they turn is the reformation which has been made in our public roads.