Notes Introduction 1. Ellen Moers, Literary Women (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1976) p. II. 2. Dorothy L. Sayers, 'Are Women Human?', in Unpopular Opinions (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1947) p. 136. 3. Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians (New York: Modern Library, 1918) p. 131. 4. Ibid., p. 168. 5. Michael Holroyd, Lytton Strachey and the Bloomsbury Group: His Work, Their Influence (London: Penguin, 1971) p. 317. 6. Anne Olivier Bell (ed.), The Diary of Virginia Woolf (New York & London: Harcourt Brace jovanovich, 1977) vol. 1, p. 196 (23 September 1918). 7. Gerald Gould, review ofMy Apprenticeship, Daily Chronicle, 26 February 1926. A collection of reviews ofMy Apprenticeship can be found among the Passfield Papers, XII.A.2. 8. The New Machiavelli was first published in 1911. Two other Wells novels of this period, Ann Veronica and Tomo-Bung({Y, also contain attacks on the Fabians. In The New Machiavelli, Wells includes a thinly disguised rendering of the events surrounding his break with the Fabians. The Fabians distrusted Wells' desire to remake them and to assert control over their Society, but they also disliked his views on marriage and 'free love', and they regarded him as a 'sexual anarchist' (see Samuel Hynes, 'The Fabians': Mrs Webb and Mr Wells', in Thr A"d1eardian Tum of Jfind (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1968). They got all the proof they thought they needed of his suspected libertinism when Amber Reeves, the daughter of two leading Fabians, was found to be expecting Wells' child. In his novel, Wells attacks the small-mindedness of those who ostracized him, and defends his own actions as 'human', normal and inevitable. Part of the defence that the narrator, Remington, offers for having left his wife and established a new family with his mistress and child is his 'feminism', which involves the notion that the 'special function' of the modern woman is 'conscious, deliberate motherhood and mothering'. The narrator is able, therefore, to suggest that his wife's childlessness and his mistress' fertility are justification for his change of allegiance. In the light of this peculiar brand of 'feminism' and of the events that prompted the writing of The New Machiavelli, Altiora Bailey's 'unwomanliness' takes on a more specific, and an ironic, meaning. 9. H. G. Wells, The New Machiavelli (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966) p. 158. 10. Ibid., p. 155. 255 256 Notes II. Robert J. Scally, The Origins of the Lloyd George Coalition: The Politics of Social-Imperialism, 1900-1918 (Princeton, NJ, & London: Princeton Univer­ sity Press, 1975) pp. 81-2. Scally's depiction of Beatrice Webb as a skilled hostess is particularly amusing in view of the austerity of the meals served by her: 'a soup, a plain fish, and mutton or boiled fowl and milk pudding, with nothing to drink but whisky and soda, and hot and cold water, and milk and lemonade' (Wells, The New Machiavelli, p. 161). 12. Bell, Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. 1, p. 26 ( 3January 191 S). 13. Wells, The New Machiavelli, p. 159. 14. Malcolm Muggeridge, In a Valley of this Restless Mind (London: George Routledge, 1938) p. 118. 15. See 'My Aunt Bo', the introduction to Kitty Muggeridge and Ruth Adam, Beatrice Webb, A Life, 1858-1943 (London: Seeker & Warburg, 1967). Kitty Muggeridge's mother, Rosy Potter, was never on the best of terms with her older sister Beatrice, particularly during the years after their mother's death when Rosy was in Beatrice's charge. It would be difficult for ill-feeling not to play a part in Muggeridge's description of her aunt, and her inevitable bias illustrates the limitations of 'definitive' biographies written by relatives. 16. Ibid., p. 13. 17. Ibid., p. 14. One wonders if Muggeridge is alluding here to her great­ grandmother, Mary Seddon Potter, said by some members of the family to have been a gipsy and by others, among them Beatrice Webb, to have been a Jew. See Chapter 6 below. 18. Ibid., p. 14. 19. Shirley Robin Letwin, The Pursuit of Certainry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965) pp. 348-9. 20. Ibid., p. 357. 21. Review of a reissue of My Apprenticeship, Daily Herald, II April 1929. 22. Review ofa reissue ofMy Apprenticeship, Newcastle Daily journal, II Aprill929. 23. Review of a reissue of My Apprenticeship, Methodist Recorder, 18 April 1929. 24. R. H. Tawney, 'Beatrice Webb', in Proceedings of the British Acadmry, 1943 (London: Oxford University Press, 1943) p. 307. 25. Desmond MacCarthy, 'The Webbs as I Saw Them', in Margaret Cole (ed.), The Webbs and their Work (London: Frederick Muller, 1949) p. 128. 26. Bertrand Russell, Portraits from Memory and Other Essays (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1951) p. I 06. 27. Ibid., pp. 106, 107, 109. 28. Ibid., p. 105. 29. Leonard Woolf, Sowing, 1880-1904 (New York & London: Harcourt Brace, 1960) p. 48. 30. Ibid., p. 48. 31. F. R. Leavis, introduction to Mill on Bentham and Coleridge (London: Chatto & Windus, 1950) p. 18. 32. Ibid., p. 18. 33. Ibid., p. 19. 34. Ibid., p. 26. 35. Hynes observes that among the great modern diarists, only Virginia Woolf is Webb's rival. Notes 257 36. Samuel Hynes, 'The Art of Beatrice Webb', in Edwardian Occasions (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972) p. 158. 37. Ibid., p. 154. 38. Ibid. 39. Ibid., pp. 170-1. 40. At this time, only the first volume has been published. See Norman and .Jeanne MacKenzie (eds), The Diary of Beatrice Webb, vol. 1: Glitter Around and Darkness Within, 1873-1892 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press; London: Virago Press, 1982). 41. A recent study of the Fabians' relation to the arts tries to correct the impression of the presumed aridity of Fabian aesthetics. In Fabianism and Culture: A Study in British Socialism and the Arts (Cambridge University Press, 1982), Ian Britain goes to very great lengths to prove that the Fabians were not the Philistines those like Wells claimed them to be. Britain may be overreacting to certain distortions in historical representations of the Fabians, but he is right to blur the rigid distinctions traditionally perceived between humanist and utilitarian strains of nineteenth-century socialism. 42. Webb's upbringing, the MacKenzies assert, engendered in her a 'profound conflict between ... her feminine instincts and her desire to be ... successful in a man's world; and that ambivalence led to the first great crisis of her life, when she conceived an obsessive passion for the Radical politician .Joseph Chamberlain' (Diarv rif Beatrice lVebb, p. xii). The MacKenzies' editing of the diary tends to overestimate, I think, the influence of the Chamberlain episode on Webb's decisions about her work and life, and to minimize both the continuity of her professional aspirations and the centrality of spiritual crises and preoccupations to her youth. 43. Patricia Meyer Spacks, The Female Imagination (New York: Avon-Discus, 1976) p. 365. 44. There have been recent effi1rts made to discuss My Apprenticeship in the context of Victorian autobiographical writing. In 'Beatrice Webb's Two Voices: My Apprenticeship and Victorian Autobiography' (English Studies in Canada, 11, I (Spring, 1976) pp. 83-96), Ira Nadel analyses the 'historical' and the 'fictional' narrative modes in Webb's autobiography. Alan Mintz makes .'lc{v Apprenticeship the focus of the epilogue to his suggestive study, George Eliot and the Novel of Vocation (Cambridge & London: Harvard University Press, 1978). Mintz asserts that \-\'ebb, a 'latter-day Dorothea', departed from the classic Victorian idea of vocation in her autobiography by making 'craft', rather than 'calling' or 'divinely inspired mission', her goal. I would argue that Mintz does not fully take into consideration the equally important theme of 'creed' in My Apprenticeship, and that Webb's notion of interdependent faith and work is the equivalent of a mid-Victorian concept of vocation. I would agree, however, that history had created new circumstances for the discovery and practice of vocation (particularly for women) by the 1880s and 1890s. 258 Notes Chapter 1: A Tradition of Victorian Autobiography I. Southey coined the term 'autobiography' in 1809, but, as Keith Rinehart has pointed out in his essay 'The Victorian Approach to Autobiography' (Modern Philology, 51 (February, 1954) pp. 177-87), the word was not firmly established until the 1860s. Rinehart's analysis of the publication dates of 171 major Victorian autobiographies suggests that the number of autobiog­ raphies published each year increased steadily throughout the century. 2. M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: Norton, 1971) pp. 95-6 (my italics). I owe a great deal to Abrams' definition of the 'crisis-autobiography' in the second chapter of his book. For another discussion of this genre, see John Nelson Morris, Versions of the Self: Studies in English Autobiography from john Bunyan to John Stuart Mill (New York: Basic Books, 1966). 3. See Beatrice Webb, .t:(y Apprenticeship (New York: Longman, 1926) p. 139, and Beatrice Webb's Diaries (Passfield Papers), March 1886, June 1878, January 1873, December 1879, March 1877 and March 1878. Many of Webb's reading notes have been left out of the typescript version of her Diaries, and must be read in the original manuscript. 4. Frank D. McConnell, The Confessional Imagination: A Reading of Wordsworth's 'Prelude' (Baltimore & London: .Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974) pp. 2, 9. 5. See Alan Mintz's George Eliot and the Novel of Vocation (Cambridge & London: Harvard University Press, 1978) p. 21, on the idea of vocation as a 'principle of biographical design' for both biographers and autobiographers. I use the male pronoun here and elsewhere in this chapter with deliberate intention as it is my point to argue that, until My Apprenticeship, this particular form of autobiography was one used by male writers.