The Diary of Beatrice Webb, Vol I:

...distinguished for lack of distinction and for their luck in marrying heiresses...

...in its creed, she finds, it has embodied the (Christian...

...In her view reasons gave things an automatic value...

...A few months before the Dock Strike of 1889, she describes a type of woman who will one day step forward as a savior of humanity, and carry within her a mother's instinctive wisdom for the welfare of her children and their descendants...

...This woman will, she prophesies, unite "charm, ability, and religious enthusiasm" in the cause of good...

...Occasionally her diary reveals longings which she subsequently repressed...

...When she first met her future husband Sidney in 1890, she tells her youngest sister that he has none of the social assurance or graces that spring from great wealth or owning estates...

...Beatrice against the growing scientific temper of the nineteenth century, had unconsciously presented herself as "a historical phenomenon...

...in the beginning though, Beatrice had described Sidney as being as ugly as a tadpole, and she had mentioned to her family his shaky vowels and lack of savoir-faire...

...the price of unskilled woman's labor...

...her long drawn-out and obsessive passion for the Radical politician, Joseph Chamberlain...

...The argument which seems finally to have carried the day shows a nice piece of lateral thinking on Sidney's part: "One and one, placed in a sufficiently integrated relationship, make not two, but eleven...

...The clergy, as an adequate organization, are worked out," she is already saying by 1883 and continues: "Some secular body must take their place.'' Yet later, when she comes to discussing the Co-operative Movement, she speaks of "the religious element of work for humanity" that has entered it and made it a vivifying force...

...Even so, she had to be convinced that their joint-usefulness to society would be increased by marriage...

...Among trade-unionists she draws attention to an anti-feminine bias, which is not to be found among members of the Co-operative Movement...

...This coincided with her belief that' 'every woman has a mission to other women" and the word "mission" should be marked...

...Beatrice Webb, to a large extent, became such a woman...

...In Britain the Webbs were to play a major role in the Labor Movement, in founding the London School of Economics, and in the creation of the Welfare State...

...There are accounts of her adolescence...

...Balzac's cynicism and disbelief in the progress of human nature had distressed her, when she had read his books at the age of twenty-three, because for her progress was the key to life...

...Then there are her puncturing comments on some of the old families in England: "The Trevelyans are...

...Celibacy, she argues, is as painful to a woman, even from a physical point of view, as it is to a man...

...She was conscious that she came from the privileged classes, and when she writes nostalgically about her father as a boy in Manchester who enjoyed "shaking the oil out of the street lamps" (until apprehended by the local police), she is quick to add that he was a street boy by inclination and not by necessity...

...As a woman frequently moving in a world of government circles where husbands dominated their wives, she observes: "It is only with working men one feels free to sympathize without fear of unpleasant consequences...

...She began it in 1873, at the age of fifteen, under her maiden name of Beatrice Potter, and the last entry in the first volume, dated 23 July 1892, reads: "Exit Beatrice Potter...

...Her concern was with the perfect representation of facts and of their proportionate values...

...Virginia Woolf, in the next century, was to have a similar reaction when driving through London...

...Characteristically, therefore, much as she admired Mayhew's London Labor and London Poor (1851) as a mine of information, she regretted that it had no opening commentary and that it reached no "destination...

...In Beatrice Webb, with her beauty, private means, and high intelligence, there emerged a new kind of woman in public life a woman whose cultivated charms and money she used as an instru-ment of power for the benefit of the mas-ses...

...Her opposition to the mass measures of the Poor Law sprang from the fact that such legislation did not take into account the individual...

...When Virginia read it, she noted in her own diary that it displayed a woman trying to relate all her experiences to history...

...but to Leonard Woolf, she appeared slightly differently a woman with the soul of an artist, who suppressed her imagination and passion because of those causes...

...In Bacup, when she was disguised as "Miss Jones," she cannot resist entering in her diary how one old shrewd farmer smelt a rat and asked if her father was a Lord...

...All around she decided that social questions had eclipsed religious ones as the vital matters of the day...

...Living through a period in which the Church of England and, to a lesser extent, the other chillies were to lose the support of the working-classes, the Webbs (and Beatrice long before her marriage) looked for ways in which those classes, commonly referred to then as the poor, might be regenerated and given hope...

...Her active researches as an investigator in the East End and elsewhere had taught her that the masses were made up of individuals...

...One of the interesting sidelights exhibited by The Diary of Beatrice Webb is its advanced attitude towards the sexes and sex...

...In the case of the Webbs, ideologically, their eventual "destination" was to be Soviet Communism the full title of their 1935 joint-book being Soviet Communism: A New Civilization...

...Her descriptions of visits, disguised as "Miss Jones," to the Lancashire cotton-weavers at Bacup are first-rate examples of what is now known as investigative journalism...

...Between the two World Wars when Virginia Woolf s novels were being published, it is worth recalling Beatrice Webb's criticism of them...

...But if public service came easily to her, prayer often became increasingly difficult...

...Richard Potter, Beatrice's father, had been a successful railway promoter...

...Although never as catty as Virginia Woolf, she can be just as sharp...

...To Virginia Woolf, Beatrice Webb appeared formidable a woman of causes, who was old enough to be her mother...

...For two years he had pleaded with her to marry him, but it was not until after her father's death that she agreed...

...At pure 'Fiction'," she was to remark once, "I want to have my 'fling'," and many of the entries here suggest that sociology's gain may have been literature's loss...

...One of these was to be a novelist...

...On September 30, 1889, she declares: "In my work Science must precede Art.'' Ideally she recognized that Science and Art should be one, but in the sociological discipline that she had chosen to work in as a writer, whose study was to be the poor, the causes of poverty, and a scientific description of society, she also recognized that whereas in art the representation of one individual might tell the whole story, in science to know the whole story countless instances must be observed...

...In 1926 when Beatrice Webb brought out the first volume of her proposed auto-biographical trilogy under the title of My Apprenticeship, she drew heavily on her diary up to the time of her marriage...

...Their partnership, despite some early setbacks, was to flourish...

...Norman and Jeanne MacKenzie, who have edited the diary admirably, point out in their Introduction that Beatrice Webb was sustained all her life by a vague Deism and found spiritual comfort in prayer and a vocation in public service...

...Driving through the crowded streets of the capital in the 1880s she records how on one occasion every face that she saw seemed ready to tell her its secret history...

...Beatrice Webb used to feel guilty if she could not find reasons for things...

...about her London Season and her suicidal tendencies...

...Neville Braybrooke BEATRICE WEBB's diary is to be published in four volumes...

...he had ensured that all his nine daughters, of whom Beatrice was the eighth, should have financial independence...

...her search to find a career...

...She thought the characters lacked predominant aims and that one state of mind followed another without any particular reason...

...Enter Beatrice Webb, or rather (Mrs) Sidney Webb...

...Beatrice regarded her diary as an "impersonal confidant'' to whom she could confide her feelings about prayer and positivism...

...However, this part of their story, and how sadly ill-founded their optimism about Russia was to prove, belongs to later volumes of the diary...

...ideals of fair trading, ethics in industry, and care for the workers...

...so, too, are her descriptions of her experiences as a trouser-finisher in a sweatshop in London's East End, where "a shilling a day [was...

...and her tricky courtship with the rising Fabian ideologist and socialist, Sidney Webb...

...What is significant about this volume (the next one, All the Good Things of Life, will be published in December) is the portrait that it provides of a girl, who by her late teens had begun to feel that she had not the right to live unless she was fulfilling some duty towards humanity...