The Philosophical Breakfast Club

by Laura J. Snyder

  Because of the close relation between political economy and geology, it was even more worrisome that political economy was being presented by Ricardo and his followers as a deductive science. The members of the Philosophical Breakfast Club were concerned that the natural sciences would be tarred with the same deductive brush. The appeal of a deductive method in general was already being proclaimed by writers such as Thomas De Quincey, who lauded this approach to science in his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, which became a literary sensation on its publication in 1821. Before Ricardo came on the scene, De Quincey wrote, “All other writers had been crushed and overlaid by the enormous weight of facts and documents; Mr. Ricardo alone had deduced, a priori, from the understanding itself, laws which first gave a ray of light into the unwieldy chaos of materials, and had constructed what had been but a collection of tentative discussions into a science of regular proportions now first standing on an eternal basis.20

  By demonstrating that political economy was a true Baconian science, Whewell and Jones believed they could transform the public’s view of all the sciences. Political economy was thus the ideal place to initiate the reform of science they had been planning since their Cambridge days. Whewell and Jones would lead the way, but Babbage and Herschel would soon join in.

  WHEWELL INSTRUCTED JONES that his job was to write a book showing the proper inductive method to use in economic science. Meanwhile, Whewell would write a series of papers criticizing Ricardo’s deductive method. In those papers, which he wrote in 1829 and 1831 (a later series appeared in 1848 and 1850), Whewell employed his considerable mathematical skills to translate Ricardo’s laws into mathematical formulae. He engaged in a two-pronged attack on Ricardo. First, Whewell showed that even if Ricardo’s initial axioms were true—which Whewell did not think was the case—Ricardo’s reasoning to his conclusions was flawed. Further, Whewell complained, even if his reasoning had been valid, his starting axioms were so far from the truth that his conclusions bore almost no similarity to “the actual state of things.”21 It was the first time that anyone had ever put economic theory into mathematical form. Whewell, for this reason, is considered the “father” of mathematical economics—ironically so, as Whewell doubted that economic science could ever be wholly mathematical, because the social considerations he believed were irreducibly part of the science could not be formulated numerically.

  It was not easy to get Jones to write his book. In addition to his depression, Jones also suffered from what seems to have been the worst case of writer’s block in history, coupled with bouts of bad health: pleurisy (a painful inflammation of the membrane around the lungs), gout (a form of metabolic arthritis), rheumatism, and other illnesses, exacerbated by Jones’s excessive weight and his heavy drinking. Whewell counseled his friend to watch his weight, which would soon balloon up to 225 pounds.22 Over the years Whewell urged Jones to cut down his consumption of alcohol from three glasses a meal to only two.23 He needed to start living a “wholesome life,” Whewell warned.24

  In letter after letter, for nine years, Whewell badgered, bullied, and begged Jones to complete his book. Jones would later joke that his book was Whewell’s “foster child.”25 Whewell worried that the longer Jones waited, the more entrenched the Ricardian system would become (and, indeed, this is what happened). “It will be both more easy and more honorable to knock down Ricardo’s errors while they are new,” he told Jones in 1822.26 Several years later Whewell hopefully inquired, “I hope to find the demolition of the Ricardians very forward if I see you, for it is a proper adventure for you to set out to kill such a dragon as that system.”27 By 1828 Whewell reminded Jones “how ripe the world is for your speculations, and how they will become less striking and original by all delay.”28 Later still, Whewell fulminated at the “monstrous inactivity of your authorly functions … a vile and detestable piece of procrastination.”29 Soon, however, Whewell realized the depth of Jones’s psychological distress about the book, and his tone softened considerably. “I had no notion that your birth-throes would have been so painful,” Whewell apologized. “Why should you not lay aside the cultivation of your task ’till all the goblins have disappeared?”30

  Admittedly, Jones’s task was not an easy one. He needed to gather the empirical evidence that would provide the data for his inductive inferences. Jones told Whewell he was “searching the museums and libraries for old tracts and pamphlets from 1688 to 1776.”31 He hoped such texts would provide him with evidence of how people’s economic behavior had changed over time, and how it had stayed the same, what kinds of systems of production of income and distribution of income had been in place, and what kinds of relationships between landlords and renters had existed. Just as a drop of water, when viewed through a microscope, is found to teem with life, Jones believed that history—when viewed correctly—“teems everywhere with facts” which can be used in constructing economic theories.32

  Information about the present state of things around the world was also necessary. In his peripatetic summer wanderings over these years, Whewell took notes for Jones’s book on the economic conditions of the people he met: peasants in rural Switzerland, herdsmen on the German Alps who lived in cow huts and ate only curds and whey, and Italian workers on a new Alpine road.33 He told Jones excitedly about a village in the Netherlands, where there were “no poor and no rich”—everyone lived well enough, in clean, spacious houses.34 During one coach trip a servant girl told him about her wages; at a stop to change horses a Belgian lamented the high duty on distillation; over dinner at an inn, an ex–Benedictine monk explained how the convent land was farmed, and the wages of the lay brethren.35 Herschel helped too. On a trip to Amsterdam, he found books on Dutch and Portuguese commerce that he brought home for Jones.36 Babbage’s brother-in-law, the member of Parliament Wolryche Whitmore, sent Jones some useful economic data about England. Jones himself would gather his own evidence on trips to Wales, Normandy, Paris, and the Rhine.

  As Jones often put it, if we want to understand the way different nations of the earth produce and distribute their revenues, “I really know of but one way … and that is to look and see.”37 Such a careful, inductive process required the sifting of much historical and current information, and would take time.

  AS TIME WENT on, Jones’s work began to have even more relevance and importance. Heated debates were going on in Parliament and in the cities and towns about how to reform the poor laws. Jones had witnessed problems arising from the poor laws firsthand: Brasted was a focal point for riots and rebellions against the government due to its mismanagement of the welfare system there.38 Whewell, too, saw glimmerings of discontent in Cambridgeshire, where fires were set by angry mobs close enough to illuminate the Great Court at Trinity.39 Whewell assured Jones that his book would change things: “We will live through this storm and teach the world wise things when the winds have lulled again.”40

  The writings of Malthus and Ricardo had succeeded in influencing public thinking about the problem of poverty, in a way that worried Whewell and Jones. If it was true that, as Ricardo supposed, men do as little as possible to get the most they can, then, people believed, Malthus was right: giving money to a poor man would not make him more industrious, but less so. Why should he work if he could be supported for free? The nineteenth-century equivalent of our modern-day refrain about “welfare queens” was the image of an indolent, drunken pauper who used his relief money at the local pub and had more children in order to receive a larger family allowance. This iconic figure of the pauper led even clergymen like Whately, soon to be appointed archbishop of Dublin, to “thank God” he “never gave a penny to a beggar.”41 The combination of Malthus and Ricardo was a deadly cocktail for the poor, soon responsible for the imposition of a penalty for poverty that struck fear in the hearts of laborers throughout England: the workhouse.

  Workhouses had existed before, but the Elizabethan statutes had led to their abandonment in favor of money payments. Slowly, however, as the influenc
e of Malthus (and, later, Ricardo) spread, the workhouse was again seen as the panacea for poverty. In 1808 the parish of Southwell, in Nottinghamshire (where Lord Byron stayed with his mother on his holidays from Cambridge), built a workhouse for the poor members of the community. Holding eighty-four “inmates,” as they were called, the workhouse was intended to replace all aid to the poor. Instead of remaining in their own homes, with their families, while living on subsidies paid for by the rates on landowners, the poor were now forced to give up their homes and all possessions and enter into the workhouse in order to be fed. Families were separated, with men, women, and children living in separate quarters and allowed outside only in separate yards. Inmates were issued drab uniforms. The food was just enough to sustain life; the inmates were always hungry.42

  The inmates worked hard for ten to fourteen hours a day: the women did the laundry and the mending and the scrubbing, men broke rocks in the yard or crushed bones for fertilizer, while children and the elderly “picked oakum,” untwining rough and inflexible rope fibers that were then sold to shipbuilders, mixed with pine tar, and used for caulking wooden ships. It was a grim existence, and was meant to be so: the idea was to dissuade all but the most desperate from entering. Many inmates would deliberately break the strict workhouse rules so that they would be transferred to prison, where the conditions were more comfortable and the rations more generous.43 Others preferred to starve in their homes rather than in the workhouse. The Reverend John Becher, who designed the workhouse at Southwell, later noted proudly in a book called The Anti-Pauper System that the parish expenditures on poor relief had been cut in half after the workhouse was open for business.44 In 1834 a new poor law was passed by Parliament, mandating that all aid to the able-bodied poor must take place in workhouses.

  JONES AND WHEWELL believed that the workhouse system was cruel, indeed evil. Having grown up in the shadow of Lancaster Castle’s debtors’ prison, Whewell was particularly compassionate toward the poor. He and Jones agreed that the current system needed to be reformed. Giving able-bodied laborers money without requiring work might well make them lazy, and less inclined to seek labor. But a more purely economic result was that it drove down the wages that employers paid; they knew they could get away with paying less than what a worker could live on, because the worker would receive aid from the parish to top off his wages. At the same time, Jones and Whewell felt strongly that the workhouse system was not the answer. Although the philosopher and political radical Jeremy Bentham had once described the workhouse as “a mill to grind rogues honest,” Jones and Whewell believed such places did nothing but turn honest and proud laborers into cowed and frightened men or, even worse, criminals and bullies.45 Moreover, as Jones told Herschel, “liberty and comforts of the mass are the conditions of obtaining great productive power.”46 A strong economy could not rest on the broken backs of enslaved laborers.

  In a later book, The Elements of Morality, Including Polity (1845), published a decade after the new poor law was enacted, Whewell sharply noted the irony that at the very time Britain was emancipating the slaves throughout most of its empire, with the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, it had enslaved its own laborers. A worker was required to sell all of his belongings, including the furniture from his house and the tools of his trade, in order to receive relief in the workhouse. This made it impossible for a man to leave the workhouse and take up his trade again, as he could not earn the money to buy back those tools while in the workhouse, and thus reduced him to permanent “servitude.”47

  Whewell suggested instead that the poor be educated, so that they could be trained to take up positions manufacturing and selling the new consumer goods that were beginning to flood the market as a result of the Industrial Revolution—glassware, textiles, iron pots, ceramics, and porcelain—and thus join the growing middle classes. This solution contrasts markedly with the view of another prominent man of science, Davies Gilbert, a president of the Royal Society, who complained that “giving education to the laboring classes … would be prejudicial to their morals and happiness; it would teach them to despise their lot in life, instead of making them good servants.”48

  The very year that Whewell’s book was published, a scandal at the workhouse in Andover, Hampshire, was splashed across the nation’s newspapers. The inmates at the workhouse had been put to work crushing bones for use as fertilizer. Conditions were so bleak that the men were found to be gnawing the remaining bits of meat and marrow off the moldering bones. It was whispered that not all of these bones were of animal origin; some had come from local graveyards. The intimation of cannibalism added to the public’s interest, and their horror. As a result of the publicity surrounding the shocking conditions at this workhouse and others, a tighter system of centralized control over the workhouses was enacted. Before long, relief was once again being offered to able-bodied paupers outside of the workhouse system.49 In this at least, Jones and Whewell would prevail.

  WHILE WHEWELL was exhorting Jones to complete the book on political economy, he was running up against problems in his own domestic economy. As a fellow of Trinity, he was financially secure, even comfortably so. But this plush situation would have to be abandoned if he were to take a wife. Many of Whewell’s friends and acquaintances were aware that Whewell, then in his early thirties, wished to marry someday. Only Jones knew that there was someone in particular Whewell had in mind.

  In 1823, Whewell had met Sir John Malcolm in his friend Julius Hare’s rooms at Cambridge. Sir John had written a history of Persia, and a political history of India that Jones would use as a resource for his political economy book. He had served in Bombay with General Arthur Wellesley, later created the Duke of Wellington. Hare, Whewell, and their friend Adam Sedgwick soon became frequent guests at Sir Malcolm’s estate, Hyde Hall, thirty miles from Cambridge.50 Lady Malcolm was a charming hostess; the three young dons were flattered and fawned over, given dinners and dances and hunting expeditions. The dons repaid their hostess by being charming, flirtatious, and highly entertaining guests. Whewell was described at one of these social evenings as perhaps going a bit overboard, “overwhelming the young simplicity of a little girl with the guns of his great eloquence!”51

  Everyone knew that Hare was smitten with Mary Manning, the Scottish governess to the Malcolms’ daughters. Hare’s nephew would later describe her in somewhat ambivalent terms: “She was very tall, serene, and had a beautiful countenance.… She had a melodious low voice, a delicate Scotch accent, a perfectly self-possessed manner, and a sweet and gentle dignity.” At the same time, however, her strong personality annoyed some, including Hare’s nephew, who also found her to be “the most egotistical woman in the world.” She flattered those she considered superior to her, but could be cruel to subordinates. The combination of wit and flattery was dangerous to a group of young dons, already inclined to share the belief that they were superior men.52

  Hare was not the only one in love with Miss Manning. So was Whewell. But only Jones knew how serious this attachment was. Reading between the lines of a series of carefully written letters, it is clear that Whewell was weighing the pros and cons of asking Miss Manning to be his wife.

  The first sign lies in Jones’s response to Whewell’s query about whether he should apply for the Lucasian Professorship of Mathematics when it became available in 1826. The Lucasian chair—Isaac Newton’s old position—was, and still is, one of the most prestigious professorships at Cambridge, held until 2009 by the brilliant physicist Stephen Hawking. Yet Jones discouraged Whewell, reminding him that the Lucasian could not be held at the same time as a church position or a college tutorship—it was not, then, a good situation for a married man without independent means, because the salary of the professorship itself could not support a family in comfort.53 Instead, Jones counseled, Whewell should hope to be appointed to the Mineralogy professorship, because the holder of that chair was free to seek a post as vicar or curate in a nearby village in order to supplement his income (Whewell ha
d recently been ordained as a minister in the Anglican Church). Whewell had put himself forward for the Mineralogy chair the year before, but because of some confusion about whether the professorship would be filled at all, Whewell was in limbo until his appointment in 1828.

  In 1827, while Whewell was still waiting to hear about the Mineralogy professorship, the Malcolms made a sudden, startling announcement: they would soon be leaving Hyde Hall, as Sir John had been appointed mayor of Bombay. This gave a greater urgency to Whewell’s deliberations about whether or not to ask Miss Manning to marry him. Several letters between Whewell and Jones seem to be missing from this crucial period. No doubt Jones later burned some letters on Whewell’s request. But Jones kept a letter from Whewell describing his decision. “As to other matters, my purpose, and … my views are now quite clear and untroubled,” Whewell confided. “I have no hopes or wishes there, but at the same time I do not hope that any spot of the future contains so much of the elements of happiness.”

  One problem was Whewell’s lack of position; to marry now would mean a bleak and penurious existence as, at best, a parish priest. Although sometimes Whewell romanticized the serenity of that life, he saw how hard it was for Jones to write his book while he and his wife struggled to subsist on the wages of a country cleric. It was still nearly impossible for a man of science to live on science alone. But Whewell also realized that Miss Manning, though alluring, was not the woman for him. “I can easily see great difference of feelings & character & manners, and a change on one side or both would have been requisite and would I doubt not have taken place if frequent intercourse and hopes not too distant had favored it,” Whewell explained to Jones. “But as the time is, and with the uncertain events & situations & feelings of the future … there is but one way; and though this is dark & dreary it is not very difficult. It is not very difficult to fix the thoughts upon the discordances I have [in the missing letters] spoken of, and upon the disappointment … of not attempting that which did not depend upon one’s self alone.”54