by Sylvia Nasar
In Manchester, Marshall found the smoky brown sky, muddy brown streets, and long piles of warehouses, cavernous mills, and insalubrious tenements—all within a few hundred yards of glittering shops, gracious parks, and grand hotels—that novels such as Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South had led him to expect. In the narrow backstreets he encountered sallow, undersized men and stunted, pale factory girls with thin shawls and hair flecked with wisps of cotton. The sight of “so much want” amid “so much wealth” prompted Marshall to ask whether the existence of a proletariat was indeed “a necessity of nature,” as he had been taught to believe. “Why not make every man a gentleman?” he asked himself.12
• • •
Marshall, who lacked the plummy accent and easy manners of other fellows of St. John’s College, sometimes compared his discovery of poverty to that of original sin and his ultimate embrace of economics to a religious conversion. But although poverty first occurred to him as a subject of study after the panic of 1866, the implication that he had had to wait until then to look into the faces of poor people was grossly misleading.13 His maternal grandfather was a butcher and his paternal grandfather a bankrupt. His father and uncles started life as penniless orphans. William Marshall had put down “gentleman” as his occupation on his marriage license, but he had never risen above the modest position of cashier at the Bank of England. His son Alfred was born not, as he later intimated, in an upscale suburb but in Bermondsey, one of London’s most notorious slums, in the shadow of a tannery. When the Marshalls moved to the lower-middle-class Clapham, they took a house opposite a gasworks.
Thanks to his precocious intelligence and his father’s efforts to convince a director of the bank to sponsor his education, Marshall was admitted to Merchant Taylors’, a private school in the City that catered to the sons of bankers and stockbrokers. From the age of eight, he commuted daily by omnibus, ferry, and foot through the most noxious manufacturing districts and slums bordering the Thames. Marshall had been looking into the faces of poor people all his life.
In Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, published in 1861, the year Marshall graduated from Merchant Taylors’, the diminutive orphan hero, Pip, makes what he describes as a “lunatic confession.” After swearing his confidante to absolute secrecy three times over, he whispers, “I want to be a gentleman.”14 His playmate Biddy is as nonplussed as if Pip, on the verge of being apprenticed to a blacksmith, had expressed ambitions to become the Pope. Indeed, to make his hero’s mad dream come true, Dickens had to invent convicts on a foggy moor, a haughty heiress, a haunted mansion, a mysterious legacy, and a secret benefactor. Even in an age that celebrated the self-made man, the notion that a boy like Pip—never mind the whole mass of Pips—could join the middle class was understood to be the stuff of pure fantasy or eccentric utopian vision, as divorced from real life as Dickens’s phantasmagoric novel. As an editorialist for the Times observed dryly in 1859, “Ninety nine people in a hundred cannot ‘get on’ in life but are tied by birth, education or circumstances to a lower position, where they must stay.”15
Yet there were signs of motion and upheaval. The question of who could become a gentleman, and how, became one of the great recurring themes of Victorian fiction, observes Theodore Huppon. A gentleman was defined by birth and occupation and by a liberal, that is to say non-vocational, education. That excluded anyone who worked with his hands, including skilled artisans, actors, and artists, or engaged in trade (unless on a very grand scale). Miss Marrable in Anthony Trollope’s The Vicar of Bullhampton “had an idea that the son of a gentleman, if he intended to maintain his rank as a gentleman, should earn his income as a clergyman, or as a barrister, or as a soldier, or as a sailor.”16 The explosion of white-collar professions was blurring the old lines of demarcation. Why else would Miss Marrable have needed to lay down the law? Doctors, architects, journalists, teachers, engineers, and clerks were pushing themselves forward, demanding a right to the label.17
A working gentleman’s occupation had to allow him enough free time to think of something other than paying the bills, and his income had to suffice to provide his sons with educations and his daughters with gentlemen husbands. Yet exactly what such an amount might be was also a matter of much debate. The paupers in Trollope’s The Warden are convinced that £100 a year was enough to transform them all into gentlemen, but when the unworldly warden threatens to retire on £160 a year, his practical son-in-law chides him for imagining that he could live decently on such a mere pittance.18 Alfred Marshall’s father supported a wife and four children on £250 per annum,19 but Karl Marx, admittedly no great manager of money, couldn’t keep up middle-class appearances on twice that amount.20 In 1867 gentlemanly incomes were few and far between. Only one in fourteen British households had incomes of £100 or more.21
Yet even Miss Marrable might have agreed that a fellow of a Cambridge college qualified. All fifty-six fellows of St. John’s College were entitled to an annual dividend from the college’s endowment that rose from about £210 in 1865 to £300 in 1872—as well as rooms and the services of a college servant.22 A daily living allowance covered dinner at “high table,” which usually consisted of two courses, including a joint and vegetables, pies and puddings, followed by a large cheese that traveled down the table on castors. Twice a week a third course of soup or fish was added. Most fellows supplemented their fellowship income with exam coaching fees or specific college jobs such as lecturer or bursar. For a single man with no wife and children—fellows were required to remain celibate—college duties still left many hours for research, writing, and stimulating conversation and an income that permitted regular travel, decent clothes, a personal library, and a few pictures or bibelots—the requisites, in short, of a gentleman’s life.
• • •
Alfred Marshall’s metamorphosis from a pale, anxious, underfed, badly dressed scholarship boy into a Cambridge don was nearly as remarkable as Pip’s transformation from village blacksmith’s apprentice into partner in a joint stock company. His father had gone to work in a City brokerage at sixteen. His brother Charles, just fourteen months his senior, was sent to India at seventeen to work for a silk manufacturer. His sister Agnes followed Charles to India, in order to find a husband but died instead.
Like many frustrated Victorian fathers, Marshall’s tried to live vicariously through his gifted son. Committed to educating Alfred for the ministry, William Marshall got his employer to foot the tuition at a good preparatory school. He was “cast in the mould of the strictest Evangelicals, bony neck, bristly projecting chin,”23 a domestic tyrant who bullied his wife and children. A night owl, he often kept Alfred up until eleven, drilling him in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin.24
Not surprisingly, the boy suffered from panic attacks and migraines. A classmate remembered that he was “small and pale, badly dressed, and looked overworked.” Shy and nearly friendless, Marshall revealed “a genius for mathematics, a subject that his father despised,” and acquired a lifelong distaste for classical languages. “Alfred would conceal Potts’s Euclid in his pocket as he walked to and from school. He read a proposition and then worked it out in his mind as he walked along.”25
Merchant Taylors’ School was relatively cheap and heavily subsidized, but even with a salary of £250, William Marshall could barely afford the £20 per annum required to cover his son’s out-of-pocket expenses as a day student.26 Yet the senior Marshall was willing to endure—and impose—the strictest economies to send Alfred there, because success at Merchant Taylors’ guaranteed a full scholarship to study classics at Oxford, no small prize at a time when a university education was a luxury that only one in five hundred young men of his son’s generation could afford. Even more important, under soon to be abolished statutes, the Oxford scholarship came with a virtual guarantee of a lifetime fellowship in classics at one of its colleges or entrée into the church, the civil service, or the faculty of the most prestigious preparatory schools.
When Marshall announced
his intention of turning down the Oxford scholarship and studying mathematics at Cambridge instead, his father raged, threatened, and cajoled. Only a substantial loan from an uncle in Australia and a mathematics scholarship enabled Marshall to defy parental authority and pursue his dream. When the seventeen-year-old went up to take his scholarship exam, he walked along the river Cam shouting with joy at his impending liberation.
At the end of three years at St. John’s, there was another race to run, namely a grueling sporting event known as the Mathematical Tripos. Leslie Stephen, who was Marshall’s contemporary at Cambridge and the future father of Virginia Woolf, estimated that a second-place finish such as Marshall’s was worth as much as a £5,000 inheritance—one-half million dollars in today’s money—more than enough to get a leg up in life.27 Marshall’s reward was immediate election to a lifetime fellowship at his college, which gave him the right to live at the college and to collect coaching and lecture fees (worth another £2,500 in Stephen’s reckoning). After a year of moonlighting at a preparatory school to repay his uncle’s loan, Marshall was, for the first time in his life, truly financially independent and free to do as he liked.
How to best use his freedom was the great question. Mathematics was beginning to bore him. As Marshall sat high up in the pure Highland air reading Immanuel Kant (“The only man I ever worshipped”28), the world below was hidden in mist. Yet the faces of the poor and images of drudgery and privation continued to haunt him. Like Pip, Alfred Marshall had shot up but could not forget those left behind.
• • •
Marshall had returned to Cambridge from Scotland in October 1867, “brown and strong and upright.”29 As an undergraduate he had been excluded from all the social clubs and private gatherings in dons’ rooms that constituted the most valuable parts of a Cambridge education. But now that he had achieved intellectual distinction, he was invited to join the Grote Club, a group of university radicals who met regularly to discuss political, scientific, and social questions. Their leader was Henry Sidgwick, a charismatic philosopher four years Marshall’s senior who quickly spotted Marshall’s talent and took him under his wing. “I was fashioned by him,” Marshall acknowledged. His own father had almost squeezed the life out of him, but Sidgwick “helped me to live.”30
With Sidgwick as intellectual guide, Marshall plunged into German metaphysics, evolutionary biology, and psychology, rising at five to read every day. He spent some months in Dresden and Berlin, where, according to biographer Peter Groeneweger, he “fell under the spell of Hegel’s Philosophy of History.”31 Like the young Hegel and Marx, he found Hegel’s message that individuals should govern themselves according to their own conscience, not in blind obedience to authority, compelling. He absorbed an evolutionary view of society from Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, which appeared in 1859, and Herbert Spencer’s Synthetic Philosophy, published in 1862. An interest in psychology was stimulated by the possibility of “the higher and more rapid development of human faculties.”32 The young man whose chances in life had turned on access to first-rate education was coming to the conclusion that the greatest obstacles to man’s mental and moral development were material.
He began to think of himself as a “Socialist.” In the 1860s, the term implied an interest in social reform or membership in a communal sect, while the equally expansive label of “Communist” encompassed everyone who thought that things couldn’t get better unless the whole system of private property and competition was torn down.33 When Marshall questioned Sidgwick about overcoming class divisions, his mentor used to gently chide him, “Ah, if you understood political economy you would not say that.” Marshall took the hint. “It was my desire to know what was practical in social reform by State and other agencies that led me to read Adam Smith, Mill, Marx and LaSalle,” he later recalled. He began his education by reading John Stuart Mill’s Principles of Political Economy, then in its sixth edition, and “got much excited about it.”34
His interest was intensified by the unexpected passage of the Reform Act of 1867, which, in a single stroke, turned England into a democracy. The act did more than double the size of the electorate by extending the franchise to some 888,000 adult men, mostly skilled craftsmen and shopkeepers, who paid at least £10 a year in rent or property tax. It brought the working classes into the political system and made democratic government the only acceptable form of government. Though it ignored the 3 million factory operatives, day laborers, and farm workers—and, of course, the entire female sex—twentieth-century historian Gertrude Himmelfarb emphasizes that the Reform Act nonetheless lent the notion of universal suffrage an aura of inevitability.35 Marshall was troubled, though, by the contrast between the ideal of full citizenship and the reality of material squalor and deprivation that prevented most of his countrymen from taking full advantage of their civic freedoms.
“Shooting up,” as Marshall had done, can provoke feelings of guilt or a sense of obligation. Victorian fiction is populated by the “double” who shares the hero’s attributes and aspirations but is condemned to stay put while the other shoots up. When the American journalist and writer Henry James explored London on foot in 1869, Hyacinth Robinson, the protagonist of James’s 1886 novel about terrorists, seemed to jump “out of the London pavement.” James was watching the parade of brilliantly dressed figures, carriages, brilliantly lit mansions and theaters, the clubs and picture galleries emitting agreeable gusts of sound with a sense of doors that “opened into light and warmth and cheer, into good and charming relations,” when he conceived a young man very much like himself “watching the same public show . . . I had watched myself,” including “all the swarming facts” that spoke of “freedom and ease, knowledge and power, money, opportunity and satiety,” with only one difference: the bookbinder turned bomber in The Princess Casamassima would “be able to revolve around them but at the most respectful of distances and with every door of approach shut in his face.”36
Having been admitted to the rarified world of freedom, opportunity, knowledge, and ease, if not power or great wealth, Marshall kept the face of his double where he could see it every day:
I saw in a shop-window a small oil painting [of a man’s face with a strikingly gaunt and wistful expression, as of one “down and out”] and bought it for a few shillings. I set it up above the chimney piece in my room in college and thenceforward called it my patron saint, and devoted myself to trying how to fit men like that for heaven.37
As Marshall studied the works of the founders of political economy, “economics grew and grew in practical urgency, not so much in relation to the growth of wealth as to the quality of life; and I settled down to it.” The “settling” took a while. He found “the dry land of facts” intellectually unappetizing and socially unappealing. When he was asked to take over some lectures on political economy, Marshall agreed reluctantly. “I taught economics . . . but repelled with indignation the suggestion that I was an economist . . . ‘I am a philosopher straying in a foreign land.’ ”38
• • •
When Marshall began to study economics seriously in 1867, his mentor Sidgwick was convinced that the “halcyon days of Political Economy had passed away.”39 After the success of the 1846 Corn Law repeal, which was followed by a period of low food prices, political economy had a brief turn as “a true science on par with astronomy.”40 But the economic crisis and political upheavals of the 1860s revived the old animus against the discipline among intellectuals. Going a step beyond Carlyle’s epithet “the dismal science,” John Ruskin, the art historian, dismissed political economics as “that bastard science” and, like Dickens, called for a new economics; “a real science of political economy.”41 The fundamental problem, observed Himmelfarb, was that “the science of riches” clashed with the evangelicalism of the late Victorian era.42 Victorians were repelled by the notion that greed was good or that the invisible hand of competition guaranteed the best of all possible outcomes for society as a whole.
&nbs
p; With the advent of the franchise for working men, both political parties were courting the labor vote. But “political economy” was invoked to oppose every reform—whether higher pay for farm laborers or relief for the poor—on the grounds that it would slow down the growth of the nation’s wealth. While the founders of political economy had been radical reformers in their day, championing women’s rights, the abolition of slavery, and middle-class interests versus those of the aristocracy, their theories pitted their disciples against labor. As Virginia Woolf’s father, Leslie Stephen, remarked: “The doctrine . . . was used to crush all manner of socialist schemes. . . . Political economists were supposed to accept a fatalistic theory, announcing the utter impossibility of all schemes for social regeneration.”43
For example, when Henry Fawcett, the reform-minded professor of political economy at Cambridge, addressed striking workers, he told them that they were cutting their own throats. Such advice outraged Ruskin, who said, after a builders’ strike in 1869, “The political economists are helpless—practically mute; no demonstrable solution of the difficulty can be given by them, such as may convince or calm the opposing parties.”44 Mill was an even more dramatic example than Fawcett. Now a Radical member of parliament, Mill called himself a Socialist, and had championed the Second Reform Act and the right of workers to unionize and strike. Yet Mill’s view of the future of the working classes was scarcely less dour than that of Ricardo or Marx. J. E. Cairnes, a professor at University College London who published a famous indictment of slavery as an economic system, echoed Mill’s position a few years later:
The margin for the possible improvement of their lot is confined within narrow barriers which cannot be passed and the problem of their elevation is hopeless. As a body, they will not rise at all. A few, more energetic or more fortunate than the rest, will from time to time escape . . . but the great majority will remain substantially where they are. The remuneration of labor, as such, skilled or unskilled, can never rise much above its present level.45