by Sylvia Nasar
Beatrice’s identity was shaped by having been born into Britain’s “new ruling class,”16 and her mind by having been “brought up in the midst of capitalist speculation” and “the restless spirit of big enterprise.”17 As the historian Barbara Caine notes, Beatrice distinguished her class not by wealth but by the fact that it was “a class of persons who habitually gave orders, but who seldom, if ever, executed the orders of other people.”18 Her grandfathers were both self-made men. Her father had lost the lion’s share of his inheritance in the crash of 1848, only to quickly recoup his losses by supplying tents to the French army during the Crimean War. By the time Beatrice was born in 1858, Richard Potter had amassed a third fortune from timber and railways and had become a director (and future chairman of the board) of the Great Western Railway. More entrepreneur and speculator than hands-on manager, Potter once toyed with a scheme to build a waterway to rival the Suez Canal. His business interests were scattered from Turkey to Canada, and he and his family were constantly traveling. The Potters’ Gloucester estate, Standish, as grand and impersonal as a hotel, was filled with an ever-changing contingent of visiting relatives, guests, employees, and hangers-on.
Though Richard Potter began to vote Conservative in middle age, he was never a stereotypical Tory plutocrat. His father, a wholesaler in the cotton industry, was for a time a Radical member of Parliament and had helped found the Manchester Guardian19 (“our organ,” as Beatrice used to say).20 Intellectually engaged, broad-minded, and convivial, he counted scientists, philosophers, and journalists among his closest friends. Herbert Spencer, the most lionized intellectual in England in the 1860s and 1870s and a former railway engineer and Economist editorialist, called Richard Potter “the most lovable being I have yet seen.”21 Even the latter’s cheerful indifference to Spencer’s philosophical interests could not squelch Spencer’s lifelong adoration.
It is almost axiomatic that behind every extraordinary woman there is a remarkable father. Potter encouraged Beatrice and her sisters to read and gave them free run of his large library. He made no effort to restrict their discussion or friendships. He enjoyed their company so much that he rarely took a business trip without one or another as a companion. Beatrice claimed that “he was the only man I ever knew who genuinely believed that women were superior to men, and acted as if he did.”22 She gave him credit for her own “audacity and pluck and my familiarity with the risks and chances of big enterprises.”23
In some ways, Laurencina Potter was even more unusual than her husband, bearing even less resemblance to the plump and placid mothers that populate Trollope novels than her husband did to the stereotypical businessmen. When Spencer met the Potters for the first time shortly after their marriage, he thought they were “the most admirable pair I have ever seen.”24 As he got to know them better, he was surprised to learn that Laurencina’s perfectly feminine, graceful, and refined personage hid “so independent a character.”25 In contrast to her easygoing husband, Laurencina was cerebral, puritanical, and discontented. Born Heyworth, she came from a family of liberal Liverpool merchants who educated her no differently from her brothers; that is, trained her in mathematics, languages, and political economy. As a young woman, she became a local celebrity and the subject of newspaper articles as a result of the zeal with which she canvassed against the Corn Laws. Decades later, Beatrice was used to seeing pamphlets on economic issues appear on her dressing table.
Laurencina was a very unhappy woman. The cause of her frustration was not hard for her daughter to divine. She had envisioned a married life of “close intellectual comradeship with my father, possibly of intellectual achievement, surrounded by distinguished friends.”26 Instead, for the first two decades after her marriage, she was almost always pregnant or nursing an infant and banished to the company of women and children while her husband traveled on business and dined with writers and intellectuals. Her real ambition had been to write novels, and she did publish one, Laura Gay, before the demands of family life overwhelmed her.
When Laurencina’s ninth child and only son, Dickie, was born, she devoted herself completely to him. But when the boy died of scarlet fever at age two, she became severely depressed and withdrew from her other children. Beatrice, who was seven at the time, recalled her mother as “a remote personage discussing business with my father or poring over books in her boudoir.” As a consequence of her mother’s coldness, Beatrice came to believe that “I was not made to be loved; there must be something repulsive about my character.” Moody, self-dramatizing, and inclined to fib and exaggerate, she had also inherited the Heyworths’ tendency to Weltschmerz and suicide. Two of Laurencina’s relatives had died by their own hand. “My childhood was not on the whole a happy one,” reflected Beatrice as an adult. “Ill-health and starved affection and the mental disorders which spring from these, ill temper and resentment, marred it . . . Its loneliness was absolute.”27 Beatrice herself had toyed with bottles of chloroform even as a child.
Rebuffed by her mother, a biographer says, Beatrice sought affection “below stairs” among the servants who helped keep the Potter household running. She and her older sisters were especially close to Martha Jackson, or Dada as they called her, who took care of the children. Dada, Beatrice learned much later, was actually a relative from a branch of her mother’s family who were poor but respectable Lancashire hand-loom weavers. Caine credits Dada with planting in Beatrice the notion of original sin that gave her the determination to do good and the identification she felt all her life with the “respectable” working poor. But it was Laurencina’s example that inspired her to write. On her fifteenth birthday, Beatrice began a journal that she kept until her death. “Sometimes I feel as if I must write, as if I must pour my poor crooked thoughts into somebody’s heart, even if it be into my own.”28
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Among the intellectuals who frequented the Potter house were the biologist Thomas Huxley; Sir Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin’s; and other proponents of the new “scientific” point of view that was undermining traditional beliefs. By the time Beatrice was in her teens, Spencer, who shared the Potters’ background as dissenting Protestants, had become Laurencina’s closest confidant and the dominant intellectual influence in the household.
Spencer, who coined the term “survival of the fittest,” was a bigger celebrity in the 1860s than Charles Darwin. His notion that social institutions, like animal or plant species, were evolving—and therefore could be observed, classified, and analyzed like plants or animals—had captured the public’s imagination. One of the earliest exponents of evolution, Spencer was a radical individualist who opposed slavery and supported women’s suffrage. His antipathy toward government regulation and high taxes appealed to the upwardly mobile middle and lower-middle classes. His popularity was further bolstered by his refusal to rule out absolutely the existence of God.
Fame, however, had not agreed with Spencer. In uncertain health and prone to hypochondria, he had grown increasingly reclusive and eccentric with age. When not at his club or alone in his rooms, he turned to the company of the Potters and their children. A frequent guest at the Potters’ Gloucester estate, he delighted in liberating the Potter sisters from their governesses while chanting, “Submission not desirable.”29 Often he would lead them off to gather specimens to illustrate one or another of his ideas about evolution. In the summers, when the Potters were at their Cotswold retreat, he would lead the way through beech groves and old pear orchards, dressed in white linen from head to toe, carrying a parasol. Trailing behind would be a “very pretty and original group”30 of tall, slender girls with boyishly short black hair, dressed in pale muslins and carrying buckets and nets. From time to time, the party stopped to dig for fossils. The old railway cuts or limestone quarries of Gloucester once lay under shallow, warm seas and thousands of years later yielded a choice collection of ammonites, crinoids, trilobites, and echinoids. The girls did not take their hyperrational friend too seriously. “Are we
descended from monkeys, Mr. Spencer?” they would chorus amid giggles. His unvarying reply—“About 99 percent of humanity have descended and one percent have ascended!”—elicited more peals of mirth as well as, occasionally, volleys of decaying beech leaves aimed at the philosopher’s “remarkable headpiece.”31
The most bookish and moodiest of the sisters, Beatrice developed a lasting fascination with the workings of Spencer’s remarkable mind. Spencer encouraged Beatrice by telling her that she was a “born metaphysician,” comparing her to his idol, George Eliot, drawing up reading lists, and urging her to pursue her intellectual ambitions. Without his support, Beatrice might have submitted to the kind of life that convention—and at times her own heart—demanded.
Beatrice’s formal education was shockingly skimpy. Like that of many upper-class young women, it was limited to a few months at a fancy finishing school, in part because of her own frequent illnesses, both imaginary and real, and in part because even Richard Potter, liberal as he was by the standards of the time, never thought of sending her to university. She was therefore largely educated at home—that is to say, self-taught and free to read even books that had been banned from public libraries. “I am, as Mother says, too young, too uneducated, and worst of all, too frivolous to be a companion to her,” she wrote in her diary. “But, however, I must take courage, and try to change.”32 Penny-pinching in most things, Laurencina was openhanded when it came to buying newspapers and magazines. Beatrice plunged into religion, philosophy, and psychology, her mother’s interests. Her schoolgirl reading included George Eliot and the fashionable French philosopher and pioneering sociologist Auguste Comte.
Because Beatrice was given unlimited access to her father’s library and her mother’s journals, she was exposed in a way few girls were to the religious and scientific controversies that dominated the late Victorian era. “We lived, indeed, in a perpetual state of ferment, receiving and questioning all contemporary hypotheses as to the duty and destiny of man in this world and the next,” she recalled. By the time Beatrice was eighteen and about to come out, she had substituted for the old Anglican faith Spencer’s new doctrine of “harmony and progress.” She had also embraced her mentor’s libertarian political creed and his ideal of the “scientific investigator.” The image of the latter aroused her “domineering curiosity in the nature of things” and “hope for a ‘bird’s eye view’ of mankind” as well as her secret ambition to write “a book that would be read.”33
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After three weeks at Princes Gate, Beatrice was suffering from the “rival pulls on time and energy.”34 After a particularly tedious dinner party, she fumed that “Ladies are so expressionless.”35 She no longer understood why “intelligent women wish to marry into the set where this is the social regime.”36 She poured her discontents into her diary: “I feel like a caged animal, bound up by the luxury, comfort, and respectability of my position.”37
Beatrice longed for work as well as love, but she was beginning to wonder whether her chances of having it all were any better than poor Laurencina’s. When Isabel Archer insisted that “there are other things a woman can do,” she was thinking, presumably, of the small but growing ranks of self-supporting female professionals who could befriend whomever they pleased, talk about whatever they liked, live in lodgings, and travel on their own.
But such women gave up a great deal, Beatrice realized upon reflection. When she encountered the daughter of the notorious Karl Marx in the refreshment room of the British Museum, Eleanor Marx was “dressed in a slovenly picturesque way with curly black hair flying about in all directions!” Beatrice was taken by Eleanor’s intellectual self-confidence and romantic appearance but repelled by the latter’s bohemian lifestyle. “Unfortunately one cannot mix with human beings without becoming more or less connected with them,” she told herself.38 She adored her cousin Margaret Harkness, the future author of In Darkest London, A City Girl, and other social novels. Maggie lived on her own in a seedy one-room flat in Bloomsbury and had tried teaching, nursing, and acting before discovering her talents as a writer. Her family was horrified, and Maggie had been forced to break off all contact with them, something Beatrice could no more imagine than she could picture immigrating to America. She wished that she could be more contented. “Why should I, wretched little frog, try to puff myself into a professional? If I could rid myself of that mischievous desire to achieve . . .”39
Once again Spencer came to the rescue by suggesting that Beatrice take her older sister’s place as a volunteer rent collector in the East End. She could prepare for a career of social investigation while continuing her private studies. Like Alfred Marshall a generation before, Beatrice found herself drawn to London. She went off to a meeting of the Charity Organization Society, a private group dedicated to “scientific” or evidence-based charity and the gospel of self-help. “People should support themselves by their own earnings and efforts and . . . depend as little as possible on the state.”40 Women had traditionally been responsible for visiting the poor, but by the 1880s social work was becoming a respectable profession for spinsters and married women without children. The attractions were manifold. Beatrice observed: “It is distinctly advantageous to us to go amongst the poor . . . We can get from them an experience of life which is novel and interesting; the study of their lives and surrounding gives us the facts whether with we can attempt to solve the social problems.”41 Shortly afterward she thought, “If I could only devote my life to it . . .”42 Yet, as of a few months earlier, Beatrice had made only two or three visits to the Katherine Houses in Whitechapel. “I can’t get the training that I want without neglecting my duty,” she sighed.43
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One night that same month, Beatrice lay awake until dawn, too excited to sleep. Her partner at a neighbor’s dinner party had been Joseph Chamberlain, the most important politician in England and the most commanding and charismatic man she had ever met.
Chamberlain was twenty-two years older than Beatrice and twice widowed, but he radiated youthful vigor and enthusiasm. Powerfully built with thick hair, a piercing gaze, and a curiously seductive voice, he was a natural leader. He had made a large fortune as a manufacturer of screws and bolts before moving into politics as the reform-minded mayor of Birmingham. For four years, he “parked, paved, assized, marketed, Gas and Watered and improved”44 the grimy factory town into a model metropolis. After spending several years rebuilding the Liberal Party’s crumbling political machine, he was rewarded with a cabinet post.
By the time Beatrice met Chamberlain, he had become the bad boy of English politics. His studied elegance—contrived with a monocle, a bespoke suit, and a fresh orchid on his lapel—hardly fit his rabble-rouser image. But in the stormy debates of that year, Chamberlain had focused voters’ attention on the twin issues of poverty and voting rights. He had used his cabinet post to campaign for universal male suffrage, cheaper housing, and free land for farm laborers. He infuriated Conservatives by inviting the party’s leader, Lord Salisbury, to visit Birmingham—only to serve as the keynote speaker at a rally protesting his presence. His rivals called him the “English Robespierre” and accused him of fomenting class hatred. Queen Victoria demanded that Chamberlain apologize after insulting the royal family at a working-class demonstration. Herbert Spencer told Beatrice that Chamberlain was “a man who may mean well, but who does and will do, an incalculable amount of mischief.”45
As a disciple of Spencer’s, Beatrice disapproved of virtually everything Chamberlain stood for, especially his populist appeals to voters’ emotions. Nonetheless, he excited her. “I do, and don’t, like him,” she wrote in her diary. Sensing danger, she warned herself sternly that “talking to ‘clever men’ in society is a snare and delusion . . . Much better read their books.”46 She did not, however, follow her own advice.
Given that the Potters and Chamberlain were neighbors at Princes Gate, it was inevitable that the controversial Liberal politician and the fashionabl
e, if slightly unconventional, Miss Potter should be constantly thrown together. The second time they met was that July, at Herbert Spencer’s annual picnic. After spending the entire evening in conversation with Chamberlain, Beatrice admitted, “His personality interested me.”47 A couple of weeks later, she found herself seated between Chamberlain and an aristocrat with vast estates. “Whig peer talked of his own possessions, Chamberlain passionately of getting hold of other people’s—for the masses,” she joked. Though she found his political views distasteful, she was captivated by his “intellectual passions” and “any amount of purpose.” Beatrice thought to herself: “How I should like to study that man!”48
Beatrice was fooling herself. The social investigator and detached observer had already lost her footing and slipped into the “whirlpool” of emotions to which she was irresistibly drawn but that she could neither comprehend nor control. She agonized over whether or not she would be happy as Chamberlain’s wife. Used to charming the men around her, she was unsatisfied by easy conquests. Starved for affection as a child, she longed to capture the attention of a man who was focused not on her but on some important pursuit. Chamberlain, who wanted to be prime minister, demanded blind loyalty from followers and family alike, and seduced crowds the way other men seduced women. He was the most powerful personality Beatrice had ever encountered. Might he not relish a strong mate?
She tried to analyze his peculiar fascination for her: “The commonplaces of love have always bored me,” she wrote in her diary.