Grand Pursuit: A Story of Economic Genius. Sylvia Nasar

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 nonvocational, 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