News of Beatrice’s exploit spread quickly. In May, a House of Lords committee that was conducting an investigation of sweatshops invited her to testify. The Pall Mall Gazette, which covered the hearing, described her in glamorous terms as “tall, supple, dark with bright eyes” and her manner in the witness chair as “quite cool.”110 In the hearing, Beatrice slipped into her childhood habit of fibbing and claimed that she had spent three weeks instead of three days in the sweatshop. Fear of exposure kept her in an agony of suspense for weeks afterward. But when “Pages of a Workgirl’s Diary” was published in the liberal journal the Nineteenth Century, in mid-October, its success was delicious. “It was the originality of the deed that has taken the public, more than the expression of it.”111 All the same, Beatrice admitted, an invitation to read her paper at Oxford made her ridiculously happy. (“If I have something to say I now know I can say it and say it well.”112) Just before New Year’s, despite a bad cold that kept her in bed, Beatrice was luxuriating in mentions in the daily papers and “even a bogus interview . . . telegraphed to America and Australia.”113
Beatrice now felt emboldened to embark on a project that was hers alone. Ever since her week as “Miss Jones” in Bacup among the hand-loom weavers, she had been drawn to the idea of writing a history of the cooperative movement. Even the shock of reading in the Pall Mall Gazette that Joseph Chamberlain had been secretly engaged to a twenty-five-year-old American “aristocrat”—“a gasp—as if one had been stabbed—and then it was over”114—did not prevent Beatrice from plunging into Blue Books once more. Her cousin Charlie tried to convince her to write a treatise about women’s work instead. So did Alfred Marshall, whom she met for the first time at Oxford and who invited her to lunch with him and Mary. He greatly admired her “Diary,” he said. When she seized the opportunity to ask him what he thought of her new project, he told her dramatically that “if you devote yourself to the study of your own sex as an industrial factor, your name will be a household word two hundred years hence; if you write a history of Co-operation, it will be superseded or ignored in a few years.”115
Beatrice, who preferred spending her time with men rather than with other women, and who suspected that Marshall thought her unqualified to write about one of his favorite subjects, had no intention of taking such advice. The matter was clinched when she impulsively joined with other socially prominent women in signing a petition opposing female suffrage. “I was at that time known to be an anti-feminist,” she later explained.116
In fact, Beatrice was changing her mind about a great many things. Notwithstanding her spirited defense to Chamberlain of her laissez-faire philosophy, she was beginning to have doubts about her parents’ and Spencer’s libertarian creed. She and the old philosopher still saw each other often, but their disagreements were now so violent that they talked less and less about politics. In any case, she was spending more and more of her time with her cousin Charlie.
When Booth published the first volume of Labour and Life of the People in April 1889, the Times said it “draws the curtain behind which East London has been hidden from view,” and singled out Beatrice’s chapter on the London dockworkers for praise.117 In June of that year, Beatrice attended a cooperative congress, where she became convinced that “the democracy of Consumers must be complemented by democracies of workers” if workers could ever hope to enforce hard-won agreements on pay and working hours.118 The dramatic and wholly unexpected victory in August 1889 of striking London dockworkers, universally believed to be too egotistical and desperate to band together, impressed her greatly. “London is in ferment: Strikes are the order of the day, the new trade unionism with its magnificent conquest of the docks is striding along,” Beatrice wrote in her diary.
The socialists, led by a small set of able young men (Fabian Society) are manipulating London Radicals, ready at the first check-mate of trade unionism to voice a growing desire for state action; and I, from the peculiarity of my social position, should be in the midst of all parties, sympathetic with all, allied with none.”119
Instead of witnessing these stirring sights firsthand, Beatrice was far away in a hotel in the country, tethered to her semicomatose father, “exiled from the world of thought and action of other men and women.” She worked on her book, but without any conviction that she could ever complete it. She was “sick to death of grappling with my subject. Was I made for brain work? Is any woman made for a purely intellectual life? . . . The background to my life is inexpressibly depressing—Father lying like a log in his bed, a child, an animal, with less capacity for thought and feeling than my old pet, Don.”120
As her frustration grew at being unable to sustain a career while nursing her father, Beatrice was more and more inclined to identify the plight of women with the oppression of workers. She thought about the houses of “all those respectable and highly successful men” and her sisters, to whom she remained close, had married:
Then . . . I struggle through an East End crowd of the wrecks, the waifs and strays, or I enter a debating society of working men and listen to the ever increasing cry of active brains doomed to the treadmill of manual labor—for a career in which ability tells—the bitter cry of the nineteenth century working man and the nineteenth century woman alike.121
The previous fall, when her father had told her, “I should like to see my little Bee married to a good strong fellow,” Beatrice wrote in her journal, “I cannot, and will never, make the stupendous sacrifice of marriage.”122
Beatrice became aware of Sidney Webb months before she met him. She read a book of essays published by the Fabian Society, a Socialist group that intended to win power the same way a Roman general named Fabius had won the Carthaginian war; gradually and with guerrilla tactics rather than head-on battles. She told a friend that “by far the most significant and interesting essay is by Sidney Webb.”123 Sidney returned the compliment in a review of the first volume of the Booth survey: “The only contributor with any literary talent is Miss Beatrice Potter.”124
Their first encounter took place in Maggie Harkness’s rooms in Bloomsbury. Beatrice had asked her cousin if she knew of any experts on cooperatives, and Maggie immediately thought of a Fabian who seemed to know everything. For Sidney, it was love at first sight, though he left their first meeting more despondent than euphoric. “She is too beautiful, too rich, too clever,” he said to a friend.125 Later he comforted himself with the thought that they belonged to the same social class—until Beatrice corrected him. True, blue-collar men amused her. She enjoyed talking and smoking with union activists and cooperators in their cramped flats. But the self-importance of working men who, having “risen . . . within their own class,” show up at London dinners and “introduce themselves as such without the least uneasiness for their reception” provoked her inner snob.126 Beatrice thought Sidney looked like a cross between a London cardsharp and a German professor and mocked his “bourgeois black coat shiny with wear” and his dropped h’s. Unaccountably, she found that something about this “remarkable little man with a huge head on a tiny body” appealed to her.127
As his “huge head” indicated, Sidney was indeed a great brain. Like Alfred Marshall, he was very much a son of London’s lower-middle class and had risen on the tide that was lifting white-collar workers. Born three years after Beatrice, he grew up over his parents’ hairdressing shop near Leicester Square. His father, who moonlighted as a freelance bookkeeper in addition to cutting hair, was a radical democrat who had supported John Stuart Mill’s parliamentary campaign. Sidney’s mother, who made all the important decisions in the family, was determined that Sidney and his brother would grow up to be professionals. With a prodigious memory, a head for numbers, and a talent for test taking, Sidney excelled in school, got hired by a stockbroker at sixteen, and was offered a partnership in the firm at twenty-one. Instead of accepting, he took a civil service examination and won an appointment in the Colonial Office. By then he had been bitten by the political bug and realized that he was more interested