Grand Pursuit: A Story of Economic Genius. Sylvia Nasar

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ instead of going to China to convert the Chinese. A similar experience inspired “General” William Booth, the author of In Darkest England and the Way Out, to organize a Salvation Army. Samuel Barnett, an Oxford scholar, founded the University Settlers Association to encourage university students to live among the poor running soup kitchens and evening classes.

      Missionaries in their own land, these young men and women strove to be scientific rather than sentimental. Their vocation was not dispensing charity but converting the poor to middle-class values and habits. As Edward Denison, an Oxford graduate, remarked in 1867: “By giving alms you keep them permanently crooked. Build school-houses, pay teachers, give prizes, frame workmen’s clubs; help them to help themselves.”¹⁰

      A young man with delicate features, silky blond hair, and shining blue eyes boarded the Glasgow-bound Great Northern Railway at London’s Euston Station. It was early June 1867. He was carrying only a walking stick and a rucksack crammed with books. His fellow passengers might have taken him for a curate or schoolmaster on a mountaineering holiday. But when the train reached Manchester, the young man put his rucksack on, jumped down onto the platform, and disappeared in the crowd.

      Before resuming his journey north to the Scottish highlands, Alfred Marshall, a twenty-four-year-old mathematician and fellow of St. John’s College in Cambridge, spent hours walking through factory districts and the surrounding slums “looking into the faces of the poorest people.” He was debating whether to make German philosophy or Austrian psychology his life’s work. These were his first steps away from metaphysics and the beginning of a dogged pursuit of social reality. He later said that these walks forced him to consider the “justification of existing conditions of society.”¹¹

      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 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, СКАЧАТЬ