Beatrice Potter Webb

This volume is the second of a four-volume collection that presents the diaries of English sociologist, economist, socialist and social reformer Beatrice Webb (1858-1943). In her diary Beatrice expressed her desire to write fully and creatively about her life and she kept her diary from 1873 until her death in 1943. In the diary Beatrice records the activities of her daily life, interactions with friends and family, and her most private thoughts and fears. Webb is at the peak of her powers in this second volume of her diary. She is content with "the ideal life" and her partnership with Sidney, and devotes herself to their grand foundation of the London School of Economics, the writing of incisive studies of trade unionism and local government, and plans for the creation of modem schools and universities. All of these accomplishments are in sharp relief to the political stresses caused by the Boer War and the collapse of Gladstonian Liberalism. Only the rise of the Labour movement seemed in stride with the Webbs' leaps of fortune. Even more than before, Webb's circle glitters with the makers of Edwardian society. Mistress of the salon, she dines with Asquith, talks politics with Winston Churchill, debates philosophy with Bertrand Russell, visits Balfour and Lloyd George, becomes an intimate friend of Bernard Shaw, and quarrels with H.G. Wells.

This volume is the fourth of a four-volume collection that presents the diaries of English sociologist, economist, socialist and social reformer Beatrice Webb (1858-1943). In her diary Beatrice expressed her desire to write fully and creatively about her life and she kept her diary from 1873 until her death in 1943. In the diary Beatrice records the activities of her daily life, interactions with friends and family, and her most private thoughts and fears. The fourth (and last) volume of Beatrice Webb's diary is a detailed chronicle of the Webbs' influential lives between the two World Wars, laced with more of Webb's delightfully shrewd portraits of political, literary, and intellectual luminaries. It is also a rare insider's account of the working of the Labour government. The diary runs to within a few days of Beatrice's death in 1943, a time of triumph in her lifelong commitment to social and political change. While Sidney sits on the Labour Cabinets of 1924 and 1929, Beatrice retires to the country to rework her early diaries and produce her classic memoir, My Apprenticeship.

Beatrice Webb writes " This book is the outcome of various lectures to Welfare Supervisors given by me in the University of Birmingham and elsewhere. It is an attempt to do some little towards meeting the new conditions arising from the war, which have not only brought many hundreds of thousands of women and girls into factories, in addition to all who were there before, but which have led to the coming of the Welfare Supervisor with her great opportunities for help ... The root idea of the book is my strong conviction that a doctor's best work is to keep people well, to raise as far as possible the everyday level of health .."

This volume is the third of a four-volume collection that presents the diaries of English sociologist, economist, socialist and social reformer Beatrice Webb (1858-1943). In her diary Beatrice expressed her desire to write fully and creatively about her life and she kept her diary from 1873 until her death in 1943. In the diary Beatrice records the activities of her daily life, interactions with friends and family, and her most private thoughts and fears. In this third volume of her diary, Beatrice Webb gives us an insider's account of the heady days of British socialism. Appointed to the Royal Commission on the Poor Law, she steps out of Sidney's shadow and into active public life for the first time. Her energetic campaign to not merely alleviate but truly eliminate destitution rallies the reformist middle classes, but the wearing "plunge into propaganda" has a hardening, as well as exhausting, effect. She plans a fresh start after a trip around the world in 1911 with Sidney, and returns further radicalized to a country also in a more radical frame of mind. With her "working partner," she launches the weekly New Statesman, which quickly becomes a monument to justice in public affairs.

"In 1898 Beatrice Webb, with her husband, the eminent Sidney Webb (co-founder of the Fabian Society), and a companion, Charles Trevelyan, visited the United States on one lap of a tour that took them also to Australia and New Zealand. An inveterate diarist, Mrs. Webb kept a detailed journal of her experiences and impressions, of which this is the American portion. Too provincial and too British to appreciate fully what she saw abroad, Mrs. Webb was, nevertheless, keenly perceptive, and her impressions are of great value because she brought an informed and intelligent mind from outside America to focus on her subject. Though sometimes superficial and frequently barbed, she is never dull and in many of her insights is ahead of her time. The current interest of the Webbs was in problems of city government, and they took pains to seek out and interview a number of people who were prominent or were later to become prominent in American affairs including Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, John Peter Altgeld, Jane Addams, Lillian Wald, 'Czar' Reed, and numerous college professors"--Book jacket.

"From age fifteen until her death, Webb confided in her diary. She describes her obsessive and self-thwarted passion for politician Joseph Chamberlain, her work as a young woman in London's East End, and the troubled courtship that led to her marriage and famous partnership with Sidney Webb. She tells of the books they wrote together and the people they knew - Winston Churchill, Lloyd George, Ramsay MacDonald, Leonard and Virginia Woolf - in pages rich in anecdote and insight. She describes their friendship with Bernard Shaw and despairs of H. G. Wells's peccadilloes. The Diaries chart the collapse of Liberalism and the rise of the Labour Movement, and set Beatrice Webb's faith in social communism against the growth of fascism in the 1930s. They encompass the Boer War and the devastation of two world wars, and bring to life the social and cultural changes that introduced the modern world.". "Alongside this record is an intensely moving account of a long life, of friendships and family, conviction, and self-doubt. From this unparalleled document emerges a woman whose shrewd judgment, skilled portraiture, and refreshingly ironic tone establish her as one of the greatest diarists of her time."--BOOK JACKET.

This volume is the first of a four-volume collection that presents the diaries of English sociologist, economist, socialist and social reformer Beatrice Webb (1858-1943). In her diary Beatrice expressed her desire to write fully and creatively about her life and she kept her diary from 1873 until her death in 1943. In the diary Beatrice records the activities of her daily life, interactions with friends and family, and her most private thoughts and fears. This first volume of Webb's diary begins when she is fifteen, child of a cultivated and wealthy man who allowed his nine daughters a wide-ranging and eclectic education that was unusual for the times. Rejecting the path of successful marriage chosen by her sisters, she confronted the first great crisis of her life in her ill-starred passion for the politician Joseph Chamberlain. She sought refuge from that unhappy obsession in work with London's poor in the East End slums; then in 1890 she met Sidney Webb, civil servant and brilliant Fabian ideologist. Volume one ends with their marriage in 1892, an unlikely union that proved a remarkable success.