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The Life and Times of Sidney and Beatrice Webb, 1858-1905: The Formative Years, by Royden J. Harrison. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000. $75.00. Pp. xii, 397.
Harrison was given the commission to write an official biography of the Webbs by the Passfield Trustee - a body which the Webbs set up towards the end of their lives to benefit the many institutions they had helped to create, including the Fabian Society, the London School of Economics, the New Statesman, the Political Quarterly, and Tribune. Over 30 years have elapsed since the biographical project began, during which time several studies of the Fabian Society and the Webbs have appeared. These earlier works say nearly everything of substance about the Webbs' partnership that is said here and a good deal that is absent from this book. But even now it is too early to make a final judgement on Harrison's labors. With this volume he has only reached the "halfway" point in his subjects' lives; their work for the British Labour Party is yet to come, as is much of their writing on socialism, Sidney's ministerial career and their later defense of Stalin's Russia.
The partnership that was formed when Sidney Webb married Beatrice Potter in 1892 was unlikely in every way. Beatrice was the beautiful daughter of a landowning plutocrat; Sidney was a clever cockney, born in the heart of London, the son of a barber who doubled as an accountant. Class would normally have kept these two far apart. Beatrice decided otherwise when she realized that joining forces with such a prodigious intellect would strengthen them both as social scientists. It was a remarkable decision which involved overcoming her sensual side in full awareness of Sidney's manifold shortcomings - "his tiny tadpole body, his unhealthy skin, lack of...