In 1873, fifteen-year-old Beatrice Potter started writing a diary. The early entries were a mix of impressions from overseas travels, notes on current reading matter, and unremitting self-criticism. ‘I am getting decidedly self-satisfied, conceited and selfish’, she wrote in a reflection typical of this period: ‘Half the time I spend in building castles in the air, instead of examining myself.’Footnote ¹ A decade on, the diary still brimmed with introspection, but Beatrice was now using it to document her social work in East London, including – in 1886 – her first publication: a signed letter to the Pall Mall Gazette on the problem of unemployment. Three articles followed in The Nineteenth Century which drew on material from Beatrice’s investigations for Charles Booth’s mammoth survey of Life and Labour of the People in London; and after that came a historical study of the Cooperative movement in England. The latter subject was chosen by Beatrice against the better judgment of both Booth and the economist Alfred Marshall, who advised she tackle the more appropriately feminine subject of women’s wages instead.Footnote ² From 1892, the year of Beatrice’s marriage to the Fabian socialist Sidney Webb, the diary became, to a substantial degree, a record of the couple’s famous production-line of books, reports, and articles on subjects ranging from trade unionism and the Poor Law to social research methods and Soviet communism. During the First World War, Beatrice started plundering the diary for material to fill a planned autobiography, the first volume of which appeared in 1926 as My Apprenticeship, covering her life before Sidney. A second volume, Our Partnership, was published posthumously and recounted the first twenty years of the Webb marriage. Beatrice made her final entry in the diary on 19th April 1943, almost seventy years after making her first, and just eleven days before her death at the age of eighty-five.

Beatrice Webb’s life was long, and it was lived by the pen. Her co-authored work with Sidney has been widely studied by historians of socialism, industrial relations, and the welfare state, whilst her diaries and autobiography have attracted successive biographers as well as literary and feminist scholars interested in gendered modes of life-writing.Footnote ³ In this chapter, I bring these analytical frames together by considering how Beatrice Webb might help us to think about genres of political writing, with a focus on her earliest publications as a budding social investigator in the 1880s and her later works of autobiography. The answer, I suggest, lies in the intimate analytical work which her unique archive, with the diary at its heart, allows us to do. These sources provide exceptional insight into the choices that Beatrice made in the pursuit of public recognition for her ideas through writing, and the personal, affective contexts which shaped those choices. Like the interview data discussed in Chapter 12 on post-war social science, the diaries illuminate the subjects that Beatrice tackled, the voices that she adopted, and the audiences that she had in mind, as well as the paths that she turned away from. As scholars have previously noted, for Beatrice, ‘authorising’ herself in the world of late-Victorian social and political thought meant rejecting feminised modes of social knowledge and relegating novelistic literary self-expression to the private, confessional realm of the diary.Footnote ⁴ In other words, dilemmas over genre were never solely about writing. They signalled Beatrice’s larger intellectual ambitions as well as the gendered constraints which contained them.

The present essay develops this perspective by attending in close detail to the evolution of Beatrice’s political pen from the mid-1880s to the early 1890s, and by considering how her identity as a writer changed in the 1920s through My Apprenticeship (1926) and the posthumous publication of her diaries. I suggest that Beatrice’s early contributions pushed against the gendered knowledge claims favoured by late-Victorian feminists, whilst My Apprenticeship eschewed the self-effacing norms of much autobiographical writing by elite women between the wars, staking a place instead inside the perimeter fence of political life-writing, the male-dominated field discussed by Richard Toye elsewhere in this volume. Yet the later publishing history of the diaries, alongside her treatment by popular biographers, made Beatrice’s identity as a political writer inherently unstable.

I

The worlds of Beatrice Potter’s childhood and youth were awash with the written word. Her father, the timber merchant and railways magnate Richard Potter, allowed his nine daughters free run of the large library at Standish, the family’s mansion nesting in the Cotswolds. The diary tells us that in the 1870s Beatrice was consuming a diet of Shakespeare, Goethe, W. E. H. Lecky, Victor Hugo, Ruskin, and Mill, alongside Harriet Martineau, whose autobiography she greatly admired, and the novelist George Eliot. She was not sent to any of the academically focused girls’ schools opening up in this decade, nor later to the women’s colleges in Oxford, Cambridge, or London, but her education was substantial, conducted mostly at home by private tutors under the watchful eye of Beatrice’s scholarly mother, Lawrencina.Footnote ⁵ The family entertained many intellectual guests at their London and country residences, most notably the philosopher Herbert Spencer, with whose work Beatrice became very familiar. Yet she was ultimately expected, like her sisters, to enter Society and make a good match. This set up the conflict between intellectual ambition and familial duty which would preoccupy much of Beatrice’s interior life as a young, unmarried woman.

This conflict was palpably evident in the mid-1880s, by which time Beatrice was working for the Charity Organisation Society (COS) as a lady rent collector at Katharine Buildings in East London, a newly built ‘model’ dwelling for the working classes.Footnote ⁶ Voluntary work offered a welcome occupation and purpose for late-Victorian spinsters, but in Beatrice it stirred an impulse to study social and economic conditions systematically, seeking to understand the causes of poverty and destitution rather than merely administering relief. It was on the basis of knowledge acquired through first-hand observation of her tenants in Limehouse that Beatrice wrote a letter to the Pall Mall Gazette, then in its activist-investigative phase under the editorship of W. T. Stead, on the problem of unemployment in East London. Stead wrote back asking permission to publish it as an article, to which Beatrice readily assented, pasting the letter into her diary under the words: ‘A turning point in my life’.Footnote ⁷

In this somewhat serendipitous way, Beatrice Potter became a published author, her letter appearing as ‘A Lady’s View of the Unemployed at the East’ on page eleven of the Pall Mall Gazette for 18 February 1886. Author and editor alike invoked an authority which would have been wholly legible to late-Victorian readers: the claim of the middle-class philanthropist to ‘know’ the poor through personal contact and intuitive sympathy.Footnote ⁸ In the opening line, Beatrice took pains to state her credentials ‘as one who is personally acquainted with many of the “unemployed”’, and later, ‘as one who has lived among this people’. This formulation mirrored Stead’s editorial framing, which stated that ‘Miss Beatrice Potter, like other members of her family, has had much actual experience among the poor in the East-end of London.’ This was a reference to the older Potter sister, Kate, who persuaded Beatrice to take her place at Katharine Buildings in 1884 on the occasion of her (Kate’s) marriage to the Liberal politician Leonard Courtney.

Yet reading on, we find Beatrice’s article pushing beyond this familiar philanthropic genre, the author explaining that, in addition to studying ‘a small but representative section’ of the unemployed, she has ‘taken some trouble to learn the industrial condition of that part of London, and to understand the remarkable change which has taken place in that district during the last fifty years’. Drawing on this deeper knowledge, Beatrice presented an analysis of the causes of worklessness in East London – which she located in the pull upon outside labour of the district’s ready supply of casual employments – and argued against any extension of public works or outdoor relief. Such measures, Beatrice concluded in the imperious tone of the late-Victorian reformer, would merely ‘augment the evils of an already overstocked and demoralised labour market’.Footnote ⁹

The conventional principles of political economy expressed here signal the considerable distance which Beatrice’s politics would travel before she could write in a diary entry for February 1890: ‘At last I am a socialist!’ But her letter is also noteworthy for its courage in addressing a general labour market subject. Although women’s visibility within economic thought was growing, the contributions of figures such as Ada Heather-Bigg, Mary Paley, Clara Collet, and Millicent Garrett Fawcett were, at this time, mostly restricted to subjects relating to women’s employment and wages.Footnote ¹⁰ In moving outside this feminised intellectual cordon, Beatrice was conscious of doing something that was unusual and perhaps socially inadvisable for the unmarried daughter of a Tory industrialist. These personal stakes were raised higher when Joseph Chamberlain, then President of the Local Government Board, wrote to Beatrice congratulating her on the article and asking what she thought the Liberal administration ought to be doing about the unemployed. Her reply was prickly and self-deprecating. ‘Is it not rather unkind of you to ask me to tell you what I think?’ she wrote back:

The context of Beatrice’s earlier history with Chamberlain is crucial for understanding this terse reply. Beatrice had met recently widowed Chamberlain at a dinner party in 1883 and found herself instantly attracted to him. A troubled and protracted courtship unfolded throughout which Beatrice wrestled with difficult emotions. Her passion for Chamberlain ran deep, but marrying him, she believed, would mean abandoning all intellectual ambition. It would mean being ‘absorbed into the life of a man whose aims are not my aims; who will refuse me all freedom of thought in my intercourse with him; to whose career I shall have to subordinate all my life, mental and physical’.Footnote ¹² Receiving Chamberlain’s letter in 1886 thus stirred feelings which were complicated: ‘when I saw the Great Man’s handwriting I was ominously excited’, Beatrice wrote in the diary. ‘I knew it was the old torture coming back again.’Footnote ¹³

The peculiar mix of intellectual self-confidence and paralysing insecurity with which Beatrice tackled her writing projects in the 1880s did not originate with the former mayor of Birmingham, but Chamberlain’s insistence on ‘absolute supremacy’ intensified her internal conflicts, lending them a heightened emotional, erotic even, charge. This was clear from Beatrice’s fluctuating mental state during the summer following publication of her letter in the Pall Mall Gazette, when she started drafting an essay on ‘The Rise and Growth of English Economics’. Beatrice’s canvas was impressively broad:

But having completed the draft a month later, Beatrice began to question the seemliness of attempting such a weighty subject. ‘I wonder whether, if it is published’, she asked the diary, ‘it will be thought very conceited?’

Chamberlain, undoubtedly, was one of the ‘people’ she had in mind in this passage, which should be read in the light of Beatrice’s ongoing agonies over the courtship, which would not be decisively terminated for another year. As biographers have noted, Beatrice was much preoccupied during this period of her life with the situation of unmarried women of the middle and upper classes. Her mixed feelings about Chamberlain – ‘the deadly fight’, as she put it, ‘between the intellectual and the sensual’ – fed a general undecidedness about the widening sphere of education, professional work, and suffragism into which many women of her class were now stepping.Footnote ¹⁶ She admired the active spinsters of the COS, whilst remaining doubtful that ‘a working womanhood with friendship and not love’ could deliver true fulfilment.Footnote ¹⁷ Conversing on this subject with the philosopher Frederic Harrison, Beatrice offered the view that ‘if unmarried women kept their feelings alive, did not choke them with routine idleness, practical work, or with intellectualism, though they must suffer pain, they were often for that very reason more sympathetic than married women’.Footnote ¹⁸ This is a revealing statement, given Beatrice’s personal circumstances when she made it: still rent-collecting at Katharine Buildings whilst drafting highbrow essays for prospective publication. She was, to all intents and purposes, already leading a life of practical work and intellectualism, if not routine idleness. Again, the diary reveals the depths of Beatrice’s ambivalence as she grasped for a public identity and voice through her pen.

Beatrice never published ‘The Rise and Growth of English Economics’. She sent the ‘little thing of my own’ to Charles and Mary Booth, whose lukewarm reception confirmed her sense of ‘ignorant self-confidence’ for attempting ‘a critical essay after two months’ study!’Footnote ¹⁹ By December, Beatrice was reading Karl Marx in French translation and working on an article which would demonstrate ‘that the proper subject matter for economic science is human nature’.Footnote ²⁰ In February, she once more felt ‘the suicidal effect of giving way to intellectual ambition and to strong feeling’.Footnote ²¹ Yet, unknown to Beatrice, she was on the brink of a significant new chapter of her life in early 1887. By March of that year, she had joined Charles Booth’s mammoth poverty survey of London as an investigator, with a special remit to study conditions of labour in the East End docks. This work led to the first of three notable publications in The Nineteenth Century, one of the most prestigious periodicals of the era – versions of which later appeared in volume one of Booth’s nineteen-volume Labour and Life of the People (1889–1902).Footnote ²² Beatrice would at last become a ‘public person’ and in the process face new dilemmas as a writer.

II

Beatrice’s first article, ‘The Dock Life of East London’, appeared in print in October 1887 and has been closely analysed by the historian Rosemary O’Day, who describes it as ‘a somewhat colourless contribution’.Footnote ²³ O’Day takes Beatrice to task for an inadequate use of statistical data, poorly documented personal observations, and failure to properly attribute facts and opinions. These criticisms of Beatrice’s research methods are not unjustified, yet O’Day arguably underplays Beatrice’s status as a budding investigator on her first foray into the field and the psychic weight of writing for publication after so many false starts and under the cloud of Chamberlain’s disavowal of feminine intellect. ‘Dock Life’ and the two articles which followed help us to see how Beatrice was feeling her way in the late 1880s. She was only too aware of her lack of prior experience, compounded at this juncture by the burden of attending to Richard Potter, whose health was badly deteriorating. ‘As the observation will necessarily be disjointed and incomplete’, she wrote of her work for Booth at the end of March, ‘it will serve more to clear my own ideas than to form definite pictures of life. My education is yet to come.’Footnote ²⁴

As a piece of writing, ‘Dock Life’ is often stiffly descriptive, yet it is far from colourless, as the following examples illustrate. Describing the organisation of labour at three docks (London and St Katharine, West and East India, Millwall), Beatrice notes men running up and down ‘like the inhabitants of an ant-hill burdened with their cocoons’; later, she imagines the ‘fine lady who sips her tea from a dainty cup’ quite oblivious to fact that the leaves have been ‘trodden into their case by a gang of the great unwashed’. The docks, Beatrice observes in a striking phrase, are undergoing a period of rapid development: ‘All things are in the process of becoming, and the yesterday vies with the today as a foreteller of tomorrow.’ There are flashes of shrewd social commentary in her portrait of the upwardly mobile foreman, who goes home to ‘one of those irreproachable houses furnished with the inevitable bow window, and perchance with a garden’. Finally, Beatrice’s writing is highly embellished when describing the drinking and gambling habits of the ordinary dockers. Casual employment drags men into ‘the low level of monotonous excitement of the East End street’, making them ‘the sinners of East-end society’. Utilising the language of degeneration and contagion common within late-Victorian social thought, Beatrice laments ‘the pitifulness of this ever-recurring drama of low-life – this long chain of unknowing iniquity, children linked on to parents, friends to friends, ah, and lovers to lovers – bearing down to that bottomless pit of decaying life’.Footnote ²⁵

The moralising artfulness of these passages complicates O’Day’s suggestion that Beatrice adopted a plain prose style to avoid ‘sensationalism’ of the kind associated with Henry Mayhew’s classic 1851 work, London Labour and London Poor, which Beatrice read over the summer of 1887 and thought ‘overloaded with descriptive detail’.Footnote ²⁶ The problem with O’Day’s claim is that the diary implies that Beatrice drafted her article before reading Mayhew. In August, she was looking ahead to her next piece of work for Booth on the sweating system in London’s tailoring trades and had resolved ‘to make it more of a picture than my article on “Dock Life” – to dramatize it’.Footnote ²⁷ The diary records that Beatrice was spending her days reading unspecified works of ‘English literature’ in order ‘to discover the secret of great writing, whether prose or poetry’. The answer, she decided, was ‘the art of presenting pictures to the mind … the conception of the whole work should be a representation of life’. It was in the light of this judgment that Beatrice pronounced Mayhew’s work ‘good material spoilt by bad dressing’.Footnote ²⁸ In other words, Beatrice did not scrimp on colour, texture, and detailed description in ‘Dock Life’ to signal her seriousness of purpose (and, as I have suggested, the prose was not in any case as restrained as O’Day implies). On the contrary, ‘making pictures’ was, she believed, the key to effective writing, and whilst Beatrice did not feel that she had fully achieved this with ‘Dock Life’, she nonetheless detected ‘a steady rise in literary capacity as my diary shows’, and saw ‘no reason why I should not rise further’.Footnote ²⁹

Beatrice’s spirits were lifted by the positive if modest reception for her article when it appeared in the autumn: a ‘very favourable notice’ in the Daily Telegraph, she recorded, and a useful discussion with John Burnett of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers, who ‘had read my “Dock Life” and was evidently more inclined to treat me seriously’.Footnote ³⁰ By then, her investigations of the tailoring trades were well under way, involving a demanding schedule of interviews with inspectors, employers, and workers, which she carried out with the assistance of George Arkell, another member of Booth’s team.Footnote ³¹ Between them, they amassed a huge amount of data on wages, prices, working hours, and production processes, which Beatrice presented in radically different registers in her second and third articles, published respectively as ‘East London Labour’ and ‘Pages from a Work-Girl’s Diary’ in August and October 1888. Again, we can turn to the diary to understand Beatrice’s practice as a writer, which she now conceived as intrinsic to her newly chosen vocation of research and observation. ‘How must I equip myself for this new life, the outward form of which will be literary expression?’ she asked herself in October 1887:

This statement complicates claims made by Deborah Nord about how the register adopted in ‘Dock Life’ and ‘East End Labour’ suppressed ‘feelings of sympathy and identification’ in favour of masculinised objective distance. Nord sets these texts apart from Beatrice’s novelistic – and hence feminised – style in ‘Pages’.Footnote ³³ Yet despite the differences, all three essays can be understood as experiments curving towards the same objective, which was to develop an authoritative expert voice. We might view Beatrice’s efforts as a late-Victorian version of the ‘writing for influence’ approach pursued by social scientists in the later twentieth century.Footnote ³⁴

‘East London Labour’ was, in Beatrice’s own estimation, ‘a horribly stiff bit of work’, and she feared ‘it will be too much matter-of-fact for the taste of the general public’.Footnote ³⁵ ‘I knew I could not make it brilliant’, Beatrice wrote in August once the article appeared, but she was nevertheless ‘glad that the general opinion is that it is sound work. To be thought a sound and conscientious worker, with ability guided by conscience, is my one ambition. I do not care to be thought “talented” or brilliant.’Footnote ³⁶ This was disingenuous, as the literary ambition of ‘Pages’ would shortly prove, but even within the data-heavy paragraphs of ‘East End Labour’ we find Beatrice striving to ‘make pictures’ using the racialised tropes which patterned late nineteenth century debates about low pay.Footnote ³⁷ Following an introductory exposition of the problem of sweating in the tailoring trades, Beatrice invited her reader to imagine a morning coat made by ‘an English journeyman tailor’ for a quality West end outfitter, and then to turn their mind

A few lines down, Beatrice’s imaginary middle-class consumer is addressed again:

This image prompts an informal aside and rare attempt by Beatrice at humorous punning:

Whether this raised a smile on the lips of the reader of The Nineteenth Century is not known, but it offers further evidence of how Beatrice’s writing continued to evolve with each new publication.

Her next effort, ‘Pages from a Work-Girl’s Diary’, appeared just two months later and has been the subject of detailed study by literary scholars as well as by historians.Footnote ³⁸ Briefly, the fourteen-page article is written as a first-person narrative recounting Beatrice’s experience of posing as a poor tailoress inside a Jewish-owned workshop in Mile End. The text describes Beatrice’s two days undercover in colourful detail, comprising evocative descriptions of urban spectatorship as she moves through the streets of East London, an interior monologue charting the physical and emotional pressures of maintaining her disguise, plus a great deal of speech quoted verbatim from her employers and co-workers. Drawing directly (with some notable edits and omissions) from the diary, Beatrice’s writing carried a freshness and immediacy which made it a hit with readers of The Nineteenth Century, although she was characteristically ambivalent about its true quality. ‘There is nothing in it but bright description of an audacious adventure’, Beatrice wrote in August 1888 ahead of publication, later reflecting on how the article’s success

The fictional style with which Beatrice wrote a purportedly authentic account of her investigatory work is what makes ‘Pages’ of interest to literary scholar Ann Ardis, who frames the text as ethnographic, a mode which allowed Beatrice to engage her reader with narrative strategies whilst preserving objectivity: ‘She writes novelistically without writing a novel or a short story. She fictionalizes the diary account so as to shape it to the conventions of participant-observer ethnography, while at the same time avoiding the charge of “telling stories.”’Footnote ⁴⁰ Beatrice, as Ardis argues, regarded fiction as a genre in which women’s contributions, unlike those of great male writers like Balzac, Flaubert, and Goethe, were coded as domestic or sentimental; hence her efforts to place distance between her own writing and ‘novelistic discourse’.Footnote ⁴¹

Nevertheless, as the diary reveals, doing so was a wrench. Writing was a creative outlet for Beatrice, a compulsion even, hence the millions of words scribbled into the diary over the course of seven decades. The problem of form weighed heavily as she ‘hammered’ at ‘East London Labour’, in summer 1888 followed by the ‘cheap thrill’ of ‘Pages’. A year later, she was still undecided as to what kind of writer she wished to be. ‘There is intense attractiveness in the comparative ease of descriptive writing’, Beatrice noted in the diary:

In the same entry, Beatrice confessed her ‘vulgar wish to write a novel!’ That derogatory adjective and exclamation mark convey neatly the lowly position which Beatrice accorded fiction (or, at least, fiction written by women) in late-Victorian hierarchies of knowledge.

Nord views this turning away from novel-writing as a wider phenomenon amongst intellectually inclined women in the 1880s, when ‘it seemed possible for women safely to abandon fiction and express themselves in other literary forms’.Footnote ⁴³ And yet, it is difficult to square this statement with the emerging genre of ‘New Women’ fiction, ‘exposure’ fiction, and the increasing tally of socialist–feminist novels by such writers as Isabella Ford, Katharine Glasier, and Beatrice’s second cousin, Margaret Harkness.Footnote ⁴⁴ Harkness was one of several women from Beatrice’s world of social investigation who crossed literary genres in their efforts to describe, explain, and critique urban poverty. Their number included Clara Collet, Beatrice’s co-investigator on Booth’s team, who was a close friend of the ‘New Woman’ novelist George Gissing and penned an unpublished novel about degenerate working-class motherhood in East London; and Clementina Black of the Women’s Industrial Council, whose 1894 novel, An Agitator, dealt with themes of low wages and labour unrest.Footnote ⁴⁵

This impresses upon us the oddness, rather than the obviousness, of Beatrice’s disavowal of ‘feminised’ modes of literary expression at the end of the 1880s. For other middle-class women of a socially progressive outlook, sexual difference was a resource for making claims upon the public sphere, and they pinned their authority upon it.Footnote ⁴⁶ As Ellen Ross has shown, this was expressed through feminised styles of writing about poverty, which, alongside fiction, drew on missionary narratives and travelogues and deployed anecdote, pathos, and self-deprecation to engage the emotions of readers.Footnote ⁴⁷ These effects can be found fleetingly – or, in the case of ‘Pages’, fulsomely – in Beatrice’s published writings between 1886 and 1888; yet she came to reject the model of womanly expertise being staked out by contemporaries, despite its growing presence and power in late-Victorian public culture. After finishing her work for Booth, Beatrice demurred at his request that she conduct a study of women’s industrial labour, determining instead to write a history of the Cooperative movement.Footnote ⁴⁸ She stood by this decision when challenged by the economist Alfred Marshall during a visit to Cambridge in spring 1889. ‘With that disagreeable masculine characteristic of a persistent and well defined purpose’, she wrote in the diary, ‘I shall stick to my own way of climbing my own little tree.’Footnote ⁴⁹

Undoubtedly, Beatrice’s personal history and complex psychology offer part of the explanation for her resistance to the advice of these two distinguished public men. We might point to the lingering trauma over Chamberlain, to her continuing ambivalence towards the prospect of ‘glorious spinsterhood’ and, relatedly, to feminism (it was around the time of the Marshall visit that Beatrice signed Mary Ward’s high-profile Anti-Suffrage Appeal).Footnote ⁵⁰ Most important of all, in February 1890, Beatrice met a ‘remarkable little man with a huge head on a tiny body’ called Sidney Webb at a dinner with the Booths. Their marriage in July 1892 altered the course of Beatrice’s life and of her writing career, which subsequently became moored to a project of co-authorship in which Sidney’s dry, itemising prose style tended to dominate. Yet closer scrutiny of the diary reveals that Beatrice’s break from the 1880s world of feminised expertise was not quite as sudden nor as total as this biographical slicing of pre- and post-Sidney phases would suggest.Footnote ⁵¹ ‘“Female labour” shall be one of my principle [sic] inquiries of my life,’ Beatrice wrote after her lunch with the Marshalls in 1889, ‘but I will not undertake it at present’. And indeed she returned to the subject in 1896 with a Fabian Society pamphlet on Women and the Factory Acts; and again in 1914 through a series of shorter pieces on women in industry in New Statesman; and five years after that, Beatrice wrote a lengthy minority report for War Cabinet Committee on Women in Industry, appointed to explore the problem of men and women’s wages after the war.Footnote ⁵²

These publications did not experiment with style in the manner of ‘Pages’, and privately Beatrice continued to experience cravings for literary self-expression. The novel-writing itch returned in February 1895 whilst the Webbs were in the midst of ‘stiff work on trade unions’. Beatrice conceived of a piece of speculative fiction set sixty years into the future in which ‘the fully-fledged woman engaged in a great career should be pictured just as we should now picture a man’. As before, her sense of taking illicit pleasure in creativity is telling:

III

In the 1920s, Beatrice got her fling, but she got it not through writing novels but autobiography. Her first contribution to the genre, My Apprenticeship, was published in 1926, when Beatrice was sixty-eight and a prominent public intellectual, and was followed by the posthumous publication of a second volume, Our Partnership (1948). My Apprenticeship covered the years 1858 to 1892, narrating the author’s childhood and youth, her training as a social researcher, and her eventual conversion to socialism, drawing heavily on material from the diary. This Beatrice began to re-read and edit during the First World War, a task which she found both pleasurable and therapeutic. By February 1920, Beatrice was spending ‘spare hours in the later afternoon and evening typing out my diary, a task which amuses and interests me vastly. I find all sorts of interesting facts and impressions, not to mention the development of my own inner emotional and intellectual life, which I had completely forgotten’.Footnote ⁵⁴ In its review of the book, the Manchester Guardian drew attention to this textual hybridity, describing My Apprenticeship as ‘the fully documented history of the mental development of that extremely able young society woman Miss Beatrice Potter, drawn from a rich series of diaries kept from the age of ten’.Footnote ⁵⁵ The New York Times called it a ‘Log-Book of a Mental Voyage’.Footnote ⁵⁶

Was Beatrice’s turn to autobiography in the 1920s a pivot back towards the novelistic ethnography of ‘Pages’, a belated reunion of private and public selves? Or should we see My Apprenticeship as a new intervention into the burgeoning genre of political life-writing whose effect over the twentieth century, as Toye suggests, would be to enforce an ‘elitist, London-centric, and largely white male-centric view of what politics is about’?Footnote ⁵⁷ Nord offers one kind of answer by locating the book’s literary significance in its adoption of the classic Victorian form of spiritual crisis and conversion, with Beatrice emulating the style of male life-writing luminaries such as J. S. Mill and Thomas Carlyle. ‘Like them’, Nord writes, ‘she regarded her work to be emblematic of her life, and regarded her own spiritual and intellectual development as the essence of her existence’.Footnote ⁵⁸ The groundbreaking qualities of My Apprenticeship sharpen further when we contrast its authorial voice to the self-effacing discretion with which late-Victorian and Edwardian elite women wrote their lives for inter-war audiences curious about the century now passed. As Julia Bush has shown, with titles such as Reminiscences or Time Remembered, these texts presented their authors as eye-witnesses to the public deeds of great men with whom they had the privilege of being connected through family or marriage. Beatrice’s close contemporary, Lady Frances Balfour, opened her two-volume memoir, published in 1930, with the assurance that she had ‘no intention of laying my friends on their own dining room tables, and there dissecting them’ and instead wished to record ‘the memories, and, above all, the Hero landmarks which have marked life’s highway’.Footnote ⁵⁹

Whilst Bush identifies hidden agency in this genre of elite, feminised life-writing by ‘reading between the lines’, Beatrice’s ego is in plain sight to the reader of My Apprenticeship. In other respects, however, Beatrice’s status as a political autobiographer was not so very different from that of Bush’s by-standing aristocrats. Like them, Beatrice never held elected office and, as a woman, was voteless until 1918, after which Sidney pursued a parliamentary and ministerial career, turning Beatrice into a political spouse.Footnote ⁶⁰ On a number of occasions, Beatrice gained official standing of her own by sitting on statutory bodies, beginning with the Royal Commission on Poor Laws (1905–9), for which she wrote a celebrated minority report.Footnote ⁶¹ Nonetheless, like her aristocratic contemporaries, Beatrice’s political influence lay mostly through her proximity to powerful men, a dynamic established during her privileged Potter childhood and sustained through the regular salons that she hosted with Sidney at their Westminster home, funded by the private income that Beatrice continued to receive from her family.

In Toye’s hierarchy of who is most important and therefore most publishable as a political life-writer, Beatrice Webb thus sits several rungs below the high-ranking male politicians of her era, including many who dined at her table and supplied pen-portraits for the diary. Whilst Beatrice was hard at work on the follow-up to My Apprenticeship, Lloyd George was negotiating lucrative publishing and serialisation deals for his War Memoirs on both sides of the Atlantic. When Our Partnership finally appeared in 1948, it competed for attention with volume one of Churchill’s History of the Second World War, the literary rights for which were estimated to be worth upwards of eighteen million dollars.Footnote ⁶² There were cases of female memoirists commanding large advances, such as that paid to Margot Asquith, wife of the former Liberal Prime Minister, whose two-volume autobiography was published in 1920 and 1922, having been bought for ‘a considerable sum’ and serialized in the British and American press.Footnote ⁶³ Asquith tore up the rule book on elite female life-writing in a very different way from Beatrice, courting controversy for the candour and irreverence with which she depicted living members of the governing classes. A stern review in the Times warned that Asquith’s memoir ‘will be cited by our domestic Bolsheviks and accepted by many ignorant workers as proof that our statesmen and politicians and the circles in which they move live lives of philandering frivolity’.Footnote ⁶⁴

Beatrice steered clear of this path. Margot Asquith’s fate at the hands of the press might have been in mind when she wrote in the diary in February 1923: ‘there is a certain morbid tendency in writing this book – it is practically an autobiography with the love affairs left out – the constantly recurring decision of what degree of self-revelation is permissible and desirable’.Footnote ⁶⁵ One subject definitely proscribed was the entanglement with Chamberlain, who is described in My Apprenticeship as merely one of several important political figures encountered by the author in the 1880s. Beatrice’s close friend George Bernard Shaw thought this reticence on sexual matters ‘funny in these shameless psycho-analytic days’ and urged that she find a means of ‘telling everything that has a documentary value without telling anything at all in Margot’s way’.Footnote ⁶⁶ Rejecting this advice, Beatrice chose to write nothing about the affair, possibly out of regard for Sidney’s feelings or because the infatuation now seemed embarrassing given her considerable public stature.Footnote ⁶⁷

These tensions over Beatrice’s relationship to the genre of political life-writing took a new turn in the years following her death. Margaret Cole, a Fabian Society colleague, edited two volumes of the diaries in 1952 and 1956, picking up where Our Partnership left off by covering the period from 1912. The first volume included an introduction by William Beveridge, who had worked with the Webbs before the First World War, for whom the diaries were of major interest because they showed ‘in intimate frank detail how things get done, or do not get done; how men in public life behave to one another; how they should and should not behave’.Footnote ⁶⁸ It was through appraisals like this that Beatrice’s diaries gained their reputation as political diaries, representing a storehouse of insight into the personalities and processes behind early twentieth-century policy-making.

And yet this identity was not stable. To the 1956 volume, Cole added an appendix which narrated Beatrice’s affair with Chamberlain by quoting selectively from the earlier volumes of the diary (to which, as a trustee of the Webb estate, Cole had special access). Beatrice’s involvement with Chamberlain was, according to Cole, already widely known ‘but the details were lacking’, and these details, she argued, threw ‘interesting light both on Chamberlain and on the girl to whom he directed his attentions’.Footnote ⁶⁹ Cole was a fierce guardian of Beatrice’s legacy as a serious social and political thinker, which may explain why she did not publish the relevant diary extracts in their entirety.Footnote ⁷⁰ Kitty Muggeridge, Beatrice’s niece, published a biography of her aunt in 1967 which included a much longer account of the fated courtship.Footnote ⁷¹ Only in 1982 were Beatrice’s own words published in full in volume one of Jeanne and Norman MacKenzie’s landmark four-volume edition of the diaries. These disclosures coincided with and helped to speed a revisionist turn amongst biographers of Beatrice Webb, who were more minded, on the one hand, to centre the love affairs left out of My Apprenticeship, and on the other, to bring the tools of feminist literary and historical analysis to bear upon the diaries.Footnote ⁷²

This latter scholarship, comprising the work of Deborah Nord, Barbara Caine, and others, has been foundational for the present essay, producing new insights into Beatrice Webb as a writer, thinker, and woman of her times. I have used their work as a starting point for thinking about the relationship between ‘political’ writing and other genres of writing, especially life-writing. As we have witnessed, in her earliest publications and through the later autobiographical voice, Beatrice’s pen could be both intimate and distancing, moving back and forth between ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ registers. Yet every word put into print, from a ‘Lady’s View of the Unemployed’ to the celebrated My Apprenticeship, was for Beatrice a tiny advance towards becoming someone of consequence who had something to say, and who was determined to say it in her voice and no one else’s. She reminds us that political writing, of whatever genre, always carries this authorising function, and Beatrice, thanks to her extraordinary diary, allows us to see it in play.

The socialist intellectual G. D. H. Cole (1889–1959) was a remarkably prolific writer. He published biographies, popular histories, guides to the modern economy and overviews of contemporary politics, books about trade unionism, cooperation and the Labour party, expositions of guild socialism (the contribution for which he is perhaps best remembered today), editions of literary texts, a multi-volume history of socialist thought, many articles and reviews for the New Statesman and other magazines and newspapers, and even a string of detective novels. Over the course of his career, he contributed to many genres of political writing. When his widow, Margaret Cole, compiled a bibliography of her husband’s work, this ran to three pages of text – and that was merely counting the books he had published. Margaret emphasised that she had not attempted to compile ‘a complete list’ of all his published writings ‘which would take up many pages’.Footnote ¹

Within a vast word count that was focused predominantly on prose, Cole also published four books of poetry: Poems (1910), New Beginnings (1914), The Bolo Book (1921 – jointly with Margaret Cole) and The Crooked World (1933). He edited and contributed to Oxford Poetry, 1910–1913 (1913), and he and his wife edited The Ormond Poets, a series of sixteen collections of poetry appearing between 1927 and 1928, with each volume offering a selection of a particular poet’s work. Poetry was where G. D. H. Cole’s life as a published author began. His Poems is the book that heads up that list of titles assembled by Margaret as an appendix to the biography she wrote of her late husband. As David Reisman has noted, although it was The World of Work (1913), Cole’s survey of contemporary trade unionism, which seemed to announce him and his authorial ambitions, this was not strictly speaking his literary debut, but his second published book, ‘sandwiched between Poems in 1910 and New Beginnings, a further volume of verse, in 1914’.Footnote ² Margaret’s assessment of both these early poetry collections was typically forthright: she described them as ‘bad, though not abysmal’.Footnote ³

Before their marriage, Margaret herself – then Margaret Postgate – was also a published poet, contributing to Bits of Things by Five Girton Students (1914) and producing a collection Margaret Postgate’s Poems (1918). She later admitted to rather losing heart about her own poetry, given the muted reception it received. Yet, while G. D. H.’s poetic output has faded into obscurity, Margaret has begun to receive some posthumous recognition as a poet. Her verse has been included in anthologies of First World War poetry, while her poem ‘The Fallen Leaves’ became a set text in schools.Footnote ⁴ Her husband’s poems meanwhile seem unlikely to achieve any retrospective recognition based on literary merit alone.

Literary merit, however, is not a prerequisite for making something interesting to historians. This chapter reflects on where poetry sits within Cole’s career, and how verse could provide another way of writing about politics – and, indeed, sometimes singing about it too. What should we make of Cole’s own poetry, and his interest in things poetic? Where does poetry fit within an analysis of his life and work? How, if at all, does it relate to the more dominant genres in which he wrote so prolifically: biography, social history, political philosophy, popular introductions to economics and politics, political journalism and reviewing? And how was poetry linked to Cole’s political commitment and his contribution to the development of the Labour interest in the first half of the twentieth century, as a political thinker and teacher. Connections between poetry and politics are hardly novel – not least in thinking about the 1930s, when many poets, on the left especially, were vocal in their commitment to go beyond the self-conscious challenge of much Modernist writing in an ‘art for art’s sake’, to produce a political verse which might address issues of class, economic depression and international tensions and conflicts.Footnote ⁵ Cole was not one of the 1930s ‘poetry and the people’ setFootnote ⁶ and actually showed little interest in the poets of his own time. But his preferences in reading poetry – towards the work of William Morris and Walt Whitman, for instance – often reflected his sympathy with those writers’ own political sensibilities.

The title of this chapter, ‘Versifying Politics’, refers to the ways in which Cole came to adopt poetry as another way of writing about politics. On the whole he did not look to poetry as a way to explore different emotions or ideas from those he expressed elsewhere in his voluminous written output. In so far as the terms verse and poetry might carry slightly different resonances, it is most tempting to place Cole’s efforts in the verse camp. Margaret glossed them all as ‘verse’ when listing them in her husband’s bibliography – from the satirical doggerel of The Bolo Book to the lovelorn outpourings in that first collection Poems. Cole’s recourse to writing verse over much of his career does suggest that we should pay attention to it, and to what it might mean as a complement to his other work. His first two volumes of poetry could be viewed simply as the work of a cultured and literate young person in those early years of the twentieth century, almost a rite of passage – and it is notable that Margaret too published a volume of poetry while in her early twenties. What is more interesting is that G. D. H. went on to publish The Crooked World when he was in his forties and well established as an author, researcher and political thinker. To write poetry for one’s own satisfaction is one thing (and there are unpublished verses of his in the archive too), but to publish is something else. Cole chose to persist with verse as a form, even as he became well established as a public figure and a writer in prose.

The connections between socialism and poetry in Cole’s work can be considered in relation to two more familiar histories: of socialist song and a popular poetic culture in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain, on the one hand, and the development of an explicitly political poetry in left-wing circles in the 1930s, on the other. Poetry and song had fitted both the missionary character of fin-de-siècle socialism and its aesthetic sensibilities, with the publication of Clarion song books and ‘Chants for Socialists’, and the commonplace integration of poetry into the pages of socialist magazines and newspapers.Footnote ⁷ Verse in this context was a way of expressing political allegiance and promoting socialist ideas in ways that were popular and accessible. The left-wing political poetry of the 1930s in Britain also celebrated the potential for verse as a way to ‘let the people sing’Footnote ⁸ and to mobilise and organise for socialism. Colin Draper wrote of how poets might be recognised as ‘revolutionary skirmishers’, and that this required them to write in particular ways, writing ‘fiercely, simply, and directly’, where ‘lampoon, satire and ballad’ might serve as the most appropriate genres. The uses of poetry as a response to the Spanish Civil War, in particular, defined a political poetry, which aimed to rally for the cause and adopt verse forms to articulate ideological positions and shared commitments.Footnote ⁹

Cole’s poetry had some affinities with both of these approaches, with the tradition in which singing provided a shared repertoire amongst political comrades, and with ideas about poetry as an appropriate form for expressing one’s political convictions and speaking about political ideas. But his writing also provides a striking example of how the output of one author could encompass a range of very different types of verse, and how a commitment to writing and publishing poetry sat alongside the many other different genres in which Cole wrote over the course of his career. In exploring Cole’s poetry in this chapter I begin by looking briefly at his attitude towards poetry in general, before going on to consider his early poetry, written while a student and young academic at Oxford, his use of verse as political entertainment, and finally The Crooked World and its take on discussing contemporary problems through the medium of verse.

I

In characterising her husband for posterity, Margaret Cole made a great deal of Douglas’ aesthetic sensibilities. Poetry was a part of that. She cited his ability to quote long passages of English – and classical – literature, and told us that his three ‘passionate’ loves were Morris, Wordsworth and Whitman, while he had barely read anything written in the last half-century.Footnote ¹⁰ Ivor Brown also noted that admiration for Morris: writing in the Oxford University newspaper Cherwell in the mid 1930s, he remembered being introduced to socialism by Cole two decades earlier, when Cole was ‘at that time addicted to Morris and to writing portentous poetry in the Victorian manner’.Footnote ¹¹ His contemporaries at Oxford recalled someone to whom poetry mattered, within a context in which many students felt the impetus to write poetry: Naomi Mitchison reminisced about her Oxford days before the First World War and admired the ‘pale-faced, slender’ G. D. H., ‘to whom I wrote two of my worst poems’.Footnote ¹²

Cole’s sense of himself as a literary figure is clear from his decision to publish his work: the 68 pages of Poems were issued at a shilling by the Walter Scott Publishing Company in 1910, while he was still an undergraduate, and the 74 pages of New Beginnings, came out with B. H. Blackwell in 1914 under the name Douglas Cole, who is described there, a little grandly, as ‘Author of “Poems, 1910,”, “The World of Labour,” etc.’Footnote ¹³ Cole had also had ‘The Record’ (‘an occasional diary in verse, 1910–1912’) published privately as a small volume in 1912. Even more interestingly, he assumed a form of artistic leadership, co-editing a volume of Oxford Poetry (1913), with a second impression in 1914, as an ‘anthology of contemporary University poetry’ – ‘throwing together in a convenient form typical specimens of the various kinds of verse that are being written in Oxford and everywhere else, as poetry begins to wake up’.Footnote ¹⁴ Largely, this is a collection of work by writers who would become well known for other things: the historians G. N. Clark and Philip Guedalla, the novelist and bibliophile Michael T. H. Sadler, the politician and humorist A. P. Herbert and the detective novelist and Catholic priest Ronald Knox. Cole himself contributed five items, one of which was itself a set of eight poems, seeming to rather abuse his position as editor in including a disproportionate quantity of his own work.

This sense that Cole had of himself as a literary figure and impresario continued into his later career. We find him in the 1920s and 1930s producing editions of Daniel Defoe and William Cobbett, and – most relevant to the subject of this chapter – publishing the ‘Ormond Poets’, elegant cloth-bound editions on fine quality paper, of writers from Shakespeare and Robert Herrick to Keats and Shelley.Footnote ¹⁵ Robert Browning was the most recent writer represented in the choices for this series, with other volumes focusing on the work of William Blake, John Donne and excerpts from the Authorised Version of the Old Testament. The Ormond Poets was a joint project with Margaret, and she reminisces about the pleasure of making the selections together. The selection was the point: these are editions without any commentary or obvious editorial intervention in the text, and the volumes also need to be appreciated within Cole’s interest in books as objects. The publisher ‘Noel Douglas’ was his own enterprise, committed to producing fine editions, the name Ormond being taken from the street where it was based.

This was the landscape of poetry within which Cole lived. Poetry was something he enjoyed reading, felt able to write to a standard that was publishable, and over which he assumed he could operate as an editor, selecting writings and making poetry available to a book-buying public. As part of that context, it is worth emphasising that he had a classical education and that he was interested in history and in the ways that literature formed a part of the historical narrative. He seems to have read little literature in other modern European languages, though, and his view of style and form essentially eschewed contemporary developments. This was reflected in the poetry he wrote, which for large stretches conformed to a ten-syllable line and rigid rhyming patterns.

Despite Cole’s evident love of poetry, it is notable that in his wide-ranging body of work, poetry and prose rarely met. His Life of William Cobbett is one of the few books of his even to have a poetic epigraph, in this case from Ebenezer Elliott’s ‘Elegy on the Death of Cobbett’.Footnote ¹⁶ In the popular history The Common People that Cole co-wrote with his brother-in-law Raymond Postgate, there is some brief reference to the romantic poets responding to the French Revolution with ‘some great and some fairly good poetry’, and there is a short extract again from Ebenezer Elliott’s work, remembering radicals transported for their advocacy for political reform in the 1790s.Footnote ¹⁷ But otherwise poetry features little in Cole’s historical narratives or his expositions of political ideas.

This is in some ways surprising, since he had an interest in the links between literature and history, and indeed between politics and literature. He gave a Hogarth lecture on the subject in the 1920s, noting that ‘I know of no book that is about political literature as literature – no book that studies the ideas of English political writers not only as ideas, but in relation to their literary form and flavour as well.’ In writing about this topic, he emphasised the need to consider form and content together, though he explained that content would still be prominent in his treatment of the subject, ‘for the first aim of nearly all political literature is to get something said, and only the second aim to say it well’.Footnote ¹⁸ His comments on different types of poetry here are interesting, drawing a distinction between lyric poetry and other sorts (dramatic, epic, didactic, observational), and observing that in the former ‘[s]ense and sound have no life apart’, whereas poems which told a story or offered observations of nature, for example, might be analysed for their content, independently of their form. Even while setting out the importance of the relationship between what was being communicated and how that was being expressed in words, Cole seemed to backtrack, acknowledging that ‘the more purely intellectual the content of literature becomes, the more separable it is from its form’ – and he was not himself particularly celebrated for the elegance of his prose style. But he argued that poetry was written in a different frame of mind from prose, reinforcing the importance of those connections between form and content: ‘For men are most moved to write poetry when an emotional experience most completely fuses form and content in their minds. They turn to prose rather in their cooler moments, when they have something to say, and are seeking the means of saying it clearly and well.’Footnote ¹⁹

That comment about the emotional impetus for poetry may say something about Cole’s own inclinations, legible in some of his more introspective verse. Yet, he made a case elsewhere in the Hogarth lecture for the prominence of politics in English poetry, citing Milton, Pope, Byron and others. Burns, he wrote, ‘redeems our literature from the reproach of having no great political songs’.Footnote ²⁰ That relationship between lyric and song was especially relevant to much of Cole’s published verse, not least, as we shall see, in The Bolo Book. The lecture ends with a critique of academic writing and the jargon of politics. ‘Modern political literature is, for the most part, far less literature than its equivalent of a hundred years ago’, he wrote, and that ‘cannot be good for political thinking, any more than it is good for literature’.Footnote ²¹

When it came to poetry as a mode for expressing political ideas, even Cole’s hero William Morris came in for some criticism. Cole argued that Morris’ prose had endured better than his verse, because Morris thought of literature as a decorative art: ‘Morris, the poet, chose commonly to retreat into an unreal world whose men and women, as well as the scenery, came off tapestries, or out of illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages,’ while Morris the propagandist ‘lived vigorously … in a real world he loved’.Footnote ²² Cole commented that Morris ‘wrote verses so easily’ and approached poetry as a ‘craftsman and designer’, rather than as ‘an imaginative artist determined to get at the heart of the world’s meanings’. He saw this as Morris’ limitation as a poet: ‘Good verse can be written so, but hardly the greatest poetry.’Footnote ²³

II

Cole’s early published poems are his least obviously political. The language is often elevated and a little archaic – self-consciously ‘poetic’. Rather surprisingly (given that he had cut ties with organised religion quite early on) there are a number of religious references and themes. The persona of the lovelorn young poet puts in regular appearances, and the frustrations of romantic attachment are the main point of ‘The Record’:

And so on, for forty lines in this section alone.

There is, perhaps understandably, a lot of reflection on being young, including ‘Youth’s Second Sight’:

The tone in these early poems can seem more seventeenth century than twentieth, and even the title of the poem ‘Love’s Unity’ evokes origins in a world of Donne and Marvell.Footnote ²⁶ But, occasionally, more socially-conscious elements break through the young varsity man’s introspection:

Cole had already undergone his conversion to Socialism before going up to Oxford, and the references to comrades and fraternity show that this was beginning to make itself felt in his poetry.

It may say something about the literary networks of the time, that the Times Literary Supplement found space to note Cole’s debut Poems of 1910 amongst a list of ‘New Books’, commenting that Cole ‘writes with taste and finish as a grave moralist upon life’ and offered some ‘accomplished exercises’ in the writing of sonnets, though the reviewer seemed less convinced about his abilities as a love poet.Footnote ²⁸ New Beginnings and the Record also received some approving notice from the reviewers. ‘Anybody who cares at all for literature should certainly spend one shilling to place this volume on his shelves’, was the verdict from Poetry Review.Footnote ²⁹

III

Seven years on from New Beginnings – which ironically seems to have been an ending rather than a beginning for Cole’s career as a poet in that vein – he and Margaret published a very different book of verse: The Bolo Book (1921). Authorship itself was treated as something much less precious in this volume. ‘The Editors are not responsible for all of [the songs]’, they wrote, ‘nor are they even able in all cases rightly to apportion the responsibility’.Footnote ³⁰ And these verses were presented explicitly as lyrics, ‘meant to be sung as well as read’. The Coles envisaged them being taken up by ‘Glee Clubs and other bodies which may desire to perform them’, though reading them now they speak more of in-jokes and entertainment born of particular moments shared amongst political friends.Footnote ³¹ Gathering together an assembly of parodies and comic verses, digs at political opponents and lampoons of leading political figures, The Bolo Book was issued by the Labour Publishing Company as a pleasing little hardbound volume with an embossed cover illustration by Frank Horrabin. The context was the aftermath of the First World War, Bolshevik scares, spies and scandals, political venality (notably the sales of honours) and the policies of Lloyd George’s administration. Horrabin’s image for the cover shows a cartoon plutocrat, with top hat and cane, and a big pound sign blazoned on his shirt front, frowning at what looks to be a cloud of bees buzzing at his back. On closer inspection, they reveal themselves as musical notes, troubling the capitalist’s peace. The singing of songs from the book of Bolo promises to irritate the establishment in like manner.

The verses in The Bolo Book rest heavily on parody, adapting familiar lyrics, hymns and poems to ridicule and criticise the politics and politicians of the day. The Minister of Housing, Christopher Addison (still a Liberal at this point, before his conversion to Labour), is cast as Kubla Khan in a Coleridgean fantasy:

There were various takes on nursery rhymes, including ‘Here we go round the vicious circle’ and ‘What are Cabinets made of?’ (the answer being ‘Wizards from Wales / And journalists’ tales’).Footnote ³³ ‘A Song of Shortage’ reaches such a catchy conclusion that it almost overshadows the original words of the nursery rhyme about blackbirds and pies:

The Bolo Book commemorates a world of politics and sociability within the Labour Research Department, at Fabian summer schools and workers’ education events, and records that still somewhat unlikely side to G. D. H. Cole, as librettist-in-chief for exuberant revues.Footnote ³⁵ His most substantial contribution to this world of socialist light entertainment was The Striker Stricken from 1926, produced in the aftermath of the collapse of the General Strike. As a prologue to The Striker Stricken announced:

Cole’s operetta in the mode of Gilbert and Sullivan (and indeed adapting several songs from The Pirates of Penzance, Patience, the Gondoliers and the Mikado amongst its various parodies) was subtitled ‘or the Thirty Sleepers of Eccleston Square being the Operatives’ Opera in Three “Ops”’.Footnote ³⁶ The show was written for a University of London tutorial classes summer school, supposedly in 48 hours flat, and parodies such as ‘Onward, Christian peace-makers/Stop the floods of gore’ give a flavour of the piece. The entertainment was not entirely in verse, and sections of dialogue alternate with songs and mock-Shakespearean blank verse soliloquy. Various hymn tunes and familiar pieces of popular and classical music were attached to the lines to be sung; the lyric ‘Joynson Hicks would like a teeny/Weeny touch of Mussolini/Just to teach the workers what is what’ was set to Dvorak’s ‘Humoresque’, while the round ‘London’s Burning’ was recast as ‘London’s striking, London’s striking,/Bring blacklegs, bring blacklegs,/Scab, scab, scab, scab’.Footnote ³⁷ One of the better Gilbert and Sullivan pastiches was given to the person playing Ernest Bevin: ‘I am the very pattern of a boss for this imbroglio./In the coming Labour Government I’ll take the Chief’s portfolio.’ The operetta was revived for various Labour gatherings over the following decades, though not published at the time.Footnote ³⁸ When Asa Briggs and John Saville published the text with notes by Margaret Cole in 1977, they described how the piece had been ‘talked about for many years, but very few have seen the script’.Footnote ³⁹

The wicked, knock-about humour of Cole’s lyrics for The Striker Stricken, which Margaret characterised as an ‘angry operetta’,Footnote ⁴⁰ points to ways in which verse featured as an accessible and lively part of left-wing culture in the interwar years. Though The Striker Stricken seems to have been all Cole’s own work, much of this kind of entertainment was more collaboratively produced – as the multiple authorship behind the Bolo Book itself demonstrates – arising out of the in-jokes and shared tastes, opinions and world views that ran through socialist and workers’ education gatherings. At the end of one piece, the Coles note that ‘Further stanzas can be devised ad lib’, depending on where and by whom the song was being sung.Footnote ⁴¹ Taking easy shots at political opponents from the high moral ground of a politics of opposition, the sentiments of these verses could also exaggerate the rhetoric of the left to comic effect. In her biography of Cole, Margaret celebrated one of Douglas’s more infamous lyrics in this vein: ‘Wage the class-war slickly … Keep the “ell-fires burnin” for the bourgeoisie’.Footnote ⁴² She was amused to find that this had by the 1970s become detached entirely from any association with her husband, acquiring a status as a kind of left-wing folksong, and she observed that no one would suspect its actual authorship ‘from the list of its author’s published works as listed in Who’s Who’.Footnote ⁴³ The tone of this particular ditty seems entirely of a piece with the 1920s world of The Bolo Book and The Striker Stricken, but it was in fact published in what seemed, on the surface, to be a rather more serious book of verse: The Crooked World.

IV

The Crooked World (1933) was Cole’s last published volume of poetry, issued by Gollancz and running to an impressive 135 pages – quite lengthy for a single-authored collection of poetry. It takes the form of a poetic sequence, assuming the voices of various characters – a charwoman, a Nazi, a chorus of farmers, someone on the dole – all linked by a series of ‘arguments’ and commentaries by the poet, which is, one assumes, intended to be the perspective of Cole himself, reflecting on what poetry should be about and might be for, and lamenting the state of the world. As with so much of Cole’s poetry, and indeed his published prose, there is a prevalent sense of writing down first thoughts and sticking with them, so that the book suffers from a degree of padding and repetition. There are some uncomfortable moments, too, when Cole evokes the voices of Nazis and fascists and imperialists, alongside poems that read awkwardly for different reasons, as Cole ventriloquises members of the working classes picking up their dole, or wondering why the economy is in such desperate straits:

Some parts of the collection are more obviously in the mode of The Bolo Book, like ‘The Song of the Press’, with its determined commitment to ingenious rhyme, and specification of the tune to which it was set:

There are also some pleasingly clever pieces like ‘A Political Alphabet’:

Yet the mood of The Crooked World can be difficult to pin down. Parts of the sequence are overt commentaries on contemporary problems and the need for a shift in policy. ‘The Master Builder’ lambasts the building of ‘a thousand Londons / In England’s pleasant land’, while other poems highlight the crisis in wheat farming, the impact of the means test, and the failures of Versailles and post-war international relations.Footnote ⁴⁷ There are exercises in different poetic forms: a random set of quatrains; a sonnet in praise of William Cobbett.Footnote ⁴⁸ Meanwhile, ‘Dirge at a meeting’ is little more than doggerel, driven by repetitive rhythm and insistent rhyme:

Twenty-three years on from noticing his debut slim volume, the Times Literary Supplement was less warm in its reception of Cole’s The Crooked World. A review by the poet and critic Hugh L’Anson Fausset picked up on Cole’s own reference to ‘ragged rhyme’, and observed that this ‘well describes the quality of much of his versifying’. One of the problems may have been about raising expectations. The presentation of The Crooked World made this collection appear as a conventional book of poetry, when Cole was really using verse here as an alternative way to speak about politics. Fausset observed perceptively that, in essence, ‘these verses constitute another “Intelligent Socialist’s survey”Footnote ⁵⁰ of the modern world’ commenting on ‘the more obvious follies and inhumanities apparent in the world to-day’. He concluded that ‘Verse … is for [Cole] not so much an art as an instrument’:

Did Cole think that poetry had to be devoted to such ends, given the times he was living in? He suggests a revision of ‘notions of things poetic’ in one of the first poems within the sequence:

The poem concludes that writers must apply their ‘lyrical measures’ to ‘modern themes’:

Years earlier, by contrast, Margaret had written, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, about rejecting realism in favour of being explicitly ‘poetic’. Modern poets might write about ‘a tin-opener, or wet mackintoshes, or an uncovered drain’, she complained: ‘Well, I don’t like them, and I won’t!’ Instead, her poem vows to celebrate things she likes: ‘Roses and lovers in lanes and honeysuckle and green woods’.Footnote ⁵⁴

That attraction of poetry as something occupying a world set apart, in subject matter and language, retained a certain appeal for both the Coles, even as they deployed verse in more knock-about, satirical and instrumental ways, and used it to address the ideas and issues that exercised them for so much of their working lives. In the final piece in The Crooked World, G. D. H. Cole seemingly longed to escape the exigencies of political obligation, in both life and literature, those frustrations set out in a poem which oscillates between lyrical romantic moments and statements of commitment to making a better world:

V

Writing and publishing were central to Cole’s life and work. His journalism and reviewing, histories and biographies, studies of the economy and political thought made those authorial initials ‘G. D. H.’ familiar to generations of readers in the early and mid twentieth century, when his writings became some of the most prominent sources of information and education for those on the progressive and left wings in Britain. Alongside his tracts on guild socialism, his labour histories and studies of socialist thought, the poetry may seem a mere curiosity, difficult to reconcile with the other genres of political writing that made up this exceptionally productive literary career. However, that is to underestimate two important contexts. Firstly, it downplays the presence of poetry in the period in which Cole came of age. The prominence of reading and reciting poetry in school, at home, on stage and at social gatherings, and the exposure to versifying in comic forms and lyrics, meant that poetry was a familiar part of everyday culture, and something that many people in all sorts of walks of life not only read, but often wrote themselves.Footnote ⁵⁶ In that sense, it should not be surprising that poetry was a common feature and point of reference in the lives of many political figures too. Secondly, it neglects an aspect of political sociability and community that was part of the political culture of the period. Cole made an obvious contribution to shaping the development of Labour organisations through his educational work and the writings which informed and engaged a readership of trade unionists, co-operators, socialists, politicians and party members. But less tangible than the many editions of publications such as The Common People is Cole’s place in that more elusive world of revues, parody and socialist entertainments, the events and comradeship of the summer schools and labour gatherings. The Bolo Book and the belated publication of The Striker Stricken offer us a glimpse of that culture, where a shared political outlook intersected with fun and sociability, here drawing very clearly on a common treasury of rhyme and song, readily adaptable as vehicles for parody and the satirising of one’s opponents.

The published collections tell part of the story about Cole and poetry, but much of what he wrote never made it into print. Even after the appearance of The Crooked World marked the last of his published volumes, he clearly continued to write, and many poems and attempts at poems survive in the archive, often written on the back of typescripts for other projects: index pages for other genres of book, notepaper from visits to Naomi and Dick Mitchison at Carradale House, a duplicated text about the League of Nations. Some of these manuscripts suggest satirical entertainments that may well have been intended for, or indeed made it into comic revues at socialist conferences and summer schools. Others present a stream of consciousness, or an attempt to work through policy positions and principles in lines of verse. ‘If I could make a world,’ he muses, before drifting into reflections on equality and freedom. There are poems, too, about love, gardens, even London nightlife; about historical scenes, and an Ozymandias-esque reflection on the passing of empires and the ruins of a city in the desert. He addressed poems to ‘Dear Mr Eliot’, and ‘Dear Mr Auden’ – though the latter got no further than the idea of the title itself: ‘Dear Mr Auden, (Wystan to real friends)’.Footnote ⁵⁷

Poetry, then, was a common recourse for G. D. H. Cole throughout his life, a form in which to work out thoughts and ideas, but also to be playful, punning, and often political. As an influence on him in terms of what he read and as something he valued, poetry formed a significant part of his intellectual make-up, and needs to be considered alongside the various other philosophical, historical and social scientific contributions that shaped him as a thinker and communicator. And his assumption within his own writing that poetry could offer a complementary approach to expressing political commentary and commitments speaks to a certain fluidity between the uses of poetry and prose at the time, and to Cole’s aspiration towards a life of letters in the broadest sense. The seriousness with which he took his writing in verse is made clear by his keenness to see it in print, placed alongside his work in other genres as yet another way of communicating his ideas about contemporary politics, economic challenges, the importance of socialism and even the possibilities and limitations of writing itself.