Henry Fawcett (1833-1884)

Bart Schultz

Introduction

In the history of economics, there is a fairly common dismissive designation to the effect that the economist in question was an unoriginal follower or popularizer of John Stuart Mill, whose Principles of Political Economy (1848) was the truly epochal, paradigm-establishing work falling between Smith’s Wealth of Nations and Marshall’s Principles of Economics. Perhaps no one has suffered more from this designation than Henry Fawcett, Professor of Political Economy at Cambridge University (from 1863), Liberal MP (from 1864), and Postmaster General under Gladstone (from 1880). Donald Winch, in his generally excellent Wealth and Life, captures something of the overall attitude:

Fawcett may have been present at the British Association conference in Cambridge in 1862 when Jevons gave the first public account of his new theory of value, where it was received ‘without a word of interest or belief’. At this time Fawcett was completing his Manual of political economy, a popularisation of Mill’s Principles that was his only academic claim on the attention of the electors to the practically defunct (never properly activated) chair of political economy in Cambridge in the same year. Cambridge connections dating back to his

B. Schultz (*)

Senior Lecturer in the Humanities (Philosophy) and Director of the Civic Knowledge Project, University of Chicago, USA e-mail: This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it

R.A. Cord (ed.), The Palgrave Companion to Cambridge Economics,

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-41233-1_14

undergraduate days and including a fellowship at Trinity Hall, plus Mill’s testimonial, played a part in Fawcett’s success, though in the end this was mainly due to the way in which his opponents bungled the election by splitting their vote. Fawcett was to occupy this post, chiefly addressing an undemanding, because mainly conscripted, audience composed of those sitting for pass degrees, until his death in 1884 (Winch 2009: 243).

Indeed, Winch’s is one of the more balanced and judicious accounts of Fawcett’s place in the history of economics. It would seem that at least when it comes to Fawcett’s contributions to economics, perhaps the kindest conclusion to be drawn from the overall consensus is that ‘his direct, realistic, unpolished attempts to explain the substance and policy implications of elementary economic analysis to non-professionals reached a much wider contemporary audience than the writings of any other late nineteenth-century English professor of political economy’ (Deane 1987: 296-297). Even Fawcett’s close friend and biographer Leslie Stephen conceded that for Fawcett ‘the leading principles of political economy and those which were really valuable, were few, simple, and therefore capable of exposition on the level of average intelligence’ (Stephen quoted in Deane 1989: 106). Such views were scarcely apt to excite the minds of the young 1870s Cambridge revolutionaries seeking to establish economics as a serious, independent scientific discipline, included amongst them the likes of Marshall, Cairnes, and Foxwell, or their intellectual descendants who rule the profession today.

Yet, as this essay will seek to demonstrate, the received wisdom on the subject of Henry Fawcett is less than satisfactory, more received than wise. Although a radical revisionary history is not being promised here, some gestures will be made to the effect of rescuing Fawcett from what E.P. Thompson called the ‘enormous condescension of posterity’.

Fawcett rose from relatively modest circumstances. His father was a draper who ran a shop in Salisbury and married well, to one Mary Cooper. As Lawrence Goldman has observed, the

Fawcetts were staunch Liberals and their strict party loyalty rubbed off: there is no need to look far for the origins of Fawcett’s Liberalism. In the year of the Great Reform Act, William Fawcett was Mayor of Salisbury; eleven years later in 1843, when Cobden and Bright visited the town as they took their antiprotection campaign into the heart of rural England, they stayed with the Fawcetts (Goldman 1989: 1).

As Fawcett’s wife would later recall, of his parents and home situation, ‘there were, as in most country towns, rigidly defined political barriers between the shops in the city—Liberal drapers, fishmongers, and so on, and Tory drapers, fishmongers, and so on. Mrs. Fawcett would never have dreamed of going into any but those in sympathy with the Liberals’ (Fawcett 1925 [1995]: 58-59).

Henry, who was born on 26 August 1833, was by most accounts not a prodigy, but he nonetheless ended up making it to Cambridge University, where he shifted from King’s College, to Peterhouse, to Trinity Hall, emerging, to his disappointment, as Seventh Wrangler in the Mathematical Tripos, but nonetheless winning a Fellowship at Trinity Hall (1856). He adored Cambridge, which was to his mind a meritocracy by virtue of the struggles and possibilities afforded by the Tripos system and Fellowship competitions, which built both character and opportunity. His interest in mathematics was, however, surpassed by a lifelong interest in making an impact in politics, in the House of Commons, which meant pursuing a legal career as well. But as Goldman recounts:

Fawcett’s career at the bar was cruelly short, terminated by the accident that left him totally and permanently blind—yet an accident that paradoxically changed everything and nothing for him. Ironically, Fawcett had serious problems with his eyes before the accident. In the winter of 1856-7 he was advised to take ‘perfect rest’ to restore his failing sight, affects by over-work. Then, on 17 September 1858, Fawcett went out shooting with his father, and William Fawcett, with a cataract in one eye failed to see his son in advance of the party. He fired at some partridges and two pellets went through the tinted spectacles that Henry had been advised to wear, blinding him in both eyes. Fawcett apparently once told a friend that it took him just ‘one night to decide whether the loss of my sight should make any difference in my life or not; I decided it should not’ (Goldman 1989: 3).

The accident did mean that he would enter politics from a position of academic rather than legal eminence; it was from Cambridge that Fawcett ‘sallied forth into a series of electoral contests, into various public arena and into the society of Liberal intellectuals and activists’ (ibid.: 6). That Mill’s Principles had so stuck in his head is perhaps not surprising, given that it was the primary work in political economy that he had studied before losing his sight. Mill’s works, he explained to Mill himself, ‘have been the chief education of my mind’ (Fawcett quoted in Stephen 1885: 102), though the writings were very importantly supplemented by a cordial, somewhat pragmatic friendship with Mill that followed their first personal meeting, in 1860, when both were s truggling to advance

Thomas Hare’s elaborate scheme for proportional representation. They were both members of the London Political Economy Club, and the Mills joined Fawcett’s Radical Club in 1870, a club that proudly allowed women members.

Fawcett’s blindness is of course one of the first features of him that most commentators single out, referring to him as the ‘blind Victorian’. His blindness undoubtedly threw many obstacles in his path, in an era that was scarcely known for leading the way on disability rights (unless one counts Fawcett’s own efforts). Yet what is remarkable is just how effective he was in making his way on his own terms. In remembering Fawcett, his younger friend and Cambridge colleague Henry Sidgwick would write:

Just now I think most of the wonderful success and example of this life, which is now beyond the reach of time and change ... He was a hero of a peculiar type, without any outward air of self-sacrifice or suggestion of idealism in his ordinary talk, and yet one felt his determination to live the ordinary life of a man, and a successful man—who gives pity and aid more than he takes it—required a continual sustained effort which did not draw its force from self-love alone; it continually demanded and obtained further force given by the consciousness of the power of serving others; and the needs of this struggle gave to a nature, which, though large, healthy, and generous, was not originally characterized by high moral aspiration, an elevation it would not otherwise have had. In spite of all that I have read of saints and sages, I feel that if grievious physical calamity came upon me, yet one that left the springs of physical energy unimpaired, I should turn for strength to this example. I wonder how many blind feel that he has opened the door of their prison- house and shown them the way back to ordinary life: steep, yet one that may be trodden by a steady and trustful step (Sidgwick quoted in Schultz et al. 1999: 391).

Sidgwick’s question was in due course answered by Winifred Holt’s A Beacon for the Blind: Being a Life of Henry Fawcett, the Blind Postmaster- General (Holt 1914), which demonstrated at considerable length just how effective and inspiring Fawcett’s example had been, not least because of his upbeat temperament. Stefan Collini has even wondered how ‘the ironical, skeptical, moody Stephen could ever have been so close to the straightforward, emphatic, insufferably cheerful Fawcett’ (Collini 1989: 43), and it seems only fair to admit that Fawcett, for all of his ‘manly Victorian’ robustness, did keep life in perspective in ways that many of his contemporaries failed to do. As Stephen put it, after commenting on Fawcett’s unusual combination of shrewdness and kindliness:

A spontaneous and intense hatred of everything unfair showed itself in all his most active impulses; whether it took the form of sympathy for the ignorant and depressed agricultural labourer, for the children deprived of the means of cultivating their intellectual faculties, for women ousted by men from the provinces of labour in which they could achieve independence, for the townspeople shut out from the only places in which they could enjoy healthy recreation, or for the millions of India governed by an alien race too apt to neglect the real interests of the subject or to allow their policy to turn upon totally different considerations. Fawcett was invariably upon the generous side (Stephen 1885: 180—181).

One is strongly tempted to say that on a great many matters, Fawcett saw much more clearly than most of his contemporaries. A radical champion of Darwinism, feminism, and equality between the classes, he would work tirelessly on the side of quite a few of the angels, seeking, with such young supporters as Sidgwick, to open up access to higher education regardless of sex and class. Darwin himself would write to Fawcett: ‘Pray believe that I feel sincerely grateful that you have taken up the cudgels in defence of the line of argument in the “Origin,” you will have benefited the subject’ (Darwin quoted in Holt 1914: 96).

Fawcett was deeply Millian, to be sure, and always leaned heavily towards non-interference by the state, though in an open, evidence-driven way—for him, as Stephen put it, the bottom line was that ‘Government should do what experience proves it can do efficiently’ (Stephen 1885: 160). But he fought for the preservation of public open spaces, and even helped develop the telephone network. There is no little irony in the way that such a Millian classical liberal would ascend to the government position of Postmaster General, and oversee any number of public services. Like the Mills and the Sidgwicks, he also worked in partnership with his wife, setting a concrete example of equality between the sexes.

Fawcett’s wife was the famous suffragette Millicent Garrett Fawcett (1847-1929), whom he married in 1867. They had met in May 1865, at a social gathering, and she had captured his attention by lamenting Lincoln’s assassination and expressing support for the North that would resonate with a Liberal reformer like Fawcett. She would go on to publish Political Economy for Beginners (1870), Tales of Political Economy (1894), and many essays, articles, and reviews; work with Henry and their reformist circle to found Newnham College, Cambridge (one of the first women’s colleges in England); and play a lead role in the movement for women’s suffrage. After her husband’s death, she would become even more politically active, heading the National Union of Women’s Societies (1897-1918). Curiously enough, her older sister, Elizabeth, who as Elizabeth Garrett Anderson would become Britain’s first woman physician, had also been proposed to by Fawcett in the very same month and year, though she declined out of concern for her career.

Here lies a very deep paradox indeed—how was it that one of the figures associated with the ‘manly Victorians’, with strenuous character building that both the tests competitions at Cambridge and the free market competitions of the world were supposed to advance, could at the same time seek to open up all the manly spheres to women? What did his feminism really look like, and how was it entangled with his views about building the character of the poor for purposes of economic advance? (See Collini 1989; Caine 1994.) Was it problematically masculinized, in effect allowing women equal status only when they became more like the men dominating the public sphere, and less invested in the caring relationships now celebrated by ‘care feminism’? Just how closely did the Fawcetts follow John Stuart and Harriet Taylor Mill on issues relating to the subjection of women, and how did their views on such matters figure in their economic writings? These questions will also be raised in the following section, but it is worth highlighting here some of what Millicent had to say about the Mills, which points up just how close the Fawcetts and Mills were, when it came to feminism:

During the months of the Parliamentary Session which we spent in London, I regarded it as a very great honour when we were invited from time to time to dine with Mr. Mill and his stepdaughter, Miss Helen Taylor, at Blackheath. These were delightful evenings, when we met Mr. and Mrs. Grote, Professor Cairnes, Herbert Spencer, and other celebrities, and heard, I suppose, some of the best talk from some of the best talkers in England. Of course questions concerning Womens [sic] Suffrage and the general position of women not infrequently came up, and I remember a discussion between Mill and Herbert Spencer, the latter taking the ‘anti’ line, and basing his arguments on the heavy handicap nature had imposed upon women. Mill’s reply took my fancy exceedingly. He said, ‘You look upon nature as something we should do well to follow. I look upon nature as a horrible old harridan’ (Millicent Fawcett 1925 [1995]: 60—61).

She was present when Mill (unsuccessfully) ‘moved the Women’s Suffrage amendment to the 1867 Reform Bill; its terms were to omit the word “man” from the enfranchising clause and substitute the word “person.” The speech was a masterpiece of close reasoning, tinged here and there by deep emotion’ (ibid.: 64). Her copy of Mill’s The Subjection of Women, presented to her by Mill himself, was one of her most precious possessions. But one of her proudest hours concerned Henry Sidgwick and the founding of Newnham, a deeply Millian cause:

As I am writing now of the early days of Newnham, I cannot forbear mentioning what I have always regarded as an honour, viz. that Professor Henry Sidgwick, the real founder of Newnham, asked me and my husband to lend our drawing-room for the first meeting ever held in Cambridge in its support. So far as I can remember, this must have been in 1870. We were then occupying a furnished house which possessed a drawing-room of suitable size for such an occasion. I therefore recognize that the birth of Newnham under my roof was more or less accidental; nevertheless, such is human folly, I go on being proud and pleased about it. I know that Philippa was a little baby girl at the time, but was old enough to be brought in at the tea-drinking stage at the end of the proceedings and to toddle about in her white frock and blue sash among the guests (ibid.: 72—73).

Happily, Philippa Garrett Fawcett, born in 1868 and the Fawcett’s only child, would become both a Lecturer at Newnham and one of Newnham’s most famous early success stories—in 1890, when women were allowed to sit for the Tripos, though not officially classed, she triumphed in the Mathematical Tripos, beating out even the official Senior Wrangler and demonstrating to the critics with some finality that women were indeed capable of abstract thought. Part of an anonymous poem in her honour runs: ‘Hail the triumph of the corset/Hail the fair Phillipa Fawcett/Victress in the fray/ Crown her queen of Hydrostatics/And the other Mathematics/Wreathe her brow with bay’ (Phillips 1988: 33).

Had her father but lived to see it, this would have been his most triumphant moment.

In his own life, Henry Fawcett had to settle for a series of lesser triumphs. He was, by all accounts (and admittedly), no wide-ranging, many-sided Millian philosopher. He served as MP for Brighton from 1865 to 1874, when for complicated reasons having to do with his advanced liberalism, he became MP for Hackney, remaining in that position until his premature death from pleurisy, on 6 November 1884. However, he was also appointed Postmaster General by Gladstone in 1880, quite possibly for political reasons, since Gladstone may have wanted to bridle the outspoken Fawcett, who criticized Gladstone on many counts, not least the Irish Question. Still, even as Postmaster General, he proved to be an innovative and unconventional force, introducing such significant innovations as parcel post, postal orders, and savings stamps. Very late in life, in 1883, he was also elected Rector of Glasgow University, but he died before his official installation.

The precise content of Fawcett’s advanced liberalism, on economic matters, is best discussed in connection with his writings, since he was really all of apiece, working out his economic arguments and political causes in tandem. His chief writings, in addition to the Manual of Political Economy (which went through no less than eight revised editions before 1907), were The Economic Position of the British Labourer (1865), Pauperism: Its Causes and Remedies

(1871), and Free Trade and Protection (1878), though he also co-authored with his wife Essays and Lectures on Social and Political Subjects (1872).