Herbert Somerton Foxwell (1849-1936)

Rogerio Arthmar and Michael McLure

Introduction

Herbert Somerton Foxwell was born in Shepton Mallet, civil parish of the Mendip district of Somerset, in South West England, on 17 June 1849, the eldest of the six children of Thomas Somerton Foxwell (1806-1866) and Jane Handcock (1824-1878), his second wife. Thomas Foxwell was a successful merchant who dealt in hardware, slate, and timber, although much of his wealth was wiped out during the Overend Gurney crisis of 1866. The infant Foxwell received his early education at home, and later attended the Wesleyan Collegiate Institute, now Queen’s College, Taunton, graduating from London University in 1868. That same year, he entered St John’s College, Cambridge, as student of the moral sciences and was awarded the Whewell Scholarship in International Law in 1872. In 1874, at the young age of 25, he was elected Fellow of the College and, the next year, appointed to examine in the Moral Sciences Tripos, remaining associated with St John’s for over 60 years. With a distinctive affinity to teach, he became Lecturer at University

R. Arthmar (h)

Associate Professor, Department of Economics, Federal University of Espfrito Santo, Brazil e-mail: This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it

M. McLure (h)

Professor of Economics, Business School, University of Western Australia, Australia 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_17

College, London, in 1876, succeeding his friend William Stanley Jevons in the Chair of Political Economy there in 1881. A few years later, in 1896, Foxwell started lecturing also on Currency and Banking at the newly created London School of Economics. He died on 2 August 1936, in Cambridge, at the age of 87. About his teaching skills, it was once remarked that he had been an extremely reasoned lecturer, always concerned about the ongoing issues in economics: ‘Of incomparable lucidity, with an unsurpassed knowledge of economic literature, his ingenious mind was always alert to notice the chances and changes of present day life’¹ (The Times 1936: 12; see also Bowley and Freeman 2004; Koot 1987; Bonar 1936).

Foxwell lived all his adult life in Cambridge, first at St John’s and then, after marrying Olive May (1870-1930) in 1898, at 1 Harvey Road, close to the Keynes family. The most conspicuous trait of Foxwell’s scientific life, and the one which brought him eternal gratitude from his fellow economists, was his lifelong dedication to building a definitive bibliography of economics. A relentless book-hunter, his bibliomania was initiated at Jevons’s suggestion in 1875, which ultimately led to him putting at least three large collections together, comprising over 70,000 volumes. Foxwell not only chased down and bought the books, pamphlets, and manuscripts on economics that he was interested in, but also read, annotated, and catalogued each and every piece, a practice that, with time, made him a specialist in the history of thought from a wide variety of economic fields ranging from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. His first major collection, with some 30,000 books, was about to be sold to an American library when, following an appeal to the public from the British Economic Association,^[1] ^[2] it was suddenly acquired by the Goldsmiths’ Company in 1901 for the sum of ?10,000, and donated to the University of London in 1903. In Foxwell’s own words, the library was to ‘serve as a basis for the study of the industrial, commercial, monetary and financial history of the United Kingdom, as well as of the gradual development of economic science generally’ (Foxwell 1908a: 720). Foxwell kept working on the improvement of the Goldsmiths’ Library until 1814, when he began to assemble another collection, sold to Harvard University through the agency of Allyn Young in 1929, which forms the basis of the Kress Library of Business and Economics at that institution (Rogers 1986; Keynes 1936).

Although Foxwell excelled in his multiple endeavours as a lecturer and book collector, the unavoidable travelling around and time-consuming nature of these tasks compromised the extent of his intellectual activity. Most of his erratic work, composed of speeches, articles, and introduction to books, however, carried a sense of energy, erudition, and indeed heresy that, in the words of his contemporary Joseph S. Nicholson (1850-1927), made it seem as if he had brought back to life ‘the spirit of the old pamphleteers’ (Nicholson 1919: 323). So, for instance, we find Foxwell in 1884 editing and writing the introduction to Jevons’s Investigations in Currency and Finance, praising his late friend’s willingness to analyse economic phenomena based on real data and with the same inductive method so successful in physics (Foxwell 1884: xxv). In 1899, Foxwell composed a well-known introduction to Anton Menger’s The Right to the Whole Produce of Labour, where the British socialist literature of the nineteenth century is outlined and linked to Ricardo’s doctrine of value. In addition, the book is complemented by a full bibliography of British tracts on socialist proposals running from 1756 to 1885, along with a complete and chronological list of periodicals dealing with the social question over the same period (Foxwell 1899: i-x, 191-267). Yet, in his 1909 Preface to Andreades’s History of the Bank of England, Foxwell puts forth a strong defence of that institution’s policies during the restriction period of 17971815, when the Bank was not required to convert banknotes into gold, hailing its commitment to the stability of business instead of conferring priority to the stabilization of the exchanges (Foxwell 1909: vii-xxvi). In spite of the diversity of subjects dealt with in Foxwell’s papers, his main interests gravitated around the importance of the historical method to economics, banking and monetary issues, the instability of the economy and its effects on employment, and, lastly, the history of economic thought. Foxwell’s main contributions to each one of these subjects will be examined in the next four sections.

[1] Maynard Keynes described Foxwell’s lecturing style as being always directed to practical problems froma realistic perspective: ‘But he held that the reasoning must be applied, if it is to be fruitful, to a widerange of facts furnished by historical and contemporary experience, and not to simplified and artificialhypotheses’ (Keynes 1936: 592).
[2] The British Economic Association’s plea appeared in the 25 June 1901 issue of The Times in quite convincing terms: ‘No such library of economic literature has ever been formed before, and it is doubtfulwhether any future collector, however learned, leisured and wealthy, will be able to rival it’ (The Times1901: 8).