My Apprenticeship has long been cited as an important and fascinating
source for students of social attitudes and conditions in late Victorian
Britain, and this new paperback edition makes it once more generally
available. Beatrice Webb, the eighth of the nine daughters of the
railway magnate Richard Potter, was an exceptionally able person, with a
zest for observation, a knack for pointed comment, and a habit of
self-examination - all of which gifts she put to good account in the
private diary she kept all her life and in this brilliant volume of
autobiography which she based on that diary. It tells the story of a
craft and a creed, of a withdrawn but talented girl, growing up in a
prosperous household, who turned to social investigation and social
reform, moving between the two starkly contrasted worlds of West End
smart society and East End squalor. She served a hard apprenticeship, as
a woman as well as a professional worker, and in a new introduction to
this edition Norman MacKenzie describes the severe personal stresses
which lay behind her life of dedication to social improvement,
particularly her frustrated passion for Joseph Chamberlain and the
troubled courtship which preceded her marriage to Sidney Webb. This
volume ends on the eve of that marriage, when she was about to begin her
famous and astonishingly productive collaboration with her husband. As
historians, publicists and Fabian politicians the Webbs were pioneers of
the modern age. The ensuring volume, which chronicles their mature
career and was appropriately titled Our Partnership, is also published
by the Cambridge University Press in collaboration with the London
School of Economics and Political Science.
