My Apprenticeship was published by Longmans, Green in 1926, when Beatrice Webb was sixty-eight and the Fabian project she and Sidney had spent thirty years building — the Labour Party, the London School of Economics, the welfare state — was becoming reality. The book covers her life from childhood through her marriage to Sidney in 1892, and it is one of the finest autobiographies of the Victorian period: honest, reflective, and written with a literary quality that her collaborative works with Sidney generally lack.
Beatrice Potter was born in 1858 into the upper reaches of the Victorian business class. Her father, Richard Potter, was a railway magnate and timber merchant; her mother, Laurencina Heyworth, came from a Liverpool trading family. The household was intellectually distinguished — Herbert Spencer was a family friend and, for a time, Beatrice’s informal tutor — and the nine Potter daughters grew up in an atmosphere of privileged cosmopolitanism. But Beatrice was the odd one out: introspective, self-doubting, drawn to questions about poverty and social organization that her sisters’ marriages into the aristocracy and business elite did not address.
The emotional center of the autobiography is her relationship with Joseph Chamberlain, the radical politician whom she loved in her twenties. Chamberlain was brilliant, charismatic, and politically powerful, but the relationship foundered on his expectation that a wife would subordinate her intellectual life to his career. Beatrice’s decision to refuse him — painful, protracted, and never entirely resolved emotionally — was the turning point of her life: it freed her for the work that would define her, and it established the pattern of independence that characterized her partnership with Sidney (who, unlike Chamberlain, was willing to treat her as an intellectual equal).
The book’s other great subject is social investigation. Beatrice describes her work with Charles Booth on the Life and Labour of the People in London survey, her undercover research in East End sweatshops (where she worked as a seamstress to observe conditions from the inside), and her growing conviction that poverty was not a moral failing but a structural condition that could be addressed through institutional reform. These passages are remarkable for their combination of personal narrative and social analysis — Webb writes about poverty with the precision of a social scientist and the engagement of a novelist.
My Apprenticeship was meant to be followed by a second volume covering the years of partnership with Sidney, but that book — Our Partnership — was not published until 1948, five years after Beatrice’s death. Together, the two volumes constitute one of the most important autobiographical documents of the twentieth century.
Collecting My Apprenticeship
First edition (Longmans, Green, London, 1926): Blue cloth, gilt lettering.
Market values:
- First edition, good condition: $40–$100
- Pelican paperback (1938): $5–$15
- Later reprints: $10–$25