Our Partnership was published by Longmans, Green in 1948, five years after Beatrice Webb’s death in 1943 and a year after Sidney’s death in 1947. The book was edited by Barbara Drake (Beatrice’s niece) and Margaret Cole (a Fabian colleague) from the diaries and manuscript materials that Beatrice had left, and it continues the story begun in My Apprenticeship from the marriage in 1892 through approximately 1911 — the years when the Webbs built the institutional foundations of British social democracy.
The partnership of Sidney and Beatrice Webb was one of the most productive intellectual collaborations in modern history. From 1892 to 1943 they co-authored dozens of books, pamphlets, and reports; founded the London School of Economics (1895) and the New Statesman (1913); served on royal commissions; helped create the Labour Party’s intellectual program; and trained a generation of social scientists, civil servants, and politicians who would build the welfare state. Our Partnership documents this work from Beatrice’s perspective — more personal, more reflective, and more self-critical than the public record suggests.
The most famous episode covered in the book is the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws (1905–1909), on which Beatrice served and for which she produced the famous Minority Report — a document that proposed replacing the Victorian Poor Law with a comprehensive system of social services (health, education, pensions, unemployment insurance) administered by specialized government departments. The Minority Report was rejected at the time but its recommendations were substantially implemented by the Attlee government after 1945, making Beatrice Webb arguably the single most influential architect of the British welfare state.
The book also reveals the personal costs of the partnership. Beatrice’s diaries, from which much of the book is drawn, record recurring episodes of depression, self-doubt, and exhaustion. She was haunted by the question of whether she had sacrificed her potential as a literary writer (she admired George Eliot and sometimes regretted not pursuing fiction) for the grinding work of social investigation. She worried about the emotional coldness of her marriage — she and Sidney were deeply devoted but rarely demonstrative, and she sometimes envied the passionate relationships she had renounced.
These personal revelations make Our Partnership a more complex and moving book than My Apprenticeship. It is also a more uneven one — the editing is occasionally clumsy, and the diaries sometimes repeat themselves — but the cumulative portrait of a life lived in service to a social vision is powerful.
Collecting Our Partnership
First edition (Longmans, Green, London, 1948): Blue cloth.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $30–$80
- Without jacket: $15–$30
- Later editions: $5–$15