The Diary of Beatrice Webb was published in four volumes between 1982 and 1985, edited by Norman and Jeanne MacKenzie and published jointly by Virago in London and Harvard University Press in the United States. The diaries themselves span seventy years — from 1873, when Beatrice Potter was fifteen, to 1943, the year of her death at eighty-five — and they run to millions of words in the original manuscripts, held at the London School of Economics. The MacKenzie edition is a substantial selection rather than a complete transcription, but even in abbreviated form it fills four thick volumes and constitutes one of the most important diary records in the English language.
The diaries are remarkable on several levels. As social history, they provide an eyewitness account of seven decades of British life: the late Victorian prosperity, the upheavals of the 1880s and 1890s (the dock strike, the rise of socialism, the Boer War), the Edwardian Indian summer, the Great War, the General Strike, the Depression, the rise of fascism, the Second World War, and the first stirrings of the welfare state. Beatrice knew everyone — politicians (Balfour, Lloyd George, Churchill, Attlee), writers (Shaw, Wells, the Woolfs), social reformers (the Booths, the Rowntrees), and foreign leaders (Lenin, whom she and Sidney met in 1932) — and she recorded her observations with a sharp eye for character and motive.
As intellectual autobiography, the diaries trace the development of Fabian socialism from a dining-club enthusiasm to the governing philosophy of a major political party. Beatrice records the founding of the LSE, the battles within the Labour Party, the disappointments of the 1924 and 1929 Labour governments, and the Webbs’ controversial embrace of Soviet communism in the 1930s — a late-life enthusiasm that damaged their reputations and remains the most contested aspect of their legacy.
As personal writing, the diaries are unexpectedly moving. Beatrice was far more emotionally candid in her diary than in her published work. She wrote about her struggles with depression, her ambivalent feelings about Sidney (she admired him without being in love with him in any conventional sense), her regrets about not having children, and her fear that the vast body of work she and Sidney had produced would be forgotten. These private revelations give the published diaries a depth and humanity that the official Webb image — competent, purposeful, slightly inhuman — does not suggest.
Collecting The Diary of Beatrice Webb
First edition (Virago/Harvard, 1982–1985): Four volumes, hardcover with dust jackets.
Market values:
- Complete four-volume set, first edition: $60–$150
- Individual volumes: $15–$35
- Paperback editions: $8–$20
A major scholarly publication that deserves wider readership. Sets are not rare but are worth having complete.