Volume 11, Number 9 · November 21, 1968
Do-Gooder
By Noel Annan
Beatrice Webb
by Kitty Muggeridge, by Ruth Adam
Knopf, 288 pp., $6.95
Anyone who writes about Beatrice Webb is faced with a difficulty. On the one hand there is the tireless social investigator and reformer; the pioneer Fabian socialist; the woman who at the time of the women's rights movement was herself the unanswerable evidence that her sex was a match in ability, hard work, and political dexterity for any man. She has been hailed as a spiritual descendant of the noble meliorism of John Stuart Mill and George Eliot. On the other hand, there is the tyrannical, overbearing, drill sergeant, inspired by a sweeping sense of her own rectitude and superiority, determined to improve by compulsion the morals as well as the condition of the working classes, contemptuous of inferiors, insufferable to her equals, convinced that everyone else's motives were corrupt while hers were lily-pure, willing to stoop to intrigue and even chicanery to achieve her ends, and finally, in old age, scornful of democracy and blinded by an absurd reliance upon Soviet statistics, maintaining that Stalinist Russia was the only state of the future.
Review, 3155 words
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