An Evening in Belsize Square

Abstract

From C. H. Herford, Philip Henry Wicksteed: His Life and Work (London and Toronto: J. M. Dent, 1931) pp. 207–9. For several years Shaw and Webb were members of the ‘Economic Circle’. Meetings had begun early in 1884 and from October that year took place at the Belsize Square home of Henry R. Beeton, a London stockbroker. Another member was Edgar Innes Fripp, then a student at Manchester New College, London, later a Unitarian minister and Shakespearean scholar. According to Herford (p. 206), Fripp was the only one to take careful notes at the time. The meetings were led by the Rev. Philip Wicksteed (1844–1927), lecturer, political economist, Ibsen pioneer and Dante scholar, and were particularly concerned with the ideas of the economist William Stanley Jevons (1835–82). Wicksteed had published a critical review of Das Kapital in the October 1884 issue of To-Day; Shaw defended Marx the following January and Wicksteed’s rejoinder appeared in the April issue. So the likely date of the evening described below is April 1885 or shortly afterwards. Wicksteed and Shaw continued to have a warm regard for each other in later years, and when Shaw brought out his Common Sense of Municipal Trading in 1904 he sent Wicksteed a copy inscribed ‘To my father in economics’.