The Writing of My Apprenticeship

Abstract

In January 1917, Beatrice Webb, then approaching her sixtieth birthday, began to type out and edit her manuscript diaries with the idea in mind of writing a ‘Book of My Life’ (3 January 1917). Over the next nine years, she wrote an autobiography based upon her diaries and, in so doing, performed the most revealing public act of her life. My Apprenticeship is revealing, not only in its content, but by its very existence: Webb’s decision to write an autobiography signalled, however indirectly, a crisis in her private and public lives, in her dedication to Fabianism, in her political beliefs, in her career as a social scientist and in her role as Sidney’s wife. In a paradoxical manner, which I shall elucidate here, the writing of My Apprenticeship called into question the very syntheses proposed within it, the syntheses of love and work in marriage-as-partnership and of science and faith in Fabianism. In order to discover the private motives for the writing of autobiography, it will be necessary to go beyond the framework of My Apprenticeship and to consult Webb’s post-1892 diaries.

There was a Webb legend already flourishing when I first came to London as a boy: I have no doubt it still flourishes. But it is quite false. For it is a grim, inhuman legend — a legend of blue-stocking and blue-book — a legend of statistics, economics, infallibility, research, omniscience, lectures, pamphlets, dossiers, calculations, permeation and pedantry.

Possibly this false legend will flourish forever. Possibly, on the other hand, it is now dead, killed by the publication of Mrs Webb’s autobiography. For it is the most human document you can imagine.

Gerald Gould, from a review of My Apprenticeship, Daily Chronicle, 26 February 1926.