Jose Harris

‘Who shall paint the chameleon, who can tether a broomstick?’ wrote J.M. Keynes of David Lloyd George in 1919. ‘How can I convey to the reader … any just impression of this extraordinary figure of our time, this syren, this goat-footed bard, this half-human visitor to our age from the hag-ridden magic and enchanted woods of Celtic antiquity?’ This passage was left out of the original text of The Economic Consequences of the Peace, because Keynes felt that he had tried and failed to do justice to the British prime minister’s baffling complexity of character. Lloyd George has continued to dazzle and elude his numerous biographers ever since. Few statesmen have had their public and private lives so frankly exposed and picked over by friend and foe alike: yet few have so tantalisingly evaded the grasp of the historian. Was Lloyd George, as Keynes suggested, a chimera from the Celtic twilight: or was he on the contrary a pioneer of modernity, managerialism and administrative rationalisation? Was he a ruthless practitioner of power politics or a diplomatic femme fatale – endowed with an almost feminine lubricity and guile? Was he an adherent of high principle, or merely a virtuoso of grand rhetoric? Was he a genuine democrat and parliamentarian, or was he mainly concerned with concentrating the power and streamlining the efficiency of the modern centralised state?’

The two things that everyone knows about Neville Chamberlain are that he was the son of Joseph Chamberlain and that he returned from Munich promising peace for our time. Between these two peaks of notoriety his historical reputation stretches dim, grey and obscure. An official biography by Sir Keith Feiling, written during the Second World War when Chamberlain’s reputation was at its lowest ebb, eloquently defended his subject’s personal integrity, but did little to dispel the impression of an essentially private and limited individual who had greatness thrust upon him by the high drama of historical events. Since Feiling wrote, Chamberlain has attracted some interest among historians as a social and administrative reformer; but his image remains that of a man who ‘looked at national politics through the wrong end of a municipal drainpipe’. ‘Neville has a retail mind in a wholesale business,’ observed his diametrical opposite, Lloyd George.

One of H.G. Wells’s abiding obsessions was the fear that the ‘woman of the future’ would bring about ‘race suicide’ by refusing to bear children: which may be a reason why he embarked on fatherhood so energetically, with a variety of women in addition to his wife. One of Wells’s most famous liaisons was with Rebecca West, mother of the author of the latest Wells biography. They met in 1912 when she was 19, he 45. He was an established novelist and social critic, she an ambitious young feminist author, who was beginning to make a name for herself by tart and witty book reviews in the Freewoman, Clarion and Daily News. Her articles ranged over numerous feminist topics: the ‘rat poison’ of housework, the futility of the current suffrage Bill, the scarcity of women geniuses, ‘honesty’ in sexual relationships and the moral imperative for a free woman to abandon an exhausted marriage. She constantly berated fellow females for their passivity, sentimental piety, and lack of a sense of adventure and ambition. From the start Rebecca West was obsessed by Wells – that plain and portly ladykiller, whose attractions seemed so mysterious to those who never met him. She pursued him vigorously both at his home (under the complaisant chaperonage of Mrs Wells) and by writing deliberately provoking reviews of his books. ‘He is the old maid among novelists,’ she wrote of his book Marriage. ‘Even the sex obsession that lay clotted on Ann Veronica and The New Machiavelli like cold white sauce was merely old maid’s mania, the reaction towards the flesh of a mind too long absorbed in airships and colloids.’ No man of Wells’s temperament could resist such baiting, with the result that he and Rebecca West became lovers. Their son, Anthony West, was born in 1914.–

Chartism has long been, and continues to be, of interest to historians on many different levels. To analysts of institutional change the campaign for the People’s Charter between 1837 and 1848 has been a major, if at the time abortive, episode in the history of parliamentary democracy. To labour historians, Chartism has been mainly significant as the medium of a great upsurge of autonomous working-class consciousness and working-class culture. To the historian of ideas, and to the would-be theorist of industrial change, Chartism was the crucible within which Marx and Engels forged their analysis of class relationships and the role of the bourgeois state. All these perspectives have given the scattered events of Chartism a historical meaning far beyond their immediate importance – which in terms of tangible political triumphs and achievements was remarkably slight. Moreover, as Asa Briggs plausibly argued in Chartist Studies, all these viewpoints tended to endow Chartism with an inner coherence and organisational identity not justified by the historical facts. In Briggs’s view, Chartism was not one but a cluster of movements all sheltering uneasily under the Chartist banner. It drew its support from obsolescent handloom weavers, skilled artisans and factory operatives who had no common economic base to unite them. Its political energies were hopelessly divided between those whose main goal was manhood suffrage and those more interested in factory reforms, Poor Law reform, Stamp Act repeal and a host of other lesser campaigns.–

John Maynard Keynes, grandson of the minister of the Bunyan chapel at Bedford, was born into a religious tradition that for two hundred years had stopped its ears against the blandishments of Mr Worldly Wiseman and sought only the Celestial City of Eternal Life. The City was to be found, as all readers of Pilgrim’s Progress knew, not by piety or public-spiritedness or good works or moral behaviour, but by that indefinable state of inner consciousness known as Salvation by Faith. By the 1880s, however, the tree of life as revealed to generations of Englishmen by Bunyan’s Pilgrim was dwindling root and branch. At its roots, the Bunyanites and the tradition they represented had been engulfed by a spirit of bustling philanthropy, conventional morality, social ambition and utilitarian calculation. Amid its branches, Faith itself was being continually pared away by the growth of secular knowledge. Among believers and doubters alike, the latter tendency fuelled and reinforced the former: progressive social action provided a pain-killing substitute for the sublime spiritual certainties of a former age.