Beatrice Webb’s Two Voices: My Apprenticeship and Victorian Autobiography

Abstract

B E A T R I C E W E B B ' S TWO V O I C E S : M Y APPRENTICESHIP A N D V I C T O R I A N A U T O B I O G R A P H Y IRA BRUCE NADEL University of British Columbia Th om as Carlyle in 1832 explains the fascination of the Victorians with the lives of others: how inexpressibly comfortable to know our fellow-creature; to see into him, understand his goings forth, decipher the whole heart of his mystery; nay, not only to see into him, but even to see out of him, to view the work altogether as he views it.1 This ability to see into and out from the life of another is an aspect of the effect and form of autobiography which, as a genre, is multi-dimensional. It includes dramatic conflict, lyrical digression, narrative development, and philosophical discourse. It contains both a sense of self and a sense of history. In periods of such startling change and flux as the nineteenth century, the opportunity to know another person completely is an immense attraction. And for Carlyle to know a person is to know his time. "Universal History, the history of what man has accomplished in this world," says Carlyle, "is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here."2 Every autobiographer is tormented by the struggle between truth and fiction, for the decision to write an autobiography is the decision to rewrite one's life. The structure of the work is the ordering of experience, where the self becomes a dramatic character pulled between the truth of the event and the fiction of the memory. Yeats, in the "Preface" to his Autobiographies (1927), describes this condition when he states that "I have changed nothing to my knowledge; and yet it must be that I have changed many things without my knowledge." In his autobiography The Words (1964) Jean Paul Sartre declares that "I keep creating myself; I am the giver and the gift."3 Additionally, every autobiography has two principal characters: the past and the present self. Each has a different voice, a different attitude, a different perspective on experience.4 They may reconcile each other through the artifice of narrative design, they may eliminate each other through various revisions in favour of an impersonal voice, or they may stand at odds with each other throughout the entire work. The 1805 and 1850 versions of The Prelude might represent the first situation, the early and late drafts of Mill's Autobiography English Studies in Canada, ii, 1, Spring 1976 84 English Studies in Canada the second, and the first four heavily documented chapters of Newman's Apologia the third. Rousseau recognizes the problem of choosing a proper voice when he confesses his difficulty in finding an adequate language for his autobiography: For what I have to say I need to invent a language which is as new as my project: for what tone, what style can Iassume to unravel the immense chaos of sentiments so diverse, so contradictory, often so vile and sometimes so sublime which have agitated me without respite?5 Recent studies of style in autobiography establish a linguistic duality created out of the mixture of third-person narrative and first-person monologue. For example, Jean Starobinski, the Swiss critic, calls autobiography "a mixed entity" of "discourse," which is a first-person statement presupposing a speaker and auditor, and "history," a narrative of past events. Most impor­ tantly, Starobinski stresses that the autobiographical form "can cloak the freest fictive invention."6 Paradoxically, however, what is essential for a successful autobiography is its sense of reality, its ability to convince through its presenta­ tion of events. "A rt," writes Henry James, "is essentially selection, but it is a selection whose main care is to be typical, to be inclusive."7 Autobiography becomes significant when it transforms private experience into accessible form and public meaning. Studies of autobiography in the Victorian period are scarce. The few early discussions concentrate on the moral influence of such works, as John Foster emphasizes in his 1805 article "On...