Oxford and Cambridge

Abstract

Marshall returned to Bristol in 1882. It was, coincidentally, the very year in which Jevons was drowned while only in his forty-seventh summer. His premature death means that there is loss as well as hope to be detected in Foxwell’s declaration to Walras in the last week of that year, that ‘the ablest of our living Economists is Professor Alfred Marshall, University College, Bristol’.1 Foxwell in 1884 once again expressed his admiration for ‘Mr. Alfred Marshall, beyond doubt the most competent of living writers to judge of the value of Mr. Jevons’ work on all its sides’;2 while in 1887, speaking of the rising standard of economic instruction in England in the sixteen years that had elapsed since the Theory of Political Economy, he said that ‘among living writers there is no one who has done so much to bring about this advance as Professor Alfred Marshall’.3 There is loss as well as hope to be detected in Foxwell’s repeated use of the word ‘living’. Things might have been different had Jevons lived. As it was, however, the loss of Jevons inevitably consolidated the hope that was associated with Marshall. Foxwell saw clearly what Marshall was worth. So did Jowett.