CHAPTER ONE

Beginnings

IN NOVEMBER 1876, the parents of Arthur Cecil Pigou emerged from the Holy Trinity Church in Ryde, on the Isle of Wight, to the strains of Mendelssohn’s Wedding March. Accompanied by a forty-five member wedding party, the couple advanced “over a flower bestrewn pathway” lined by a crowd of more than 3,000.1 The bride, Pigou’s mother Nora Lees, was of the minor Anglo-Irish nobility, the second daughter of Sir John Lees, third baronet of Blackrock, who had moved to the Isle of Wight in the mid-1860s.² Pigou’s father, Clarence, was a recently decommissioned lieutenant of the Fifteenth Regiment of Foot.³ Their marriage was as lavish as any ever held in Ryde; the presents, of which there were about 200, were “costly and almost of endless variety, forming a glittering show . . . [of] unique articles, rare specimens, curiosities, and things useful as well as valuable.”⁴ Among them were diamonds and rubies, pearls, and “Indian embossed” jewelry. These were gifts from families accustomed to comfort and intimately connected to empire. Nora Lees’s maternal uncle, from whom the embossed jewelry came, was a well-known Orientalist, and the international connections of the Pigou family were even stronger.⁵ Huguenots who had immigrated to England in the late seventeenth century, the early Pigous had made their wealth as traders and officials in China, India, and North America as well as in the manufacture of gunpowder.⁶

Pigou’s father, Clarence, was born in Bombay in 1850 to a civil servant, but he grew up in England, outside London. Clarence Pigou was comfortably rooted in the upper-middle tiers of the Victorian establishment. Though his eldest uncle was disinherited for marrying without permission and became a stationmaster for the London and Birmingham Railroad, another of his uncles was a solidly respectable Anglican priest.7 His brother-in-law, Sir Henry Oldham, became a Knight Commander of the Royal Victorian Order for military service in China and India.⁸ His first cousins, with whom he grew up while his parents were in India, managed the successful family gunpowder business located outside Dartford.⁹ After finishing at Harrow, the distinguished boarding school, Clarence secured a commission in the army, but with a substantial legacy from his father, he left the service in 1876 and moved to the Isle of Wight. His wedding gifts to Nora Lees—among them “a diamond ring,” a “white gold bracelet,” and a “black laced parasol with [a] carved ivory handle”—reflected a life of ease.¹⁰

It was into this life that Arthur Cecil Pigou was born in 1877, about a year after his parents were married. Cecil, as A. C. Pigou was likely called in his youth, spent the first year of his life at Beachlands, the home of his maternal grandfather.¹¹ The eighteen-bedroom house sat on the seaside Esplanade in Ryde, the vistas from its large windows sweeping over the Solent toward Portsmouth.¹² It was a prestigious address, five miles from Queen Victoria’s residence at Osborne House. It was, however, his grandfather’s house, and his parents acted quickly to find a roof of their own. A year after Pigou’s birth, the young family moved to the village of Pembury in Kent, where it grew to include a second son, Gerald, in 1878 and a daughter, Kathleen. In 1881, the year of Kathleen’s birth, the Pigous lived in a large house called Stone Court with Nora’s sister and a domestic staff of six.¹³ By the time Pigou left for boarding school, the family had moved into The Larches, a different house in Pembury, and had taken on a seventh servant.¹⁴

FIGURE 1. The Larches, now Sunhill Court, Pembury, Kent. Courtesy of Tony Nicholls.

Pembury was a small village just outside Tunbridge Wells, a prosperous resort town in southeast England that had grown in both population and wealth after visits from Victoria and Albert. Pembury itself was still largely rural: a small collection of houses surrounding a green, with orchards and fields stretching out behind. But as Tunbridge Wells gained popularity in the mid-nineteenth century, Pembury had begun to attract well-to-do Victorians, who erected houses along the road into town.15 The Larches was one of these, substantial and stuccoed, its entrance portico sheltered by a stand of trees and its back windows surveying an expanse of meadow. This was Pigou’s childhood home, the place where, according to a playful college profile, he gained “the record for the number of questions asked of a much-enduring parent per week.”¹⁶

School drained some of the precociousness out of Pigou and when—like his father, uncles, and cousins before him—he arrived at Harrow, ten miles northwest of central London, at the age of thirteen, he had become a self-described “shy and timid boy.”¹⁷ One of the most prestigious of the English public schools, Harrow was steeped in tradition, with pupils often donning a morning coat as part of their dress. Yet it was also a place that was rapidly and self-consciously modernizing. Its setting, Harrow-on-the-Hill, was a village in the throes of maturation into a suburb. The Metropolitan Line of the London Underground arrived in 1880 and with it, a type of worldly middle-class Londoner who fit uncomfortably into the old town-gown dichotomy between Harrovian and villager.18

Other changes came from central London as well. The passage of the 1868 Public Schools Act obliged Harrow and six other public schools to change their administration and update their teaching in an effort to “make further Provision for the[ir] good Government and Extension.”¹⁹ Arising from a perceived need to curb abuses and to update outdated curricula, the act pushed Harrow and peer institutions to broaden their offerings beyond classical material taught mostly by members of the clergy to include modern history, modern languages, and natural sciences. Response to legislative reform had taken a stately pace, lasting well into the 1890s. Before Pigou himself became head boy in his final year, all of Harrow’s head boys had received an education based on a classical, rather than modern, curriculum.

Nevertheless, Pigou would have experienced Harrow’s modernization in the very wiring of his schooltime home. The Harrow house in which he lived, Newlands, was just three years old on his arrival. At its opening in 1889, the school newspaper, The Harrovian, had noted “two striking features in connection with it. The colours of the football shirts is a bright canary yellow, and the house is illuminated throughout with electric light.”²⁰ The people of Harrow were also changing. Though the boys and their families had been solidly Conservative for more than three decades, throughout the Gladstone governments, the masters and governors had been predominantly Whigs and Liberals.²¹ By the time Pigou arrived, however, the educators had themselves shifted to the right. Political unity between the boys and their teachers ushered in an age of self-satisfaction and breezy, often ignorant, indifference. The future historian G. M. Trevelyan, Pigou’s contemporary at Harrow, fumed in 1892 at the age of 16 that “in a school of 600 boys I have found just two people capable of talking sensibly about politics . . . I might just as well talk Greek politics to the rest.”²² Harrow was, in the words of its historian, “a nursery of upper class Englishness.”²³

Harrow’s fees were among the highest of any public school, between £150 and £200 per year, but for families seeking a social marker recognized by the English establishment, this was a small price to pay.²⁴ A high proportion—upward of 30 percent—of Pigou’s classmates came from outside England or Wales, with many hailing from the four corners of the Empire. Yet the diversity at Harrow belied the powerful conformist forces at work at the school. It was, after all, a training ground for the ideal type of gentleman, a place with a very clear and quite traditional vision of what it sought to instill in its students.

Pigou grew up not with his family but at Harrow. He became involved in sports, taking up cricket and fives, a sport much like handball. He was by no means a natural athlete, but as his friend J. W. Jenkins was to later recall, “in a modest way, he was quite a useful cricketer.”25 Off the practice fields, Harrow, blanketed and insulated, offered a deeply sheltered environment, but it served as the backdrop against which serious life lessons played out, as any place might. Two of Pigou’s housemates died during his time at the school, and the boys were largely left to their own devices in sorting out the “minor politics” of living and working together.²⁶ And there was plenty of work. “There is no spot in the three kingdoms,” a doleful contributor to the Harrovian complained in 1893, “where a ‘long lie’ a lie of indefinite length, unbroken even by a nine o’clock bell, is so appreciably luxurious as at Harrow. Freedom tastes sweetest in sight of the prison gates.”²⁷

But for Pigou, school was likely not a jail, especially given the respect he held for his house master, Frank Marshall. “What was the first impression he made?” Pigou mused shortly after Marshall died. “Friendliness, I think, and openness and sympathy—anything but the clouded terrors of authority.”²⁸ Marshall had studied mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge, and was at once a mature educator, having moved to Harrow in 1871, and a steadfast Liberal modernizer.²⁹ As such, he was also, in the words of Head Master Henry Montagu Butler, a “faithful servant not only to the school, but to every good cause in Harrow.”³⁰

But just as the paucity of archival material makes it hard to parse Pigou’s feelings about his early childhood, it is similarly difficult to guess how he might have reflected on his time at school. Harrow was, after all, an immensely difficult social environment, propagating a rigorous hierarchy characterized by snobbishness and entitlement, and laced with sex, bullying, violence, and conformism.³¹ And, indeed, Pigou would wryly remark about the “Bacchic orgies” to which he had given a miss.32 Jenkins, writing in 1964, remembered Pigou as being “perhaps a bit too unconventional and eccentric to be widely popular, but his few intimates including myself were really fond of him.”³³ It was these friends with whom he would return to Kent during holidays and organize cricket matches, pitting Harrovians against “the villagers” from Pembury. Jenkins, who traveled home to The Larches with Pigou several times, recalled a clouded atmosphere despite the bright athleticism. Pigou “lived with a bluff old (or who then seemed to me to be old!) father, with whom I think he had little in common.”³⁴

Back at Harrow, Pigou excelled in academic pursuits. He won three separate entrance scholarships, partly as a result of his early study of mathematics in preparatory school, and went on to take home nearly every major academic prize the school offered.³⁵ This was no mean feat. Harrow maintained a rigorous academic program; Trevelyan, three years his senior, claimed that he himself “was better taught in history than any other schoolboy then in England,” and Pigou was subjected to the same rigorous instruction.³⁶ Pigou gained authority as well, becoming a monitor in early 1894, but sports soon took on secondary importance.³⁷ He badly lost the one boxing tournament he entered and though in time he came to be the captain of Newlands House cricket team, by his fourth year, he was devoting much more of his energy and time to the school’s debating club.³⁸

The Harrow Debating Society was plagued with the sort of problems that frequently dog school clubs. Members and outside commentators lamented the absence of a consistent schedule, the dearth of active participants, and the sometimes lackluster performance of interlocutors.³⁹ Still, it was an outlet for the young Pigou to express his nascent beliefs and an institution he would come to dominate. Pigou was barely fifteen, but he already had a well-articulated set of convictions. His early debates demonstrate a keen faith in progress; a student himself of “the moderns,” he “denounced Greek as well as Latin,” arguing unsuccessfully that “Latin does not repay one for the time bestowed upon it.”⁴⁰ He also evinced a developed political outlook, an awareness reflective of Harrow’s cultural landscape.⁴¹ Boys were expected to keep up to date on current events, and though some of the many guest lecturers spoke of sport and alpine expeditions, others advised Harrovians on geopolitical topics—the importance of Gibraltar as a military base, or the state of the Royal Navy.42 For Pigou, the latter of these lessons would have had special resonance; his younger brother Gerard had joined the navy in 1893 and two years later would be posted as a midshipman to the HMS Ramillies, a battleship stationed in the Mediterranean.⁴³

Over the course of 1894 and 1895, Pigou took strident stands on a host of politically sensitive issues. In a debate on “admitting” women to “all Social and Political Rights,” he “devoted himself to utterly demolishing the idea.”⁴⁴ Pigou was, later in life, accused of misogyny—even his schoolmate Jenkins noted that he “never seemed particularly at ease” with women—and it is easy to view this early debate as consonant with lifelong prejudices of a decidedly misogynistic tint.⁴⁵ Prejudice is especially clear in this case, as the young Pigou clearly prized the ideal of political freedom, at least when it came to men. In a later debate over whether “King Charles I did not richly deserve his fate,” he argued that the monarch had indeed deserved to be executed, “dwell[ing] principally . . . on the general charge of ‘treason against the people.’”⁴⁶ This position put him in a distinct minority, a fact reflective of his dissonance with the overwhelming Tory traditionalism of his peers.⁴⁷

Though he may not have been “widely popular,” Pigou was no doubt skillful in navigating Harrow’s traditions and hierarchies.⁴⁸ In his final year, he became the head of the school, and as such, he was given ex officio roles on the boards of many of its organizations.⁴⁹ Thus he was an officer of the Musical Society despite being tone deaf; of the Racquet Committee, despite his penchant for cricket; and of the Harrow Mission, a charitable enterprise set up to help the disadvantaged.⁵⁰ This last appointment is notable because, in spite of his later writing on charity and social work, this ex officio position was arguably the closest Pigou would ever come to the London slums.⁵¹ Still, though the number of his responsibilities had grown, it was to the Debating Society, of which he was now president and to which he delivered some of the “best speech[es] heard in . . . some time,” that Pigou invested most of his attention and care.⁵² “Owing to the energy of the Head of the School,” The Harrovian noted, “the Debating Society is fortunately more flourishing at the present time than it has been for many years past.”⁵³

Although Pigou found a home at Harrow, he was not a creature of the place. Harrow was overwhelmingly clubby, and Pigou was too much a student for his heart to beat in tune with the rhythm of the school. The Debating Society, for instance, was, for him far more about debating than it was about society. “If members continue to take a purely silent and coffee-drinking interest in the society,” he opined in his final year, “it can never be really successful.”54 In his last debate, he reaffirmed his resistance to popular pressure and demonstrated an increasingly mature liberalism of his own. Arguing against his friend Jenkins over the motion that “this house sympathises with Dr. Jameson,” a hero of the colonial South Africans, Pigou “vainly protested against the new jingo patriotism . . . of the London Music Halls.”⁵⁵ Whereas Jenkins “made an eloquent appeal to the chivalrous sentiments of the Society,” the young Pigou coolly distanced himself from recourse to mass sympathies.⁵⁶

By the time he graduated, Pigou had grown from a timid country boy into the head of one of the most prestigious schools in England, a teenager with a hat and cane. In his own way, he flourished at Harrow, and his affection for his home of the past six years was on display in a short article he wrote during his last year. Reflecting on the chapel services for a school holiday, he took careful note of the bond between Harrow and its past sons, pausing to pay respect to “the fair sprinkling of those [Old Harrovians] to whom the memory of their schooldays must be growing dim, but whose love for Harrow is still undiminished.”⁵⁷ Harrow’s easy grandeur, tempered somewhat by the reformist influence of Frank Marshall, had nurtured a sweeping and comfortable liberalism in Pigou, and he finished his time at the school by delivering “a fine rendering” of one of William Gladstone’s addresses at the annual “Speech Day.”⁵⁸ Thus, armed with a tidy collection of prizes, Pigou stepped forth an Old Harrovian with the words of Gladstone, the Liberal hero, ringing in his ears.⁵⁹

Cambridge at the Turn of the Century

In 1896, Pigou’s liberalism followed him to King’s College, Cambridge, where it found a much more congenial home than it had at Harrow. Reform and progress were the words on everyone’s lips in Cambridge in the 1890s.60 Of course everyone, or at least a great majority of everyone, had been to a public school like Harrow.⁶¹ Though a good number of its students did not come from means, Cambridge, like Harrow, was overwhelmingly a preserve of the upper and upper-middle classes.⁶² As a preserve, it had its own idiosyncratic system of inequalities. Age, college, program of study, and athletic success all mattered, but unlike at Harrow, there was a pluralism of overlapping hierarchies, so that an individual was evaluated not according to one master scale but to any number of them. A Cambridge contemporary of Pigou, Maurice Amos, wrote that “we were free from the social tyranny of any one set of people or of any one kind of taste.”⁶³ This was largely a function of a much larger student body: just under 1,000 young men matriculated at Cambridge each year in the 1890s, whereas the total student population at Harrow peaked at about 600.⁶⁴

FIGURE 2. King’s College from King’s Parade, Cambridge, ca. 1890.
Courtesy of the Cambridgeshire Collection, Cambridge Central Library.

Even more than Harrow, Cambridge was feeling the effects of modernization. Between 1870 and 1900, Triposes—the examinations that conferred honors degrees—were established in seven new subjects.65 Laboratory after laboratory was being built in the city center, and by 1900, with the program in Natural Sciences attracting the most students, the longstanding dominance of the humanities at the university was very much in question.⁶⁶ Moreover, there was a general openness to the ever-rising wind of liberalization. From the 1870s onward, major clashes occurred over the extent to which Cambridge would remain tied to the Anglican Church; over the admission of dissidents, Catholics, and women; and over the provision of education for future teachers and those without means.⁶⁷

It is no wonder that Pigou fitted in at Cambridge better than he had at Harrow. The new setting was, of course, in line with Pigou’s own inclinations. And, as Amos suggested, the diversity of groups at Cambridge meant that Pigou was able to move in and out of the many sets at the university. Yet, Pigou also benefited from his conventionally prestigious education and his membership in a wealthy and well-established college. At the time he arrived, the University of Cambridge consisted of twenty-two colleges, independently endowed academic institutions run by a self-selecting fellowship of scholars who provided the bulk of undergraduates’ education through individual tutorials, or supervisions. Thus, his college would have provided Pigou with a readymade community. More academic than most, King’s was the first and, until 1889, the only Cambridge college to mandate enrollment in a Tripos exam of all its admitted students.⁶⁸ It was also a college that excelled in the study of history. A total of seventy students who sat for (took) the History Tripos between 1875 and 1895 received first-class honors, or Firsts. Of those, twenty were Kingsmen.⁶⁹

History would be the primary focus of the eighteen-year-old Pigou who entered King’s, and his studies led to his own First in the subject three years later in 1899. But during Pigou’s undergraduate years, the parameters that defined “history” as a discipline were a matter of much contention. As a serious field of academic study with a rigorous independent methodology, it was only in the process of coming into its own in Britain. Very few of the men who taught the subject at Cambridge were professionally trained as historians and in the all-important Tripos examinations, students were mostly required to tackle dull feats of memorization and recapitulation.⁷⁰ But a new outlook was emerging, as a growing number of thinkers recognized the need to shape the discipline into a more modern pursuit. At Cambridge, this was to be done by making changes to the content of the Tripos. The test made for a convenient locus of reform. Though the bulk of teaching was conducted in specific colleges, the administration of the Tripos was the responsibility not of the colleges but of independent university-wide boards, so that the tests had broad influence across all twenty-two colleges of the university. Moreover, the tests demanded such rigorous preparation that they effectively determined the reading lists for every serious history student at Cambridge.

Yet it was by no means clear what Tripos reform might look like. As it happened, the reformers were divided into two camps. On one side were those who sought to make history a discipline for its own sake, while on the other were those who sought to make it serve a useful end, to turn it into a course of study that would train future civil servants. By the late 1890s, an uncomfortable synthesis of the pure and instrumental had emerged in the form of a highly fractured program of study, with outlets available for devotees of either approach. A special subject was created in the use of original sources, for instance, and the historian and economist William Cunningham slowly transformed the teaching of political economy into that of economic history.71

Pigou himself became attached to the circle of Oscar Browning, one of the chief historical reformers favoring the study of history as an end in itself. A fellow of King’s and steadfast Victorian Liberal, Browning was, as the young physicist Ernest Rutherford noted, “very agreeable” and “in appearance . . . a good deal like the typical John Bull one so often sees in Punch.”⁷² “The O.B.” was a fixture of King’s—a social animal who professed “to know all the people worth knowing in Europe.”⁷³ His parties were legendary functions at which select undergraduates could mingle not only with more senior academics but also with the lights of British and Continental high society. Browning was a larger-than-life bon vivant, a reveler who had left a Master’s lodge at Eton for Cambridge after a suspect relationship with the young George Nathaniel Curzon, a student who later became Viceroy of India.⁷⁴ Yet for all his flamboyance, The O.B. was a serious historian, someone who advocated a regimented professional discipline in the face of a distinctly amateur tradition.75 A passionate advocate for the creation of teachers’ colleges at Cambridge, from 1891 to 1909, Browning was the principal of the Cambridge Day Training College, which catered to students who would otherwise be unable to afford education and to young educators eager to learn teaching methods. In many ways, this was an ideal outlet for Browning, who, however debauched, was a devoted teacher whose penchant for deeply sentimental relationships revealed heartfelt connections with those he taught.⁷⁶

It is telling that, whereas Pigou was immediately drawn to Frank Marshall, a reserved, sensitive mathematician on arriving at Harrow, he gravitated toward the polar opposite in Oscar Browning at Cambridge. Pigou was now a self-possessed young man, one who immediately joined the Union Society, Cambridge’s debating club, and spoke in the first debate of his first term.⁷⁷ As his correspondence with Browning reveals, the young scholar’s early interests included poetry and literature as well as history. His letters were peppered with inquiries about books and travel, and with requests. He wondered whether Browning might find a way to publish a story written by his “great friend” Jenkins and was keen to see his own name in print.⁷⁸ Home on holiday, the undergraduate Pigou wrote: “You remember you told me I might send you any literary productions for criticism. Do you think it would be worth while for me to send the enclosed [sample] to any magazines & if so could you suggest which?”⁷⁹ After all, Pigou belonged to Browning’s network, from which certain benefits were inevitably gleaned. Browning had been instrumental, for instance, in advising and advocating for Pigou in his successful bid for a scholarship to King’s.⁸⁰ In the case of the magazine submission, however, Browning lightly demurred, suggesting that the timing for such a publication was premature.

Pigou’s letters to Browning displayed by turns a youthful insouciance and an inexperienced brightness.⁸¹ He reported taking “a fortnight’s bicycle tour in Brittany.” It was his first time abroad, and he “had a splendid time despite difficulties of language.” He also mused about his relations. “I suppose you remain at Florence; if not, if you go Monte Carlo way by any chance you’ll find a respected aunt of mine losing money for all she’s worth; you might give her a little fatherly advice, and my . . . condolences.”⁸² But between the playful lines of reflections, thanks, and requests, were also sprinkled references to academic work.

Pigou’s education was broad and deep, and he soon gravitated away from the rote memorization of history texts and toward political and social theory as well as toward English literature. He wrote Browning that he “meant to be virtuous this vac[ation]; [and] brought home books about that wretched early constitutional history, but haven’t opened them.” Instead, he read “Lecky’s Democracy & Liberty & Sidgwick’s Methods of Ethics, & a good many of Shakespeare’s plays.”83 Pigou read and studied widely, picking up what he would later refer to as his “philosophical training.”⁸⁴ He filled his college notebooks with quotations from the French poet Lamartine and sweeping observations about the corruption of American officials. “Institutions,” he opined, “can never attain maturity. . . . if their roots are perpetually tampered with.”⁸⁵ Pigou encountered Darwin in a history class and took uncharacteristically immaculate notes on the first six chapters of On the Origin of Species (1859). “Man selects for his own advantage,” he remarked, “nature for that of the being.”⁸⁶

Pigou soaked up evolutionary themes and would soon start writing on eugenics, but the influence Darwin had on the young historian was slight compared to that of renowned Cambridge utilitarian ethicist Henry Sidgwick, whose lectures he attended.⁸⁷ In his masterwork, The Methods of Ethics (1874), Sidgwick sought to advance ethical theory by forging a synthesis of two ethical movements: utilitarianism, which held that what was ultimately good was the “greatest happiness of the greatest number,” and intuitionism, the theory that the final arbiter of morality was the intuitional “moral reasoning of ordinary men.”⁸⁸ Intuitionally, Sidgwick argued, the maximization of utility—essentially happiness or pleasure—was society’s ultimate end. But furthermore, common sense morality could serve as a rough proxy for utilitarian ethics in day-to-day situations.⁸⁹ Sidgwick’s utilitarian message of striving to improve societal wellbeing resonated with Pigou’s solidly Victorian upbringing. And by validating intuition—especially the intuition of educated moral thinkers—Sidgwick’s philosophy worked to encourage the young Pigou’s ability to reason and expound with confidence.

Then again, considering Pigou’s active debating schedule, his self-confidence was never really in question. As it had at Harrow, debating at Cambridge—this time at the Cambridge Union Society—occupied a central place in Pigou’s social life. In the subtle hierarchies of Cambridge life, the Union carried a special kind of prestige. “Almost everyone who comes to Cambridge hopes for some distinction beyond that afforded by academic success,” The Granta, the university weekly, observed.

The most obvious and popular ambition is for athletic fame. [However,] prominence in the Union does, or is supposed to, mean certain intellectual powers, and those who deliver themselves of speeches in that historical society are held, by some persons at the least, to be deeply versed in politics, literature and art, and all other subjects concerning which men disagree.90

Debate was Pigou’s natural outlet and one in which he would gain considerable acclaim.

Before Cambridge, he had found himself somewhat more liberal than his peers. He had been, for instance, swimming distinctly out of the common current at Harrow when he denounced the jingoism of music halls. At the Union, Pigou found himself more squarely in the center of a more reform-minded group of young Englishmen from good families. After spending several days poring over the topics on which Pigou spoke, Austin Robinson came to the conclusion that his friend had been a “pro-establishment” “extrovert.”⁹¹ It is not hard to see how Robinson reached this conclusion.

In terms of extroversion, Pigou certainly was a comfortable speaker. In his first appearance, his words were variously characterized by “clearness, fluency, and earnestness” and a “dignified airiness.” Throughout his time at the Union, he was usually “free from notes and his language was vigorous and terse,” and more times than not, he benefited from the “sympathy of the House.”⁹² By the end of his time at the Union, he had become its president, and the writers of The Granta could not “remember any one else who so suddenly became a first rate-speaker.”⁹³ All the while, Pigou maintained an active social life, replete with trips to France, Scotland, and the Lake District as well as fast friendships with other luminaries of the Union, particularly another president, a Scottish theology student named J.R.P. Sclater. Pigou was in many ways the picture of the young Edwardian, one who decried “the revival of Puritan influence in secular affairs” and who emphasized the “fall of all that was good” that arose from overly restrictive social mores.94 Yet claims about Pigou’s extroversion should be tempered. He existed, after all, in “the air of ineffable creeper-clad calm which is the most distinguished characteristic of the Union.”⁹⁵ His was a society of Cambridge men and, indeed, The Granta wryly observed that he could “remain silent in the presence of the opposite sex beyond the belief of man.”⁹⁶ But without a doubt, Pigou was far more popular than he had been at Harrow. His profile in The Granta positively glowed: “What Mr. Pigou’s future is to be is at present vague; but it is sure to be one well worth having. For reasons which his friends know, he will never fail to gather the ‘best things.’ Uprightness and honour are before him.”⁹⁷

It is similarly easy to follow Robinson’s reasoning that Pigou was pro-establishment. From 1896 to 1900, Pigou variously condemned anti-monarchists, a “really Democratic Government,” and students who were speaking a little too freely in university-run theaters.⁹⁸ He defended Cambridge’s cloistered college system from would-be reformers and supported French authorities throughout the Dreyfus Affair.⁹⁹ It was not just because Pigou had gained official positions in the Union—first the vice presidency in his third year and the presidency in early 1900—that The Granta cheekily referred to him as “Monsieur le Vicomte Pigou de l’Union et de Chateau du Roi” and “Graf Pigou von Königsschloss-bei-Kam.”¹⁰⁰ The noble Pigou showed an affinity with vested institutional authority and flirted with right-leaning political forces. Compared with the Liberal Party, he observed at the Union in 1901, the Conservative party was “less likely to foster extreme sentiments of reform; and as a social force, was in some ways more trustworthy.”¹⁰¹

But le Vicomte was by no means extreme in his commitments—his feelings about imperialism, for instance, were markedly less enthusiastic than were those of many of his peers. Early as an undergraduate, he argued against Britain’s further involvement in East Asia, and later, he held forth against “the expansion of the United States of America,” arguing that imperialism would breed further corruption.¹⁰² During the Second Boer War, when patriotic fervor reached a febrile pitch and the university’s volunteers were busy conducting training exercises and mock battles in the surrounding countryside, Pigou maintained a studied silence in all of the numerous debates concerning South Africa, and from his presidential seat in 1900, he even encouraged a Boer sympathizer to take the floor.103 But none of this is to suggest that Pigou was anti-empire. In 1900, for instance, he vigorously defended the British nation’s “competence” to “govern alien powers” against the charges of his friend Sclater.¹⁰⁴ Of course, there was no jarring tension between Pigou’s respect for traditional forms of authority and his loose liberalism. The Liberals were the party of the reformist elite; Pigou’s mentor Browning basked almost exclusively in such established circles.¹⁰⁵ In short, with his comfortable existence and his detached interest in social reform, it was not difficult for Pigou to act the mildly progressive Liberal.

There was really only one issue debated at the Union that stripped away Pigou’s general political moderation and incited him to rhetorical heights at the expense of traditional interests: free trade. The question of protective tariffs had dogged British political life at least since the early nineteenth century, and especially after the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846. Traditionally, landed Conservatives favored protection, while those affiliated with urban trading and manufacturing centers advocated unrestricted commerce. It was a dispute, in the first instance, between vested interests in sectors that materially benefited from opposing policies. Yet since at least the time of John Stuart Mill, the debate over free trade had acquired a subtle second dimension: an intellectual disagreement about the mechanics of how trade protection functioned in society. While many supporters of tariffs felt they were acting in the national interest, free traders were convinced that the euphemism of “protection” was just a veil: that tariffs actually harmed the national interest they purported to protect by making prices higher for every-one. Mill, drawing on themes from political economists going back to Adam Smith, had given advocates of free trade a theoretical framework with a powerful mix of erudition and simplicity, a compound that engendered strong devotion among those who took the time to understand it. Thus, though free trade was one of the most traditional Liberal causes with broad popular democratic support, it was of special importance for Mill’s direct intellectual descendants, utilitarian political economists.106 And slowly but surely, Pigou was slipping into their ranks.

Pigou’s First Economics

The story of Pigou as the Edwardian attached to the circle of the larger-than-life Oscar Browning captures only half of Pigou’s undergraduate experience. There was another, more restrained Pigou: the incipient economist. At Harrow, Pigou had already begun to read economic texts, including The Economics of Industry (1879) by the Cambridge economist Alfred Marshall and his wife Mary Paley Marshall. During his first year at Cambridge, Pigou delved further into the literature of political economy, reading, among other books, Marshall’s more famous work, The Principles of Economics (1890).¹⁰⁷ But it was Pigou’s second year—the year in which he first personally encountered Marshall, the most prominent economist in Britain—that proved to be the real turning point in his education. Only then, though still very much a self-styled historian, did Pigou begin to take an active interest in economics. Over the course of the year, Pigou attended Marshall’s lectures and, while on a break, noted in a letter to Browning that he had read works by William Ashley, the Oxford economic historian, “which I ought to have read long ago” as well as pieces by Walter Bagehot and a book, likely Sidgwick’s, on political economy.¹⁰⁸ That summer, while back at The Larches, “the fates were quite reproachful . . . and inflicted a sprained ankle” with the result of “long sojourning on a sofa and dutiful study of economics.” “I’ve done quite a bit of work,” Pigou languidly complained to Browning, “after getting up at the barbarous hour of seven to begin.”¹⁰⁹

Not coincidentally, it was also in his second year that Pigou began to hold forth on issues of political economy at the Union. During his first year, the Union held a debate on free trade—the proposer, E. W. Harrison, who was described as a “farmer,” argued that “the depressed condition of Agriculture . . . demand[ed] an immediate return to protective duties on all foreign imports.” The Granta commented that “many of the speakers did not know the most rudimentary principles of Political Economy, and at times the logic was that of the parlour of a village inn on market day.”110 Yet throughout the frustrating debate, Pigou remained silent. Indeed, during his first year—before he had come into contact with Marshall—Pigou avoided debates on all the issues that would later captivate his professional interest: the one on “Collectivist tendencies” in the British Empire, the one on trade unionism, and, of course, the one on free trade.¹¹¹

The silence was broken in Pigou’s second year. Harrison, a student at Trinity College, again proposed that “the present system of Free Trade is disastrous to the best interests of England and her colonies.” Rising to oppose the motion, Pigou narrowly prevailed on the House to overturn the proposition, complaining “plaintively of the lack of economic argument in the Proposer’s speech.” And, The Granta noted, though he “rather over-burdened himself with statistics,” he “showed a good grasp of his subject.”¹¹² Pigou wielded a well-worn economic argument against tariffs: that in seeking to protect a national economy, they would raise domestic prices across many industries and in so doing hurt both consumers and industry. But Pigou also made use of a more sensitive political argument for free trade, one related to distribution. “Only the landlord will reap the benefits of Protection,” he held. “It is better to have a prosperous populace in the towns than starvation and want in the rural districts.”¹¹³

Although Pigou demonstrated a growing engagement with economic issues, until the end of his third year, he was still primarily a student of the humanities. As such, he acquitted himself brilliantly. Alfred Marshall wrote sarcastically that Pigou had “no memory” and “was bothered by the want of . . . [memory questions] on the History Tripos” in which he took a First at the end of his third year in June 1899.¹¹⁴ The same year, Pigou was recognized for “composition in English verse,” an ode to Alfred the Great, who led his “people far from the black slough / Of soulless greed, into more generous paths / Onwards and upwards following Truth’s bright star.”¹¹⁵

In fact, Pigou learned the better part of his economics after taking his degree.¹¹⁶ In an effort to bring his economics up to speed, he subjected himself to a fortnight of summertime isolation in a remote Breton town, “an outlandish spot . . . a place of solitude to which I have come to work.”¹¹⁷ Over the following months, Pigou prepared for Part II of the Moral Science Tripos, the test that covered political economy, reading further works by such thinkers as Walter Bagehot, William Stanley Jevons, John Neville Keynes, and Marshall himself.118 As the historian transformed into the economist, Pigou’s character was riven with contrasts. “He revels in argument,” The Granta noted, “and is a poet; he is an orator, and does not seek notoriety; he is an economist, and possesses a kindly heart; he has been a historian and remains truthful.”¹¹⁹

It was during this period that Pigou grew close to Marshall. Unlike Browning, Marshall was not a social animal. Though he cared deeply for those attached to him, from an early age, Marshall “did not readily make friends,” and throughout his life, he had trouble sustaining lasting friendships.¹²⁰ He was a more serious person than was Browning. He was also, certainly, a much more serious scholar. As John Maynard Keynes wrote, “Marshall belonged to the tribe of sages and pastors; yet . . . endowed with a double nature, he was a scientist too.”¹²¹ There was nothing slapdash or ad hoc about his work. His was a world of systems and models, of rigorously articulated, extensively footnoted assertions. Thus, Pigou’s burgeoning relationship with him represented for the young scholar a transition to science and scientific modes of thought. It suggested growth: not only growth in his own work, but also growth away from the heady company of Browning. In April 1900, in Pigou’s fourth year at Cambridge, Pigou and Browning had a quarrel that seriously damaged their relationship. The points of contention were trivial: a speech that Pigou had given to the Political Society and procedures at the Union, of which Pigou was vice president and Browning was treasurer.¹²² Still, the dispute heralded a rupture in the friendship; their subsequent correspondence had more to do with club and society business than with personal news or sentiment.

The break represented more than just a personal parting, for as Pigou came under Marshall’s influence and out from under Browning’s, he conceived of himself less as a historian and increasingly as an economist, particularly a Marshallian economist. This distinction was important, for just as the parameters of history at Cambridge were a matter of some contention, so too were the parameters of economics.

There was, during this period, substantial overlap between the study of history and economics at the university. A good collection of classes on economic theory and history were included in the list of “Lectures Proposed by the Special Board for History and Archeology,” the body that oversaw the History Tripos and organized the subject’s university-wide lectures.123 And several thinkers—most notably William Cunningham—were attempting to bring economics into the teaching of history in a systematic and integrated way. At first glance, this process of integration seems as if it would have provided a natural path for Pigou’s transition from historian to economist, but it was exactly this middle ground that Pigou avoided.

Cunningham was one of several economic historians at Cambridge to subscribe to a style of economic thought then dominant in Germany that has come to be known as the historist or historical school of economics.¹²⁴ Such thinkers stressed attention to historical trends as part of an effort to inductively reach specific conclusions about contemporary economic questions. Unsurprisingly, proponents of history as an end in itself, like Browning, prickled at the core motivations of the historical school. Though Browning himself was a scholar of sometimes sloppy methodology—he once wrote a piece on Florentine art from a hotel in Lucerne without access to any sources—he was firmly committed to the concept of history as a science rather than as a preparatory course, as Cunningham saw it. And if Pigou’s first Cambridge mentor distanced himself from Cunningham, his second actively sought to downplay Cunningham’s influence.

Indeed, the challenges brought by historians against historical economics paled in comparison to those brought by other economists, particularly by Pigou’s new mentor, Alfred Marshall.¹²⁵ English devotees of historical economics embraced the core premise that economic truths were not absolute, but culturally contingent. Economic developments, therefore, could only be explained in their historical setting.¹²⁶ For late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century practitioners like Arnold Toynbee at Oxford, William Ashley then at Toronto, and Cunningham and Herbert Foxwell at Cambridge, economic outcomes were determined by a complex matrix of time, place, institutional context, and the particularities of human interaction.127

Marshall’s approach grew out of a markedly different intellectual legacy. Whereas Cunningham was in dialogue with a largely German humanistic tradition, Marshall, whose own education was in mathematics, was more firmly an intellectual inheritor of similarly analytically oriented Englishmen, notably David Ricardo and William Stanley Jevons. Marshall had himself studied contemporary German philosophy and was convinced that economics was a study of humankind in evolutionary motion.¹²⁸ But Marshallian economics looked considerably different from other German-influenced systems. Most importantly, it offered not a historical, contextual explanation, but a “science”; the results it yielded were meant to align observable reality with an abstract and universal Truth.¹²⁹ In the preface to the first edition of Principles of Economics, Marshall wrote: “As, in spite of the great differences in form between birds and quadrupeds, there is one Fundamental Idea running through all their frames, so the general theory of equilibrium of demand and supply is a Fundamental Idea running through the frames of all various parts of the central problem of Distribution and Exchange.”¹³⁰ Marshall, in essence, set out to do for economics what Darwin had done for biology. And though he was respectful of history, in his economics, Marshall operated with an entirely different premise than did Cunningham.¹³¹

And, in shaping the future of economics as practiced in Britain, Marshall was meeting with substantially greater success.¹³² Even as early as 1887, Marshall’s colleague Herbert Foxwell had noted that “half the economic chairs in the United Kingdom are occupied by . . . [Marshall’s] pupils, and the share taken by them in general economic instruction in England is even larger than this.”¹³³ By the time Pigou reached Cambridge, Marshall had assumed the role of the codifier of British economic theory. That theory was based on marginal analysis, the evaluation of changes and rates of change.¹³⁴

Marshall’s influence was tied, in some measure, to the success of his seminal textbook, Principles of Economics, in which he had delineated his cohesive system of thought. Over ten years in the making, the book had been an immediate success when it was first published in 1890 and was already in its fourth (of eight) edition by 1898.135 The Principles and the codifying spirit it embodied would be remarkably influential. Speaking to an assembly of economists many years later, Pigou asserted that until World War I, “Economic thought in this country was dominated to a quite extraordinary degree by one man—Marshall. He was our leader, practically unchallenged. . . . For the general body of economists in England, he was ‘the master.’”¹³⁶

Marshall’s economics, though more scientifically detached and less directly concerned with reformist social goals than contemporary British schools of thought (such as the idealist-influenced Oxford School), was motivated by the same Victorian codes of ethics, according to which the privileged were expected to aid the needy.¹³⁷ Across Europe and America, economics and other social sciences arose as liberal responses to burgeoning social problems during an age of increasing democratization and industrialization.¹³⁸ It should come as no surprise, then, that Marshall was keenly interested in issues of social justice.¹³⁹ He visited London’s slums and, as he aged, became increasingly involved in programs, economic and otherwise, to help the indigent.¹⁴⁰ His economic theory grew out of a worldview that he described as having a “tendency to socialism” in its determination that much of income inequality was remediable.¹⁴¹

Running throughout Marshall’s economics was an established goal of maximizing societal welfare, specifically by growing the national dividend, that is, the yearly sum of a nation’s income (essentially what is now known as the gross domestic product).¹⁴² Thinking in terms of national economic productivity, Marshall thought that the way to maximize the national dividend involved the equalization of marginal products, meaning that a given unit of capital, labor, or any other input would be equally productive in any industry across the economy. But Marshall also was convinced that marginal analysis recommended a more egalitarian distribution of income. In its most basic sense, Marshall’s worldview suggested that the poor, because they were needier, would be able to make more use of their money than would the rich. Thus, from the perspective of maximizing social wellbeing, a more equal distribution of income and wealth made intuitive sense. “Any diminution of . . . [inequalities of wealth] which can be attained by means that would not sap the springs of free initiative,” Marshall wrote in his Principles, “would seem to be a clear social gain.”143

It was not so surprising, then, that Pigou might easily move between the reformist world of letters and the emergent field of Marshallian economics, a discipline that understood itself to be an ethical science. And indeed, as Pigou gravitated toward Marshall, his involvement with economics continued to grow alongside—not to the exclusion of—his literary and philosophical interests. After taking a starred First (the star denoting exceptional performance) in Part II of the Moral Science Tripos in 1900, Pigou remained at Cambridge to prepare materials with an eye toward securing a fellowship at King’s.¹⁴⁴ These were well before the days when a graduate degree was a prerequisite to become a British academic, and a good number of the fellows at Cambridge colleges were in their early twenties, having only recently finished their undergraduate studies. Still, election to fellowship was a highly competitive process. King’s typically took on one or two new fellows a year, and despite his top marks on his examinations, Pigou would face stiff competition. In a decision that neatly reflected his bipartite education, Pigou set himself to revising two potential essays to support his candidacy. One was a work in the Marshallian vein, an analysis of British agricultural prices over the preceding five decades. The other was a philosophical essay on the poet, “Robert Browning as a Religious Teacher,” that he had composed under Oscar Browning’s tutelage just after his first Tripos examination.¹⁴⁵ Pigou would receive awards for both works the following year.¹⁴⁶

Meanwhile, in the fall of 1900, he started giving lectures on economics to “the Extension people at Cambridge,” adult students continuing their education.¹⁴⁷ Marshall was also considering offering Pigou a job as a lecturer, not on behalf of a college or the Moral Science Tripos board, but for Marshall himself as part of his effort to cement the dominance of his brand of economics at Cambridge. “I am now inclined,” he had written to J. N. Keynes earlier that year, “to think that the ideal man [to lecture] is at hand—Pigou.”¹⁴⁸ In a letter to Browning, Marshall asserted that it would be best if Pigou “should lecture for me next year. If after that the College [King’s] likes to make him a College lecturer, I should be of course only too well pleased. They will then be able to judge better how far my high expectations with respect to him are justified.”149

But Pigou himself was still divided between economics and more philosophical and literary pursuits. That year, he began to contribute short review essays to The Economic Journal, which was edited by Marshall’s friend and Oxford professor F. Y. Edgeworth, but the works he covered revealed a decidedly mixed reading list. The first book he tackled was on economic crises, but just four months later, he reviewed one on the dispatches of a British ambassador to the court of Tsarina Catherine II.¹⁵⁰

In 1901, he submitted his essay on Browning in an unsuccessful attempt to join the Fellowship at King’s. Writing to Oscar Browning, with whom relations were still chilly, Pigou defended the topic as falling under Moral Sciences, since “the main part of [Browning’s] religious teaching is simply a mixture of [British idealist T. H.] Green’s Ethics and skeptical metaphysics.” Still, in what may have been an attempt to save face, he claimed that he only submitted the Browning essay because he was writing on it anyway “for another purpose”: “I never thought I’d have any real chance for a fellowship this year in any case, but intended to have a serious try next with a Dissertation on ‘The Causes and Effects of Changes in the Relative prices of Agricultural Produce in the U.K. during the last 50 years.’”¹⁵¹ But it was too late to convince Browning. In fact, at a meeting of the fellowship committee, Browning had unsuccessfully attempted to block Pigou from submitting a fellowship dissertation on Robert Browning at all.¹⁵²

Immediately after Pigou’s failed bid to become a fellow, Marshall hired him to teach and the following year, Pigou applied to King’s again, this time submitting the lengthily titled analysis of agricultural production. This essay, as Pigou himself readily admitted, did not pioneer great new thought. But it aptly demonstrated his mastery of contemporary economic techniques learned, as he acknowledged, “from Professor Marshall’s Principles of Economics.”¹⁵³ Thus in 1902, with Marshall’s support, Pigou became a fellow of King’s College.¹⁵⁴

Marshall’s sponsorship and mentorship of Pigou came at a time when Marshall was building an institutional groundwork for the school of thought at whose center he stood.155 Though Marshall himself was a fellow of St. John’s College, he was principally concerned with the university-wide curriculum for the Moral Sciences Tripos, the examination that dealt with economic topics. In 1903, he successfully petitioned for the creation of an entirely new Tripos to cover his brand of abstract economic theory and not the economics of the historical school. Therefore, he took great pains to demonstrate that his star student and paid lecturer, Pigou, who started his training as a historian, was not a historical economist like Foxwell or Cunningham. In a heated letter to Browning after a meeting in which this topic arose, Marshall recounted: “You burst in with but Pigou studied economic history before economics. My answer was necessarily repressed: it was, ‘he never came under Dr. Cunningham’s influence at all:’ he tried to listen to his lectures; but . . . found them . . . [a] waste of time for men who already knew how to read for themselves.’ But I could not say that.”¹⁵⁶

When preparing a list of university-wide courses covering material for the new, independent Tripos in 1903, Marshall determined to have Pigou “give for me a set of lectures like that which he is giving this term.” Marshall drafted “course titles vaguely, so that . . . [Pigou] may be free to pick out any part that he likes.”¹⁵⁷ With the Economics Tripos established, Pigou quickly became a lecturer funded by the Girdlers’ Company and was set in charge of the introductory course “treated from the scientific as distinguished from the historical and literary point of view,” leaving Marshall free to teach advanced coursework.¹⁵⁸ The decision to relinquish a great deal of control over the program in which Marshall had invested so much time, energy, and hope spoke to the confidence he placed in his pupil.¹⁵⁹ Hopes were running high indeed. Marshall wrote privately of the potential for Cambridge’s new system to overhaul British political life. “I shall not talk about the number of Chancellors of the Exchequer and Ministers . . . whom I [would] like to see educated during my life time on the new route: I fear the ridicule of the wicked,” he wrote. “But I have not overlooked the fact that a Chancellor of the Exchequer may come from Cambridge.”¹⁶⁰

Thus, to a degree, the care and effort Marshall dedicated to Pigou’s advancement was part of his larger effort to consolidate Cambridge as a base for modern economic theory. This is not, however, to suggest that Pigou and Marshall’s relationship was merely instrumental or in any way insincere. Early in 1902, shortly after Marshall had hired Pigou to lecture, the former wrote to John Neville Keynes, another Cambridge economist, “I have had many pupils whom I have cared for: but only a few whom I have loved. Among those—of the male gender—you & Pigou have a special charm for me.”161 And for his part, Pigou would remain steadfastly loyal to Marshall and the Marshallian framework for the rest of his life. His writings on Marshall never lost the reverent admiration of a one-time pupil. As late as 1952, he wrote a short book titled Alfred Marshall and Current Economic Thought, in which he referred to Marshall as his “master”; the phrase, “it’s all in Marshall” would, in time, become one of his professional mantras.¹⁶²

Pigou was Marshall’s student at a decisive moment, one at which Marshall was casting about for young disciples to become integrally involved in his new program. The result was that Pigou was personally plucked from the study of history and mentored by the greatest economist then working in Britain. His early connection with Marshall afforded him the imprimatur of the leader of British economists and enabled him to participate in the genesis of a new orthodoxy.¹⁶³ Yet unlike colleagues just a few years younger, Pigou was not educated exclusively as an economist. Instead, he was one of the last—perhaps the last—important economic thinker in Britain to come up under the old system in which politics, history, and moral science mingled with economic theory. Pigou’s early economics, then, were almost unique in that they bore the clear marks of two systems. Though works of abstract theory, they took history, politics, and morality very seriously. And though forged in the crucible of a new science, they were clearly imbued with and inspired by ethical impulses.