Abstract
Born into a notably scholarly and comfortably affluent Victorian family who provided him all the privilege of an British public school and Oxford University education (during a pre–World War I era when only the elitist of the elite received postsecondary education in the United Kingdom), a reader might well have expected R. H. Tawney to go on to become an researcher, scholar, and educator like his father. However, one would not have expected him to become one of the United Kingdom’s first and foremost champions of adult education for the working class through such an extraordinary and unlikely life journey, as faithfully chronicled by biographer Lawrence Goldman in The Life of R. H. Tawney: History and Socialism.
Goldman writes about how R. H. Tawney cleverly combined adult education and progressive politics to advocate for British workers’ rights. The book invites Tawney’s literary executor to the table and weaves in a wealth of archived papers, many of which were previously unavailable to the public’s eye. In unearthing and availing new information about Tawney, Goldman explicitly aims to enable his audience “to read Tawney in his own, magnificent words” (p. ix). Goldman takes full advantage of these documents, skillfully presenting and narrating Tawney’s letters, lectures, speeches, and other such previously unpublished articles and books through his studies at Oxford. These artifacts allow us to chronologically follow Tawney’s introduction of adult education to the working class through the Works Education Association, then joining them side by side with the same in the World War I trenches. He later lectured on history/socialism as a professor at various British universities, guest-lectured worldwide, and finally served the British Government through an array of committees and posts, including a particularly interesting assignment at the British Embassy in Washington, D.C., during World War II. Goldman additionally makes excellent use of a number of Tawney’s seminal works with unsparing quotations from and expanding on material from The Commonplace Book (1972), the Acquisitive Society (1921), Equality (1931), and Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926).
The stated purpose of the book is “to capture again the essence of the man [Tawney] and establish a workable account of life for all to use” (p. 7). One central and recurring theme was of Tawney’s support for worker adult education and secondary school education, which he repeatedly insisted be based on academic merit rather than social/economic standing (as was the case for most of Tawney’s lifetime).
Tawney was not some malign influence over national affairs but a dedicated social reformer whose greatest public contribution was probably the enormous time and effort he devoted—literally years of his life—to improving the British educational system and the opportunities it gave young and old alike for self improvement and knowledge. (p. 297)
While highlighting Tawney’s inspiring achievements for education in the United Kingdom, the author mercifully avoids a tired overglorification and/or -simplification of the man, which biographers are prone to make, and instead strikes a reasonable balance by conceding a number of Tawney’s human shortcomings and contradictions. For example, though we are treated to how Tawney’s trail blazed the introduction of adult education for the marginalized population of the British blue-collar worker, a similar advocacy for (or at least a mindful inclusion of) a woman’s equal right to education is eerily absent throughout the entirety of this book. Goldman demonstrates that though Tawney collaborated comfortably across the socioeconomic divide, he was surprisingly inept when he tried to do the same with the opposite sex. In fact, as we walk through Tawney’s life, we observe a complete inability to partner on a professional and/or personal level with women. Goldman writes, “His unfamiliarity and clumsiness with women, especially with his own wife whose quiet suffering and loneliness were never appreciated, is a reminder of the type of masculinity without contemporary relevance best left behind in Edwardian England” (p. 319).
While Goldman ultimately succeeds in his goal to bring a fresh, rich, and more in-depth analysis of Tawney’s life and work, he does so for a British audience, rather than for the wider English-reading, non-British world. Apparently Goldman, along with his editors in New York, assumes that the American reader is already conversant with what a Oxford “don” is, or what differentiates a British grammar school from a public school (the meaning of public school has vastly different meaning on either side of the Atlantic!). An American reader unfamiliar with the United Kingdom might wonder why Tawney fought for scholarships for the United Kingdom’s British public schools, unaware that the prohibitive cost of these kept the British working class out. Such is the polar opposite to our U.S. public school, originally established as a free, mandatory universal education system designed to (in theory) remove socioeconomic barriers. Just as the author had the foresight to provide readers with a section to explain the many abbreviations used in text, he could have endeavored to give the non-British readers a glossary to also familiarize them with terminology specific to British English. The same author who documented Tawney’s repeated and tireless effort, sailing back and forth across the Atlantic to share his adult education message with American workers and politicians, could borrow a leaf from Tawney’s book to make this biography more accessible to all.