After graduating with his master’s in 1848, he studied law, and was called to the bar in 1852. In between he began to write articles on political economy for the Prospective Review. One of his most audacious assessed the brand-new treatise by John Stuart Mill, The Principles of Political Economy. ‘I am in much trouble about John Mill, who is very tough, and rather dreary’, he told his best friend, Richard Hutton. ‘I am trying to discuss his views about the labouring classes.’13 Bagehot’s own opinion of them was not high. He wrote to his mother of his duties as a volunteer constable in London, where a Chartist revolt was expected on 10 April 1848. Though unexcited at ‘muddling about Lincoln’s Inn field with an oak staff’, and by the Chartists, whose ‘very violent language is delivered to the world gratis by men in dirty shirts’, he found the government’s precautions prudent: ‘with the mass of wretchedness in London, the slightest spark is dangerous and must not be neglected.’14
It was a chance encounter in Paris, however, that led him to turn his back on the law, while also reinforcing his distrust of the popular political movements that flowered between 1848 and 1851, when artisans, workers and peasants supplied the thrust for the liberal revolutions that briefly shook the autocratic capitals of Europe.15 Bored in London, Bagehot left for the French capital in the fall of 1851, witnessing a last-ditch effort to defend the republican regime installed three years earlier. What Bagehot saw – uneducated workers building barricades to defend the Second Republic against Louis-Napoléon’s coup d’état, before they were crushed by the army – affected him deeply. He took notes, and seven ‘letters’ from Paris appeared in the Inquirer, a Unitarian journal. Their provocative intent was to justify the coup to liberal opinion in England, as a way to restore confidence among shopkeepers, tradesmen, housewives, ‘stupid people who mind their business, and have a business to mind’, acutely worried that ‘their common comforts were in considerable danger’. ‘Parliament, liberty, leading articles, essays, eloquence’ – he went down the list of liberal virtues – ‘all are good’, but in such a climate, ‘they are secondary’ for ‘the first duty of government is to ensure security of that industry which is the condition of social life’.16
Bagehot’s letters ‘were light and airy, and even flippant on a very grave subject’, Hutton recalled, and ‘took impertinent liberties with all the dearest prepossessions of the readers of the Inquirer’.17 In private, Bagehot was even glibber. ‘I was here during the only day of hard fighting’, he informed one correspondent, ‘and shall be able to give lectures on the construction of a barricade if that noble branch of Political Economy ever became a source of income in England.’18 ‘M. Buonaparte is entitled to great praise’, he told another. ‘He has very good heels to his boots, and the French just want treading down, and nothing else – calm, cruel, business-like oppression to take the dogmatic conceit out of their heads.’19
The stir caused by the letters kindled his ambition, but with no clear path into politics Bagehot heeded his father’s urgings and returned to Langport to work at the family bank in 1852. Luckily, the man who ran it, his uncle Vincent Stuckey, was no ordinary banker: a political career at the Treasury; friendships with two prime ministers, Pitt and Peel; three times mayor of Langport; and as a bonus, a taste for epigrams. ‘Bankers are mortal, but banks should never die.’ Stuckey had converted the bank into one of the first joint-stock operations and made it into a regional force. By 1909, when merged with Parr’s Bank of Lancashire, it had £7 million in deposits, and a note circulation second only to the Bank of England.20 Heartened by the precedent, Bagehot slogged on for seven years in a variety of jobs, including as manager of the Bristol branch.
After years cultivating his mind in London, however, Bagehot found bookkeeping a chore. He complained to a school friend of ‘being rowed ninety-nine times a day for some horrid sin against the conventions of mercantile existence’. ‘My family perhaps you know are merchants, ship-owners, and bankers, etc., etc.’, he continued. How much better if they ‘would admit that sums are a matter of opinion’.21 Among number crunchers, he was a poet. When confronted by intellectuals, however, he played the practical, no-nonsense philistine. On a business trip he was invited to a dinner party, where an aged scholar declared his intention to get at ‘the kernel of all the machinery by which we were governed’. Bagehot piped up after a pause, ‘My impression is that the kernel is the consolidated fund, and I should like to get at that!’ If someone was taking too long constructing an elegant phrase, he would interrupt them, asking, ‘How much?’22
Bagehot’s articles from these years were mainly portraits of English writers: Cowper, Coleridge, Shakespeare, Macaulay, Shelley, Scott, Dickens, Milton and others. Aside from Bagehot’s interpretation of business success as a criterion of literary merit, what is striking is the relation of all these lives to his own. As an historian Scott was preferable to Macaulay, because the former gave the Cavalier his due: ‘a thrill of delight; exaltation in a daily event; zest in the “regular thing”.’ Shakespeare, meanwhile, was made to share in his view of common folk. It was fun to mix with the lowly, ‘the stupid players and the stupid door keepers’. But at the end of the day ‘it was enough if every man hitched well into his own place in life’, as in Much Ado About Nothing. For, ‘if every one were logical and literary, how could there be scavengers, or watchmen or caulkers, or coopers?’23
Essay-writing in his spare hours from the bank was not enough. It was as a banker, though, and not an intimate of artists, that Bagehot freed himself from the daily chores of the counting house. Richard Hutton, now co-editor of the National Review, wrote from London in 1856 to say he had received a tentative offer from William Rathbone Greg to edit the Economist. Hutton was unsure, and thought of visiting the tomb of his wife in the West Indies before deciding: what did Bagehot think? ‘Offers of this kind are not to be picked up in the street every day’, Bagehot replied. ‘You have an opportunity of fixing yourself in a post, likely to be useful and permanent, and give you a fulcrum and position in the world which is what you have always wanted and is quite necessary to comfort in England. I do not think you ought to risk it for the sake of a holiday.’24
Hutton set out for Barbados. Bagehot, however, wrote to their mutual friend James Martineau, who secured him an introduction to Greg, who in turn obtained an invitation to Claverton Manor, James Wilson’s pile in the country. After a visit in January 1857, Bagehot was asked to write a series of letters on banking. He also caught the eyes of the six girls in the house, for making fun of their German governess, ‘an egg’, and for his appearance: black wavy hair, long bushy beard, tall, thin, ‘very fine skin, very white’, a ‘high, hectic colour concentrated on the cheek bones … he would pace a room when talking and throw his head back as some animals do when sniffing air.’25 A year later he was engaged to the eldest daughter, Eliza.
Hutton got to work as editor after his return, but it was Bagehot who quickly imposed himself as the heir apparent. Wilson liked Bagehot, and was so thrilled with an essay of his in the National Review in 1859 – warning of the dangers of any but the most limited extension of the franchise to the top layers of the working class – he threw him a dinner party in April, inviting Lord Grey, Lord Granville, Sir Richard Bethell, Sir George Cornewall Lewis, Edward Cardwell, Thackeray and Gladstone – ‘a very fine collection of political animals’, Bagehot observed contentedly.26 And it was to Bagehot that Wilson turned in 1859 ‘to interpret his great work in India to the public in England through the pages of the Economist’ – even as Hutton remained nominal editor for two more years.27 When Wilson died, Bagehot was offered his job in India. He declined, looking forward to greener and more pleasant political pastures at home. Though he resigned as bank manager, he stayed on as a director, and now oversaw all of Stuckey’s business in London.
Bagehot took after Wilson in another respect, with the clear intention to use the Economist as a springboard into politics. He stood for parliament four times as a Liberal: in Manchester in 1865, Bridgwater in 1866, and twice at London University, his alma mater, in 1860 and 1867. All were unsuccessful, but on his third try he came within a hair’s breadth – just seven votes behind his Tory opponent. Bagehot did not