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. 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. Pigou's father, Clarence, was a recently decommissioned lieutenant of the Fifteenth Regiment of Foot. 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." 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. 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.

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. His brother-in-law, Sir Henry Oldham, became a Knight Commander of the Royal Victorian Order for military service in China and India. His first cousins, with whom he grew up while his parents were in India, managed the successful family gunpowder business located outside Dartford. 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.

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. The eighteen-bedroom house sat on the seaside Esplanade in Ryde, the vistas from its large windows sweeping over the Solent toward Portsmouth. 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. 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.

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-todo Victorians, who erected houses along the road into town. 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."

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." 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 fituncomfortably into the old town-gown dichotomy between Harrovian and villager.

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." 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." 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. By the time Pigou arrived, however, the educators had themselves shifted to the right. Political unity between the boys and their teachers...