THE EPIC OF A JOURNALIST'S CAREER

‘How I wish I could get some public work to do!’ was Harold Spender's lament to Wallas (28 July 1902). ‘How tired I am of this perpetual underground life of anonymous journalism! How I envy you on your Schoolboard!’ Spender had been a contemporary of Hobhouse's at Oxford, and later his lodger in Manchester when forced to take refuge as a leader writer on the Guardian after the Daily Chronicle shed its pro-Boer members of staff. Now on the Daily News, his aptitude for self-dramatisation made him at once a slave to journalism and an unreliable witness to his servitude. To Wallas, too, the grass often seemed greener on the other side of the hill; not so much, it must be said, in the field of journalism but in the more scholarly pastures which he was discovering. He could, as he acknowledged to Shaw, have written more books if he had regarded himself as a professional writer. They would, he supposed, have been ‘about as good as J. A. Hobson's’, but he was by no means sure that he would have ‘got more done by means of them than by direct administration’ (13 December 1908). At any rate, he remained on the London School Board until its demise in 1904 and then served for three years on the L.C.C. before making his academic post at the London School of Economics (L.S.E.) his paramount commitment.