Edgeworth atOxford
Edgeworth finally settled in Oxford at the age of 46 in one of the most illustrious British chairs in economics. In the same year, he also became the first editor of the Economic Journal and was editor or co-editor from its first issue until his death.
He was buried in Holywell Cemetery, St Cross Church (next to Holywell Manor), which contains the graves of many notable Oxford people. Edgeworth has a professorship named after him at Nuffield College, Oxford. This distinction in economics is shared only with Nobel Prize winners, Sir John Hicks and James Meade (the other named professorship in Oxford is the Drummond at All Souls, but Drummond was not himself an economist).At Oxford, Edgeworth was firmly established as the leading economist, after Marshall, in Britain. However, unlike Marshall at Cambridge, Edgeworth devoted little energy to improving the undergraduate teaching of economics. His influence at Oxford was described briefly by Bowley (1934: 123), and at greater length by Price (1946: 37) who complained that ‘economics at Oxford looked like slumbering quietly or in effect at least must languish comparatively as it rested, so to say, inert in Edgeworth’s keeping. There was no active stir of a resonant hive of busy students gathering honey under his helping regime’. Harrod said of his tutorials with Edgeworth, ‘we used to sit side by side at a little table, and he’d go through my various diagrams’ (Harrod quoted in Phelps Brown 1981: 662). It is indeed impossible to imagine, on the basis of his literary style, how Edgeworth could lecture clearly to undergraduates. He wrote always for fellow researchers, and even here his style was influenced by his attitude to the subject. As Price (1946: 35) argued, ‘Edgeworth...con- vinced that Economics as he conceived it was so intrinsically hard a study that it could not possibly be made popularly plain.increased repellent difficulty’.
While Edgeworth was in no sense part of an Oxford group, Price (1946), Keynes (1933 [1972]) and Bowley (1934: 122) all stressed his generous hospitality, resulting in him having ‘the widest personal acquaintance in the world with economists of all nations’ (Keynes ibid.: 264). His complex character was described in the following terms by Keynes (ibid.: 265): ‘He was kind, affectionate, modest, self-deprecatory, humorous, with a sharp and candid eye for human nature; he was also reserved, angular, complicated, proud, and touchy, elaborately polite, courteous to the point of artificiality, absolutely unbending and unyielding in himself to the pressure of the outside world'.
He was said to have inherited ‘the Edgeworthstown convention of rather formal good manners and conversation' (Butler 1972: 136). The poet Robert Graves (1960: 247) reported that Edgeworth avoided conversational English, persistently using words and phrases that one expects to meet only in books. One evening, T.E. Lawrence returned to All Souls College from a visit to London, and Edgeworth met him at the gate, asking, ‘Was it very caliginous in the Metropolis?'; Lawrence replied gravely, ‘Somewhat caliginous, but not altogether inspissated'.
3