Alfred Marshall(1842–1924)

Alfred Marshall was born at Bermondsey, on the south bank of the Thames below Tower Bridge, on 26 July 1842, second son of William Marshall, a cashier at the Bank of England, and Rebecca Oliver, a butcher's daughter from Devon. William Marshall was a strict Evangelical of the Clapham Sect type; the household discipline ran on early-morning prayer, no novel-reading, and a closely budgeted curriculum of Latin, Greek, scripture and arithmetic. The intention was the church. Alfred was sent to Merchant Taylors' School in the City at twelve and was destined, in his father's plan, for a Bible-college scholarship and ordination in the Church of England. He won an entrance scholarship to St John's College, Cambridge in 1861 to read mathematics on his own initiative, against his father's preference, partly funded by his Devon uncle the local butcher of Dawlish.

He came out of Cambridge in 1865 as Second Wrangler (second-place ranking in the Cambridge mathematical tripos, behind John Strutt, the future Lord Rayleigh and Nobel physicist), was elected a fellow of St John's, and went into private mathematical and ethical reading with the intention of producing a metaphysical study of how human personality could be improved by social reform. The reading drove him through Hegel, through Kant, through the early German political-economy literature (Roscher, Knies, Hildebrand) and into John Stuart Mill's *Principles of Political Economy*. By 1868 he had decided that the question he had been asking through the metaphysics could be answered better through the technical study of economic life, and he turned the next twenty years' work on. He was twenty-six.

The technical core of his work was done in the two decades between 1868 and 1890. He took the central conceptual problem of mid-Victorian political economy (the explanation of how prices were determined under competition) and worked out the mathematical apparatus of partial equilibrium: the supply-and-demand diagram on Cartesian axes that every introductory economics student now learns in the first week, the concept of price elasticity of demand, the framework of consumer surplus, the distinction between the short run and the long run, and the principle of *ceteris paribus* analysis that holds the other variables constant. The diagrams and the apparatus did not appear in print until 1890 because he was an unusually slow and self-doubting writer; the *Principles of Economics* manuscript was through, by his wife Mary Paley Marshall's count, eleven complete rewrites between 1881 and 1890. The book that came out in July 1890 ran to about seven hundred pages and was the foundation text of what economists now call the neoclassical synthesis. He held back the second volume he had planned indefinitely, finished one further book (*Industry and Trade*, 1919, on industrial organisation), and never managed the planned third on money and trade. The eight successive editions of the *Principles* across the next thirty years contained the additions and revisions that the unwritten volumes would have carried.

He held the chair of political economy at Bristol from 1877 to 1883 (where his wife Mary Paley, formerly his student at Cambridge and one of the first women admitted to Cambridge economics in the 1870s, also taught), at Oxford briefly in 1884 to 1885, and returned to Cambridge in 1885 as professor of political economy, holding the chair to 1908. The Cambridge appointment was the institutional position from which he founded the Cambridge tripos in economics and politics in 1903, the foundational British university degree in the discipline. The students he trained in the years between 1885 and 1908 ran on from Cambridge into the post-war Treasury and academic infrastructure of British economic policy: John Maynard Keynes (who took the first economics tripos in 1905), Arthur Cecil Pigou (his successor in the chair), Frederick Lavington, Mary Paley Marshall herself, Dennis Robertson. The post-war Cambridge that produced the General Theory was, in institutional terms, the Cambridge Marshall had built.

He retired from the chair to his small house at Madingley Road on the Cambridge outskirts in 1908 and lived there with Mary Paley for a further sixteen years. He wrote *Industry and Trade* in retirement (it took the eight years between 1911 and 1919 to write), saw John Maynard Keynes's *Economic Consequences of the Peace* through to publication in 1919 in part on his recommendation, and worked on the unfinished money-and-trade volume to the end. He died at the Madingley Road house on 13 July 1924, eighty-one years old, two weeks short of his eighty-second birthday. The funeral was at the Cambridge crematorium; his ashes are buried with Mary Paley Marshall's at the Ascension Parish Burial Ground in Cambridge. The Marshall name in its English-side catalogue is the office of mareschal scaled up from horse-servant to royal court rank; Alfred Marshall carries it alongside William Marshal as the other foundational figure of the surname, the one who built the discipline of modern economics in the long mathematical reading-life at Madingley Road.