The Apprenticeship of Beatrice Webb examines the social and intellectual movements of the 1880s and 1890s that enabled Webb to live a productive and celebrated life. Her professional evolution, from social service to social investigation and from Spencerian Individualism to Collectivism unfolded within the context of various historical changes in these last Victorian decades: the entry of large numbers of middle class women into areas of social service; the “discovery” of poverty in London’s East End; the beginnings of empirical sociology, and the socialist revival of the 1880s.