Varvara de Vesselitsky

A pioneer social researcher

Robin Oakley on a researcher who favoured empirical investigation over armchair theorising.

From the Highgate Cemetery Newsletter, April 2023.

Among the significant women buried at Highgate Cemetery is a pioneer social researcher active at the beginning of the twentieth century, Varvara de Vesselitsky, (1873-1927). Born in France, her father was Gabriel de Wesselitzky-Bojidarovitch, a prominent Russian diplomat and historian from St Petersburg. He travelled widely around Europe, had fought in the Balkan wars and he knew most of the leading European statesmen of the time. Later the family made their base in England, and Varvara also worked for a while as a teacher in the USA (her mother Julia was an American Citizen). She and her brother Sergei eventually became naturalised British citizens in 1923.

She died in 1927, her contribution - like that of other early women social researchers – relatively forgotten, eclipsed by the view that the founders of the social sciences were exclusively male. And her grave, like many others, has no monument.

Several of these ‘founding fathers’ of the social sciences in Britain have their final resting-places in Highgate Cemetery, the two best-known being near-neighbours in the East side, Herbert Spencer and Karl Marx. Although their respective conceptions of the nature of society were very different, both approached the issues primarily from a philosophical or theoretical perspective.

A contrasting approach emphasised the need to build up social scientific knowledge through empirical investigation. The studies of Life and Labour of the People of London, undertaken by Charles Booth and his colleagues in the later decades or the nineteenth century, are the best-known early examples. The Fabian Socialists Sidney and Beatrice Webb also advocated this approach, and were among those who established the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) at the end of the century to further it. Of course, nowadays the LSE has become a very large and diverse institution, and a number of its more recent well-known alumni are represented in the Cemetery, including Ralph Miliband, Richard Titmuss and R.H. Tawney.

 What is not well-known is that much of the early social investigation was in practice undertaken by women, who gathered information and conducted interviews, and then analysed the data and wrote the reports. They were mainly young women from the first generation to gain access to further and higher education, and for whom such work was one of the few career opportunities readily available.

Varvara de Vesselitsky joined the LSE around the beginning of the First World War, when a department was established in the nascent organisation (with funding from the Ratan Tata Foundation, now one of the oldest grant-making foundations in India) to carry out empirical research on the economics and sociology of work, women and the household. A bit older than many of her female colleagues, she personally undertook a series of studies including one in 1915 on women home-workers in the tailoring and box-making industries, and another on the wartime budgets of working-class families in London during the war, and she published monographs on both of these. 

For the first, she took the substantial samples of women workers in East London (877 tailoresses and 330 boxmakers), who were visited for interviews often several times, so that she was able to obtain detailed understanding of  their individual situations as well as identifying statistical patterns in their circumstances. That is to say, in modern social research terminology, she was one of the pioneers in adopting a research methodology that generated both ‘qualitative’ and ‘quantitive’ data. Her work played a significant part in establishing a British tradition of empirical social science, oriented towards current issues in social policy, as contrasted with the gentlemanly ‘armchair’ theorising of better-known predecessors. 

When she died in 1927, her funeral notice recorded that, at the time, she was Secretary of the Stepney Skilled Employment Association, based at Toynbee Hall, so she had continued to be active in the field of social welfare, if not in social research. She had also written and published a play entitled Up or Down?, bringing to life the daily struggles of working-class families. In writing this play, she followed the pattern of numerous other early women writers on social issues using fiction as a tool for drawing attention to the situation of women and impoverished groups. She designated the authorship as by ‘V de V’, and she had also used the gender-blind ‘V.’ for her social research publications. 

The owner of her grave is recorded as her brother Sergei, who at the time ran a private hotel in Surbiton, but neither he nor anyone else is buried there. Sergei married and took the name Merriman and died in Northampton in 1957. The absence of any monument on the grave remains a puzzle.

With thanks to Ann Oakley, on whose research the article is largely based.