BOOK REVIEW : Life of 19th-Century Socialist Reads Like a Contemporary Tale : BEATRICE WEBB: A LIFE, <i> by Carole Seymour-Jones,</i> Ivan R. Dee, $30; 354 pages

How can I persuade you togo out and immediately order “Beatrice Webb: A Life”? (You’d better order it, the publisher’s not a household word, and you may not find it otherwise.) Just do it. Take my word for it. If you’re interested in your world at all, you’d better do it.

I thought I knew enough about Beatrice and Sidney Webb. I knew they were 19th-Century socialists that Virginia Woolf made fun of but that Leonard Woolf admired: Sidney, whenever the couple visited for country house weekends, crept down the back stairs, scrounged rolls and hot water for tea and read aloud to his wife in bed for half an hour at dawn before the rest of the house even thought of getting up.

But when you read this “Life” by Carole Seymour-Jones, it’s like going into an amazing, elating, weird-making time warp. It’s us; it’s our world. It’s not even yesterday; it’s today.

Beatrice Webb, one of nine sisters, was raised in a very prosperous upper-middle-class British merchant family. Beatrice’s mother couldn’t stand her, but family friend and popular philosopher-economist Herbert Spencer took little Beatrice under his wing.

Spencer thought up the phrase “survival of the fittest” before even Darwin did, and to Spencer it meant, roughly, that the rich were rich because they were the fittest , OK? So that if other people wanted to molder in slums and die early and experience terrible disease and suffering, that was because they weren’t fit , OK?

Beatrice responded to Spencer’s avuncular affection and took up his ideas, because he was the only one on earth who liked her, except for her dad. But also, because Beatrice was smart, she couldn’t help but notice that marriage-as-an-institution had been nothing but grief for her mother (who bore 10 children and lost one), and as Beatrice saw her older sisters vanishing into the married state, she began to think of marriage as a kind of living suicide.

She fell in love with a handsome liberal politician who told her (bossily) that the English Rich might have to pay some money to bail out the suffering lower classes. She couldn’t stand his bossy tone and wouldn’t marry him. Besides she was an upper-middle-class capitalist, a disciple of Herbert Spencer.

But then it looked as if she was going to be a spinster all her life and, like a lot of single ladies, she drifted into social work. (Does any of this sound familiar?) She took a look at the slums--at the drugs and drink and incest and disease and terrible, terrible suffering, and decided: This is not acceptable.

And even though for the rest of her life she kept drawing lines between the “deserving” and the “undeserving” poor; even though she loved fancy parties and preferred powerful men and could barely force herself to decide that women should get the vote (because life had been kind to her; she didn’t need the vote) still, more and more, she began to think that the poor were entitled to a decent life.

Why? Although Beatrice Webb wrote reams, she never directly rebutted her old mentor who had believed so strongly in “the survival of the fittest.” She came to believe that most human beings should have a chance, just because they should have a chance, even if it cut down on a few profit margins.

She married an ugly socialist who was crazy about her. Together Beatrice and Sidney Webb founded the London School of Economics. They were staunch backbones of the Fabian Society. Their lives were filled with contradiction. She was repelled by the fact that her husband came from a lower class. She didn’t believe in God but prayed all the time. She believed in womanly submission but became a crackerjack public speaker. She worked to abolish the hated English Poor Laws but loathed trade unionists because they were “beneath” her, and she thought them dumb.

She even--get this--wrote movingly about the government’s obligation to support single mothers whose husbands had left them destitute. She argued for universal health care. She wanted to change her world, and she did, but guess what? The world she was born to crossed the Atlantic and settled down in America a hundred years later. Amazing! You’ve got to buy this book.