(Keynes to Strachey 1905)

KEYNES was born on 5 June 1883 in Cambridge, England, to an upper-middle-class, intellectual family. His father John Neville Keynes worked as a lecturer in moral sciences at the University of Cambridge. His mother Florence Ada Keynes was a local social reformer who became the town’s first female mayor. Keynes had two younger siblings, Geoffrey Keynes and Margaret Neville Keynes.

From an early age, he showed great articulacy and brightness: when he was four he asked his mother: ‘How do things get their names?’ At the age of nine he had already finished book 1 of Euclid and had algebra as his forte.

In 1897, Keynes earned a King’s Scholarship for Eton after being placed tenth among the scholars. During his first year he won ten prizes and eighteen in the next. By the time he left Eton, he owned over 300 books and was highly engaged in exclusive discussion groups – a habit that would continue throughout his life.

In 1902 Keynes received a scholarship to study Mathematics at King’s College Cambridge University. He studied Economics for only eight weeks and was taught by Alfred Marshall, who would have major influence in his early economic works. While in Cambridge he met Lytton Strachey and Leonard Woolf, who would become lifelong companies.

With universities training young men to suit the needs of an imperial nation, it was a natural path for Keynes to join the civil service when he left Cambridge in 1906. After coming second in the entrance examination, he worked in the India Office as a junior clerk. Two years later, he quit the civil service and returned to Cambridge after being offered a lectureship in Economics at King’s College.