Eleanor Marx

by Rachel Holmes

  For my mother, Karin Anne Pibernik, born Silén

  And first, a general idea that has to do with all women. The life of woman does not coincide with that of man. Their lives do not intersect; in many cases do not even touch. Hence the life of the race is stunted.

  Eleanor Marx and Edward Aveling, ‘The Woman Question’, 1886

  Is it not wonderful when you come to look at things squarely in

  the face, how rarely we seem to practise all the fine things we preach to others?

  Eleanor Marx to her sister Laura Lafargue, 26 November 1892

  ‘Go ahead!’

  Eleanor’s favourite motto

  Contents

  Preface

  1 Global Citizen

  2 The Tussies

  3 Hans Röckle’s Toyshop

  4 Book-worming

  5 Abraham Lincoln’s Adviser

  6 Fenian Sister

  7 The Communards

  8 Dogberries

  9 The Only Lady Candidate

  10 A Line of Her Own

  11 The Reading Room

  12 Peculiar Views on Love, etc.

  13 Proof Against Illusions

  14 Educate, Agitate, Organise

  15 Nora Helmer, Emma Bovary and ‘The Woman Question’

  16 Lady Liberty

  17 Essentially English

  18 Our Old Stoker!

  19 Ibsenist Interlude

  20 I Am a Jewess

  21 ‘Oh! for a Balzac to paint it!’

  22 The Den

  23 The Boldest Pause

  24 White Dress in Winter

  Afterword

  Picture Section

  Acknowledgements

  Bibliography of Eleanor

  Bibliography

  Notes

  A Note on the Author

  By the Same Author

  Also Available by Rachel Holmes

  Preface

  Eleanor Marx changed the world. In the process she revolutionised herself. This is the story of how she did it.

  She seems an unfashionable subject. And then there’s her father. Yet the public Eleanor Marx is one of British history’s great heroes.

  The private Eleanor Marx was the favourite daughter of an unusual family. She was nicknamed Tussy, to rhyme, her parents said, with pussy not fussy. Cats she adored; fussy she wasn’t. She loved Shakespeare, Ibsen, both the Shelleys, good poetry and bad puns. White was her favourite colour, and champagne her idea of happiness.

  The life of Eleanor Marx was one of the most significant and interesting events in the evolution of social democracy in Victorian Britain. Not since Mary Wollstonecraft had any woman made such a profound, progressive contribution to English political thought – and action. She left a colossal, although unacknowledged, legacy for future generations.

  Eleanor Marx was a revolutionary woman writer; a revolutionary woman, and a revolutionary. She was a person of words and action.

  Social democracy and radical thought were the family trade. Not for profit, but for the progressive transformation of people’s lives for the better. Eleanor’s parents, and the man she called her ‘second father’, Friedrich Engels, were children of industrial capitalism. They grew into political adulthood in the revolutionary Europe of the 1840s but their mature ideas were forged from the ashes of that early utopian and idealist socialism. The global triumph of capitalism was declared in the decades after 1848. Their child Eleanor, born in 1855, was heir to their ideas in a different, modern age.

  Eleanor went out into the world to put into practice and to test what she’d learned from Marx and Engels at the family hearth. Her quest to ‘go ahead’, to live it, soon took her into new worlds. The Shakespeare revival, the cultural realms of radical modern theatre, the contemporary novel and the artistic circles of early bohemian Bloomsbury. She loved steam trains and was an early and enthusiastic adopter of new technology, most notably the typewriter. Eleanor Marx was a pioneer of Ibsenism in Britain. She translated Flaubert’s Madame Bovary into English for the first time. She took to the stage herself – with sometimes hilariously misdirected results. She never noticed any boundaries between the personal and political, even when she tripped over them and they sent her flying.

  Tussy had an extraordinary gift for friendship. Unconventional, she nevertheless effortlessly attracted and compelled others. People felt good around her. Her lifelong, loving relationship with Friedrich Engels and longterm companionships with George Bernard Shaw, Will Thorne, Wilhelm Liebknecht and Henry Havelock Ellis are just a few examples of her easy rapports with men. The close and loving relationship between Eleanor Marx and Olive Schreiner is one of the great female friendships, not only of literary and political history, but of life and the heart.

  ‘What is it that we as Socialists desire?’ asked Eleanor Marx, and spent her life searching for answers to this question.

  From the time of Eleanor’s childhood – the 1860s – socialism was the ideology primarily associated with the new democratic struggle against capitalism. There is no neat story of the origins and rise of socialism qua socialism in Britain because it was by character and intent a broad-based, diverse alliance of widespread radical thought and action. Tussy’s life is one of the significant primary elements in the composition of the story of British socialism.

  As the late, great Eric Hobsbawm observed, in the 1860s and 1870s native socialists in Britain might have comfortably fitted into one smallish hall. Eleanor, the only Marx who was a native English socialist, and her friends, might have filled more than half that hall.1 ‘Certainly,’ Eleanor said, ‘socialism is at present in this country little more than a literary movement.’2 She took this literary movement from its visionary pages on to the streets and on to the political stage. She lived it, and she tested it.

  Eleanor Marx became an adult in the age of collectivism. Collectivism, most recognisable in the trade union movement, was an organised response to unfettered capitalism and the grossly uneven distribution of the prosperity it generated. The labouring poor produced surplus value, for the benefit of the happy few who exploited them. Britain was not yet an electoral democracy. The right to vote was based on property ownership and religion. Working-class men were prohibited from voting. Women of all classes were prohibited from voting. The poor were prohibited from voting.

  British government, political representation and Parliament were a closed shop: entrance was restricted to property-owning men of particular religious sects. Trade unions were therefore the first people’s parliaments. Britain had one of the strongest traditions of working-class organisation in the world, despite the collapse of Chartism and, in the 1850s, the Communist League.

  In the 1860s the organised proletariat regrouped, renewing the attempt to deal with the consequences of capitalism. A new trade unionism emerged in the 1870s, out of which grew Britain’s first democratic political parties: most significantly, the Independent Labour Party and the Scottish Labour Party. Eleanor Marx was one of the first and most prominent leaders of the new trade unionism. And she brought feminism to the heart of the trade union movement, both in Britain and in Europe.

  Eleanor often said, ‘I inherited my father’s nose (I used to tell him I could sue him for damages as his nose had distinctly entailed a loss on me) – and not his genius.’3 Friedrich Engels, George Bernard Shaw, Olive Schreiner, Henry Havelock Ellis, William Morris and his daughter May, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, Sylvia Pankhurst, Amy Levy, Israel Zangwill – amongst many others – would have corrected the error of this self-assessment. Eleanor did inherit her father’s genius. The loss entailed on her was not her nose, but her sex.

  Eleanor Marx was born into a Victorian Britain where she had no right to education, was barred from university, from voting for the national g
overnment, from standing for parliamentary representation, from most of the professions and from control of her reproductive and psychological rights. The historical conditions into which she was born made her understand from first-hand experience what it meant, and felt like, to be the member of an oppressed class.

  She spent her life fighting for the principle of equality. To a cynical generation, this might make her sound tiresome. To the people around the world who are discovering themselves in the new social revolutions today, her fight may seem more familiar.

  Eleanor Marx was the foremother of socialist feminism. Contrary to current popular misconceptions, feminism began in the 1870s, not the 1970s. Like all ideas that turn into movements, feminism has an empirical history and detectible conception. It did not arrive in Britain delivered by a stork, or left under a gooseberry bush.

  In Victorian Britain and its expanding colonies, the problem of sexual oppression was generally described as ‘the woman question’. To Eleanor Marx, this question was imprecise. So she moved it on, to ‘the working woman debate’.4 She supported and admired the call for women’s suffrage. Some of her best friends were suffragettes. But suffrage reform for middle-class women within existing capitalist society failed to address ‘the debate on the attitude of social democracy towards working women.’5 Eleanor lucidly summarised her position in an open letter to the English socialist leader Ernest Belfort Bax in November 1895:

  I am, of course, as a Socialist, not a representative of ‘Woman’s Rights’. It is the Sex Question and its economic base that I proposed to discuss with you. The so-called ‘Woman’s Rights’ question (which appears to be the only one you understand) is a bourgeois idea. I proposed to deal with the Sex Question from the point of view of the working class and the class struggle.6

  Women’s suffrage lacked a sufficient analysis of the economic base of the division of labour, production and reproduction. Understanding the role of economics in human society was essential to human happiness, and therefore to the emancipation of women, and men – equally oppressed by patriarchy. Happiness – what, Eleanor wondered, constituted happiness? She found the most important element was work.

  Eleanor Marx radicalised ‘the woman question’ by bringing modern feminism to Britain in 1886.

  She created the political philosophy of socialist-feminism, summarised in her treatise ‘The Woman Question: From a Socialist Point of View’, co-written with Edward Aveling, her spouse. In the same year, Eleanor Marx and the German socialist politician Clara Zetkin together brought feminism to the top of the agenda of the international socialist movement at the first congress of the Second International, held in London. Later, inspired by this intervention, Zetkin co-founded International Women’s Day, with Luise Zietz.

  ‘The Woman Question: From a Socialist Point of View’ stands alongside Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women, Engels’s Origin of Private Property, Family and the State and Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own in its importance as a revolutionary text.

  Eleanor Marx was her father’s first biographer. All subsequent biographies of Karl Marx, and most of Engels, draw on her work as their primary sources for the family history, often without knowing it.

  In this sense, this book is a biography of a biographer.

  Tussy’s first childhood memory was of riding on her father’s shoulders and being suddenly struck by the different view. I’ve been able to see much further by standing on the shoulders of the two groundbreaking twentieth-century biographers of Eleanor Marx. Chushichi Tsuzuki published the first full-length biographical evaluation of her life in 1967. Yvonne Kapp followed soon after with her mighty two-volume study published in 1972 and 1976. Both stand their ground as fine accounts and invaluable guides.

  Eleanor started writing the first full-length biography of her father in the 1880s. She wrote to Karl Kautsky, reflecting on the project: ‘His work must stand as it is, and we must all try to learn from it. And we can all “walk under his huge legs” – and find ourselves not dishonourable but honourable graves.’7

  Daughters are well positioned to walk under their father’s legs, and, if they can, through them and out the other side. And daughters are from their mother’s wombs born. ‘Cherchez la femme,’ Eleanor often said when people sought explanations for the behaviour of others. This is good advice to follow on the quest to understand her life and psychology.

  Eleanor Marx was the physical and spiritual daughter of a group of women who defined her as powerfully as her father: most significantly, her mother Jenny Marx, ‘second mother’ Helen Demuth, and Engels’s partner, Auntie Lizzy Burns. In adulthood, her friendships with women sustained and developed her. This sisterhood is as important to understanding the forces that made Eleanor as her family and male lovers.

  Eleanor Marx never finished her biography of her father. During the process of writing it she discovered a shocking, unspeakable secret at the heart of her family. She agonised over the consequences of its disclosure. And she thought deeply about the divided duty of daughters. On the one hand, the duty of daughters towards the patriarchs and matriarchs that made them; on the other, the duty of truth to history. Before she had time to reach a conclusion, Eleanor Marx succumbed to a painful and violent death. Some say it was murder, others that she was overwhelmed by the family secret.

  Towards the end of her life, Eleanor wrote to her sister Laura about the struggle she was having writing the biography of their father: ‘After all, Marx the “Poliker” and “Denker” can take his chance, while Marx the man is less likely to fare as well.’8 Eleanor was confronted by the challenge of all biography: the story of the individual life taking its chance in the grander scheme of history. Individuals, and our lives, are full of contradictions. We don’t conform to abstract ideology or deterministic theories. This is what makes us human, man and woman alike.

  The life of Eleanor Marx is as varied and full of contradictions as the materialist dialectic in which she was, quite literally, conceived. Her father, the most famous philosopher in the world, wrote:

  The modern family contains in embryo not only slavery (servitus) but serfdom also… It contains within itself in miniature all the antagonisms which later develop on a wide scale within society and its state.9

  Eleanor’s life was a dramatisation of these antagonisms. If Karl Marx was the theory, Eleanor Marx was the practice. This is the story of both the public and the private lives of Eleanor Marx. She wrote, in ‘The Woman Question’, that for the feminist, the public and the private were indivisible realms.

  Her peers – allies and adversaries – regarded her as one of the greatest radical reformers and leaders of their age. Will Thorne, first Secretary of the Trades Union Congress (TUC), said at her funeral that Britain had lost its foremost political economist. The praise, admiration and unqualified esteem in which she was held would fill reams. In fact, the volume of Eleanor-adulation is enough to make a biographer’s heart sink. ‘It seems impossible to find any unfavourable references to her,’10 wrote her friend Henry Havelock Ellis.

  Fortunately, this is untrue. Eleanor Marx was all too human.

  She had many shortcomings, frustrations and spectacular failures. Her life was a mass of contradictions. She is irreducible to either her public or private life. And so we need to know the story of both.

  After all, Marx the politician and thinker can take her chance. Whether Marx the woman is likely to fare as well, only her story can tell.

  1

  Global Citizen

  Eleanor Marx tumbles prematurely into the world in London at the moment before dawn on Tuesday 16 January 1855. Puffing anxiously on a cigar in the corner of the overcrowded room at 28 Dean Street, Soho, is Europe’s greatest political scientist. Karl and Jenny Marx have another child.

  They’d hoped for a boy. It’s a girl.

  Exhausted, Jenny sips crimson laudanum held to her lips by the attentive Helen Demuth. Lenchen, as she’s known to all the family, has been present at t
he births of all the Marx children. This is Jenny’s sixth home delivery. Just one year after her birth her last baby, Franziska, died in this same room from bronchial pneumonia. Jenny is now forty-one, in medical terms an older gravida according to the family physician Dr Allen, who has been urgently sent for from nearby Soho Square.

  Sweetened with honey, liquorice and anise, the laudanum adds spice and caramel scents to the overheated atmosphere. The reassuring aroma of strong German coffee mingles with the tang of blood, camphor, tobacco smoke and coal dust. Elegant and solidly expensive, the Kaffeekanne, a wedding gift from Jenny’s mother, looks out of place amongst cracked crockery, shabby, cramped surroundings and dilapidated furniture.

  Lenchen snips the umbilical cord, slaps and wipes down the baby girl. Handing her into her father’s outspread arms, she pronounces her puny but intact, with a fair fighting chance. Teeny as she is, the Marxes’ newborn baby daughter declares her arrival with hearty, indignant yelling, joining her first protest at the shock of existence with the street-life dawn chorus of Soho beneath the second-floor window.

  Boots of working Londoners, horseshoes and cartwheels crunch through the fresh morning snow. Superbly drunk revellers weave amongst them three sheets to the wind, tacking vaguely homewards or on to the next tavern, bawling heartily and insensible to the cold and their frost-nipped noses. Glum prostitutes sheltering in the portal to Miss Kelly’s Royalty Theatre diagonally opposite 28 Dean Street eye up the soakers and calculate their possible worth.

  From the tiny adjoining back room Marx hears, painfully, six-year-old Edgar’s monotonous cough. His sole surviving son is battling tuberculosis.

  Dr Allen arrives with the daylight for a ‘grand consultation’.1 Marx hasn’t paid his last overdue account but Dr Allen, a socialist, admiring of Karl Marx in particular and sympathetic to impoverished activist immigrants in general, comes anyway. Jenny is in no fit state to breastfeed, the doctor warns, and instructs that a local wet-nurse be found immediately for the purpose.