Eleanor Marx

by Rachel Holmes

  Dr Allen apologises that nothing more can be done for Edgar’s infected lungs. Flush-cheeked, bright-eyed, feverish, Marx’s once ebullient, vital male heir seems already otherworldly, clinging to a thin precipice of life as his newborn baby sister seizes on to it with clamorous vigour.

  Karl and Jenny’s old friends Wilhelm and Ernestine Liebknecht, who live around the corner in Old Compton Street, call in to congratulate them. The friends toast the baby girl’s arrival. ‘A global citizen – Weltburgerin – is born,’2 pronounces her father with suitable Teutonic emphasis for the occasion.

  To match him, Wilhelm Liebknecht, nicknamed ‘Library’ by the Marxes, plucks a reference from Proverbs, welcoming the baby girl as ‘a merry little thing, as round as a ball and like milk and blood’.3 Library’s sanguine ‘Milch’ and ‘Blut’ bring an elemental tone to the toast.

  This child is to the struggle born.

  The following evening Marx writes a reflective note to his best friend Friedrich Engels in Manchester to tell him about the new arrival. The baby is the reason he’s slipped his copy deadline for a leader on British military errors in the Crimean War for the New York Daily Tribune:4

  I could not of course write to the Tribune yesterday and could not either today and for some time in the future, for yesterday my wife was delivered of a bona fide traveller – unfortunately of the sex par excellence . . . Had it been a male the matter would have been more acceptable.5

  More acceptable to whom?

  Marx’s emphasis on legitimacy and the arrival of the baby as an act of conjugal good faith in this note to his best friend is very odd. Once again a father, Marx doesn’t say to whom it would have been more acceptable if the new child had been a boy. But he knows Engels will understand who would have preferred a son.

  Parents already to two daughters – Jenny, eleven, and Laura, ten – Karl and Möhme, as Mrs Jenny Marx is called by her family, are now burdened with another girl. Edgar is not recovering and Dr Allen has told them to expect the worst. They have already lost a son, Little Fawkes – Heinrich Guido – born on 5 November 1849 and dead from meningitis within a fortnight of his first birthday.

  Now thirty-seven, Marx is conflicted over the bearing of girls. It’s a truism of the age that daughters are all round more economic, social and sexual trouble than sons. The hard-nosed historical materialist can hardly delude himself with the hope that his daughters might transcend entirely their circumstances of being a universal underclass in the nineteenth-century moment into which they are born. Yet, since he was a youngster, Marx has recognised and loved women as equals – at times he even suspects them of being more evolved than men. In their early agitprop The Communist Manifesto of 1848 Marx and Engels emphasised the essential need ‘to do away with the status of women as mere instruments of production’, and argued that ‘bourgeois marriage is in reality a system of wives in common . . . i.e. of prostitution both public and private.’6 Marx still hopes that education and equal treatment might strengthen women’s place and possibilities in the world. But like every Victorian patriarch, he wants a son, and this is not one.

  The bona fide traveller is named Jenny Julia Eleanor after her mother – like all the Marx daughters. Jenny got her name from her great-grandmother Jeanie Wishart, daughter of an Edinburgh minister, who learned and spoke fluent German with a ‘delightful’7 Scots accent after she married Rhinelander Philipp von Westphalen in 1765 and who lived in Germany for the rest of her life. Eleanor’s mother, Jenny von Westphalen, inherited the clear, delicate complexion, dark auburn hair with lustrous blonde tints and bright emerald eyes of her grandmother’s Highland ancestry – but not her accent.

  The origin of Eleanor’s given name is obscure. The claim that it hails from her Scots forebears seems like common sense, but is unsubstantiated. There are several Helens in the genealogical history of the Wisharts of Pittarow, from whom Jeanie descended, but by the time of Eleanor’s birth these are vague shades three centuries distant. There are no Ellens or Elaines or Helens or Eleanors in any of the spliced branches of Jenny and Karl’s family tree, nor any close friends or inspirational colleagues. The only person with a similar name anywhere near to the family is their lifelong housekeeper Helen Demuth – Lenchen.

  For whatever reason it becomes hers, Eleanor is a promising name. In Arabic, Hebrew, Greek and Latin it carries the common root meaning of ray of light and bright illumination. ‘Eleanor’ holds out the promise of a radiant child with a sunny disposition.

  Twelve weeks after Eleanor’s birth Edgar dies in Marx’s arms. ‘I’ve already had my share of bad luck,’ he laments to Engels, ‘but only now do I know what real unhappiness is.’8 Disconsolate, he turns to his newborn daughter and to her he transfers all his love and hopes for his lost son.

  By the time she was nine months old, the unbaptised Jenny Julia Eleanor Marx was known by all as Tussy.9 T-oo-ssy to rhyme, as her parents explained, with pussy and not fussy. Her parents’ explanation of the correct pronunciation turned out to be prescient: fussy Tussy was not, but kittens and cats she adored from infancy. Tussy, and its variant endearment Tusschen, was a soubriquet of several possible origins. Perhaps baby Tussy sneezed a lot as her lungs acclimatised to the London fug – coal dust and her father’s cigar smoke within, a harsh frozen winter without. Tousser is the verb for cough in French, the primary language her sisters spoke with their parents at home. In Dutch, Tusschen is an archaic form of tussen, the word for between. Hence the old Dutch saying ‘tusschen en tussen’ – betwixt and between. Tussy’s immediate paternal family were mostly Dutch and living in Holland, where Marx visited them frequently. Tuzzy is the Old English word for a garland or knot of flowers. By the 1850s, tussie-mussies were a craze amongst Victorians: nosegays or bouquets of flowers carefully selected and arranged to convey secret messages between lovers and intimacies between friends – love poetry in flowers. Tussy was also street vernacular for vagina.10

  The numerous likely sources for Tussy’s nickname tell us something about the multilingual nature of the Marx ménage. Tussy’s sisters, born in Paris and Brussels, spoke French with each other, French and German interchangeably with their mother, and mainly German with their father, Lenchen and Engels. French, German and English were spoken with family and friends.

  Of all the family, Möhme was the most fluently multilingual. Her liberal and progressive father Ludwig von Westphalen had seen to it that she began to learn French and English when she was a child. Marx started on his great work on political economy and the workings of capital shortly before Tussy was born and Jenny was his tireless scribe. Jenny copied and edited all her husband’s writing, not only because she was one of the few apart from Engels who could decipher his appalling scrawl, but also because her German was, next to his, the best in the family.

  From the womb, Tussy swam in a fluid polyphony of German, French and English, with Dutch phrases and Yiddish tags thrown into the rich mix.

  An intriguing influence on baby Eleanor’s moniker came from China. The Marx household were Sino-obsessed, and avidly followed the politicking of the Dowager Empress of China, Tzu Hi (also TsuTsi or Cixi). Tussy’s sister Jenny had been nicknamed Empress of China, but Tussy supplanted her regency and became Successor to the Empress of China. The advice on how to pronounce Tzu-Hi was ‘Sue Z’ – or Tussy as in pussy, not fussy.

  The three sisters all had many topical, amusing or endearing nicknames during their childhoods. For a while Laura was Kakadou, and then became the equally exoticised Hottentot,11 on account of her black looks – a reference both to her grumpy scowls, famous in the family, and to the dusky African good looks she shared with her father. Hottentot was the nickname that followed Laura into adulthood and Jennychen the moniker that stuck for Jenny.

  Infant Tussy was looked after chiefly by Lenchen, assisted by a wet nurse, her older sisters, her parents and the Liebknechts. ‘The soul of the house’,12 Helen Demuth, born of a Rhineland peasant family, had known Jenny since entering service in th
e von Westphalen home in 1835 when she was just fifteen.

  Since then Jenny and Helen had not been separated for more than a few weeks at a time, apart from the single exception of Jenny’s extended visit to her mother in 1850 when Lenchen stayed behind to take care of the family. The Marx daughters all described Lenchen as their second mother. Like Gandhi, Churchill and many other great historical figures, Eleanor’s relationship with her nanny Lenchen, who performed the role of substitute mother-figure and provider, was a profound influence on her childhood. Lenchen had accompanied Jenny and Karl throughout their travels around Europe almost from the beginning of their marriage and had shared their many exiles. One of Marx’s sons-in-law described Lenchen as:

  housekeeper and major domo at the same time. She ran the whole house. The children loved her like a mother and her maternal feeling towards them gave her a mother’s authority. Mrs Marx considered her as her bosom friend and Marx fostered a particular friendship towards her; he played chess with her and often enough lost to her.13

  As her games of chess with Marx attest, Lenchen was also at leisure within the family. Library defined the relationship as follows: ‘Lenchen had the dictatorship in the house, Mrs Marx the supremacy.’14 No man, Library observed, is great in the eyes of his servant, ‘and Marx was certainly not in Lenchen’s eyes’.15 She would give her life a hundred times for him and the family, ‘but Marx could not impose on her’. She knew all his whims and weaknesses and ‘she could twist him around her little finger.’ When Marx was irritated and stormed and thundered, she was the only person who would brave the lion’s den. ‘If he growled at her, Lenchen would give him such a piece of her mind that the lion became as mild as a lamb.’16

  Grief at Edgar’s death was intensified by privation. There was, as ever, a domestic cash crisis. Möhme visited the ‘pop-house’, as she called the pawnbrokers, so often that she called the amiable local Soho pawnbroker Uncle. ‘Pop Goes the Weasel’, the nursery rhyme about a shoemaker pawning his tools, was an early favourite of Tussy’s. Not that she had a nursery: her bedroom and playroom were the multifunctional twin boxes of the little Soho flat squeezed into by the three grown-ups and her rapidly growing elder sisters. Borrowing against her better linens, wedding silver and the family’s clothes, Möhme kept the domestic economy circulating whilst her husband busied himself with the inaugural meetings of the International Working Men’s Association and burned the midnight oil to catch up on his overdue articles. Möhme and Lenchen were perennially short on crockery, glasses and sufficient food for the flow of friends and guests to their home, constant as the tide.

  Recollected by the rest of her family as the most miserable time of their lives, Tussy never really remembered the pinched Soho years. Twenty-eight Dean Street, without plumbing, gaslight or privacy, was sub-let to the Marxes by a grouchy Irish linguist for £22 per year. The family moved into these lodgings in 1851, shortly after the death of their second son, Little Fawkes. Though Tussy didn’t know it, the comprehensive intelligence of a Prussian secret agent sent directly by the Minister of the Interior provides a memorable illustration of Marx family life in the Soho flatlet where she was born.

  Tussy arrived into a family of political radicals under constant state surveillance. In 1850 a German newspaper editor calling himself Schmidt arrived in London, purportedly to visit the Great Exhibition. In fact, Schmidt was Agent Wilhelm Stieber, briefed by the Prussian Minister of the Interior to spy on Marx and his associates. Stieber infiltrated German communist meetings and the homes of people connected with the worker and democratic movements, observing in detail the dwelling of its most prominent leader:

  Marx lives in one of the worst and hence cheapest quarters of London. He has two rooms, the one with the view of the street being the drawing-room, behind it the bedroom. There is not one piece of good, solid furniture in the entire flat. Everything is broken, tattered and torn, finger-thick dust everywhere, and everything in the greatest disorder. A large, old-fashioned table, covered with waxcloth, stands in the middle of the drawing-room, on it lie manuscripts, books, newspapers, then the children’s toys, bits and pieces from his wife’s sewing basket, next to it a few teacups with broken rims, dirty spoons, knives, forks, candlesticks, inkpot, glasses, Dutch clay pipes, tobacco-ash; in a word all kinds of trash, and everything on one table; a junk dealer would be ashamed of it. When you enter the Marx flat your sight is dimmed by coal and tobacco smoke so that you grope around at first as if you were in a cave, until your eyes get used to these fumes . . . Everything is dirty, everything covered with dust. It is dangerous to sit down. Here is a chair with only three legs, there the children play kitchen on another chair that happens to be whole; true – it is offered to the visitor, but the children’s kitchen is not removed; if you sit on it you risk a pair of trousers. But nothing of this embarrasses Marx or his wife in the least; you are received in the friendliest manner, are cordially offered a pipe, tobacco and whatever else there is; a spirited conversation makes up for the domestic defects and in the end you become reconciled because of the company, find it interesting, even original. This is the faithful portrait of the family life of the Communist leader Marx.17

  German Agent Stieber clearly judged Frau Marx and Lenchen utter failures as hausfraus, in his book a shortcoming probably worse than being a communist. Stieber’s intelligence led to the arrest of a number of Marx Party members in Germany and ultimately to the infamous Cologne Communist Trial of October 1852. The Prussian government charged eleven members of the Communist League for alleged conspiracy in the 1848 revolution. The prosecution consisted of false testimony and forged evidence. Seven of the eleven were given six-year prison sentences. Furious, Engels later denounced Stieber as one of ‘the most contemptible police scoundrels of our century’.18 Yet even this inveigling snoop who became chief of Bismarck’s secret service felt the allure of the friendly welcome and hospitality of the ramshackle Marx home.

  The Prussian Minister of the Interior was satisfied with Agent Stieber’s report when it landed on his desk, because it confirmed his long-held suspicions of the degeneracy of his brother-in-law Karl Marx. Prussian Minister of the Interior Ferdinand von Westphalen was Jenny’s half-brother. He was furious from the instant he heard the rumour in 1836 that his half-sister was secretly engaged to the revolutionary firebrand. Ferdinand spied on Tussy’s family throughout her childhood.

  Tussy thrived on Dr Allen’s milk regime and was no longer ‘expected to die every day’.19 Her first summer was spent in what her family called ‘the country’, the pastoral suburb of Camberwell, in a cottage loaned to them by their close friend, the socialist Peter Imandt. By September she was attempting to crawl and jump, as her elder sister wrote in a letter to their father who was visiting Engels in Manchester. It seemed she was also an early starter in romance. Jenny reported Tussy ‘quite in raptures when the little crucked [sic] greengrocer calls . . . I think, this man is her first amour.’20 Marx might have hoped the greengrocer wasn’t calling by for the settlement of his accounts.

  Möhme and Lenchen bought on tick against future income promised from two windfall legacies due to Möhme from the death of both her Uncle George and one of her Scottish relatives. The Marxes spent the money several times over before it finally arrived. Marx urged Jenny to think about finding a new home. Eleanor’s ebullience was making the Soho garret feel even more cramped. ‘The elder girls’, as their mother wrote to a friend, ‘foster and fondle her with almost motherly care. It is true that there can hardly be a more lovable child, so pretty, simple and good-natured.’21

  Eleanor’s gregarious disposition buffered the cold front of Möhme’s anguish at the loss of ‘that truest and best of mothers’,22 Caroline von Westphalen, in July 1856. Tussy’s first journey out of England was at the age of seventeen months, when Möhme took the three girls to Trier in the Rhineland. Eighty-one-year-old Caroline gave her blessing to Jenny and the grandchildren and closed her eyes for the last time. Her modest legacy of a few hundre
d thalers was divided between Jenny and her brother Edgar.

  Shortly after their return from Trier in September, Möhme found a small house in Kentish Town. Tussy’s family moved into 9 Grafton Terrace23 at the end of September when she was twenty-one months old. ‘It is a truly princely dwelling compared with the holes we used to live in,’ Möhme wrote contentedly to a friend, ‘and although it did not cost us more than £40 to furnish it from top to bottom (second hand junk helped a lot) I really felt magnificent at first in our snug parlour.’24 There were other forms of snugness: Tussy’s parents put their new separate bedroom to good use and her mother immediately became pregnant. She miscarried.

  The ‘princely dwelling’ that housed Tussy’s emergence into self-consciousness was a small suburban brick home of eight modest-sized rooms spread over a basement, ground floor and two upper storeys. Inside were the new luxuries of gaslight and a kitchen with cold running water. The small garden backed on to open fields and, at the Haverstock Hill end of the terrace, a municipal dump for industrial rubbish from new building development, railway cutting and sewer works. For the first time in London, the family had its own front door on to the street, set into an ornamented façade. Grafton Terrace was a short row of new-build homes classified as ‘3rd class houses’, in the middle of an incomplete housing development contracted in the 1840s when the introduction of overground commuter trains made Kentish Town accessible to central London.

  The street was unpaved and unlit when the Marxes arrived, and the house was a bargain due to its unfinished surroundings. Marx grumbled about his exile from his Soho social life, socialist clubs and favourite pubs, but despite the removal of these agreeable distractions from working on his book about the scientific laws of political economy, there were many benefits to this newfound suburban seclusion. Tussy’s father now had his own study and separate hearth. All the family was delighted by its new proximity to Hampstead Heath, its fresh air, wildness and elevated vistas an almost magical escape from a decade in the denlands of Soho.