Möhme was depressed by the twin sorrows of the death of her mother and miscarriage. Marx confided to Engels, ‘I do not blame her, under her present auspices, although it annoys me.’25 When the British Museum opened its new rotunda Reading Room in 1857 Marx was able to escape, commuting from Kentish Town directly into Bloomsbury, where he had his lunch at the Museum Tavern on Great Russell Street, frequented also by Conan Doyle and other popular new writers. The linens, old Scottish damask napkins ‘and other small remains of past grandeur’26 all went back to Uncle’s pop-house when their credit ran dry, and this caused Möhme further anxiety.
Laura and Jenny had just started their first schooling at South Hampstead College for Ladies. Run by Misses Boynell and Rentsch, the school was as well-meaning and mediocre as all the other establishments offering unregulated private tuition in a country where there was no formal provision for the education of girls. Prior to this, Jenny and Laura had attended a few terms at a school in Soho and received indifferent coaching from William Pieper, Marx’s hopeless so-called ‘secretary’, who the family nicknamed ‘Fridolin’. Fridolin’s handwriting was as poor as Marx’s and he was a useless administrator. He achieved very little apart from nursing regular hangovers and distracting Marx from his work to discuss literature and philosophy. Möhme used the opportunity of the global recession to dismiss Fridolin. To the background noise of Jenny and Laura thumping out their scales on the very poor piano their father had hired for them, Möhme tidied up her husband’s administration and happily resumed her former role of ‘copying his scrawly articles’.27
Whilst Jenny and Laura learned musical notation, Tussy started to formulate speech. Her father was absorbed by the development of his emerging prodigy. ‘The baby,’ he marvelled, ‘is a remarkably witty fellow and insists that she has got two brains.’28 The witty fellow took to scribbling on the edge of Marx’s letters whilst sitting in his lap at his study desk. Like all of the family and friends, Tussy knew her father by his soubriquet, Mohr – German for ‘Moor’ – the nickname he earned at university on account of his swarthiness and plentiful coal-black beard and moustache. Tussy’s announcement that she was double-brained was coincident with the time of her first conscious memory:
My earliest recollection . . . is when I was about three years old and Mohr . . . was carrying me on his shoulders round our small garden in Grafton Terrace, and putting convolvulus flowers in my brown curls. Mohr was admittedly a splendid horse.29
Putting Marx in harness was a family tradition. Tussy ‘heard tell’ that at Dean Street, Jenny, Laura and her dead brother Edgar would yoke Mohr to chairs which the three of them mounted as their carriage, and make him pull. As the youngest and a later arrival, Tussy got her own mount and his dedicated attention:
Personally – perhaps because I had no sisters of my own age – I preferred Mohr as a riding-horse. Seated on his shoulder holding tight by his great mane of hair, then black, but with a hint of grey, I have had magnificent rides round our little garden and over the fields . . . that surrounded our house at Grafton Terrace.30
Severe whooping cough in the winter of 1858 gave Tussy opportunity to assume dominion of the household: ‘The whole family became my bond slaves and I have heard that as usual in slavery there was general demoralisation.’31 The year started badly, without coal or cash to pay the rental arrears. Whilst Tussy took advantage of being ill to insist on open house for every street child in the neighbourhood to keep her company, her father sent to Engels an itemised account of his debts, lamenting his inability to pay them, ‘even if I were to reduce my expenses to the utmost by, for example, removing the children from school, going to live in a strictly working-class dwelling, dismissing the servants and living on potatoes’.32
The Marxes’ immediate neighbours, a respectably petit-bourgeois master-baker and a builder, were more financially stable than the notorious local philosopher whose finances were so bad that by 1859 he was served with a county court summons at his front door and was trying to stop the gas and water companies cutting off their supply due to unpaid bills.
Oblivious to all these adult adversities spirited Tussy, the suburban barbarian, played on increasingly sturdy and sure legs in the muck, rubble and building refuse of the unfinished housing development. Initially, she played tomboyish games with neighbourhood children, barefoot in the red clay of the unpaved street. By the time she was four, the fields around Grafton Terrace were completely built over and the streets she romped around with the seven children of the master-baker and the builder were paved. Naturally gregarious, Tussy formed a circle of friendship with her little peers, introducing her family to their neighbours – skilled tradesmen, shopkeepers, artisans: working people.
Tussy was ringleader of her playmates, trailing her child troupe through the house and hosting impromptu tea parties of milk, bread and biscuits provided by the indulgent Lenchen. Other children accepted Tussy’s bossiness and tendency to take the lead in all things because she was friendly and unselfconscious. Fun, bold, laughing continuously, she didn’t exclude anyone from the playgroup. Due to her popularity, the Marx family became known to the whole neighbourhood simply as ‘the Tussies’.
But Tussy’s first friend and primary playmate was Marx. If he was an excellent horse, her adult self recalled, her father ‘had a still higher qualification. He was a unique, an unrivalled storyteller.’33 Laura and Jenny told Tussy about how Mohr told them endless tales as they rambled on their long afternoon walks. ‘Tell us another mile,’34 was the cry of the two girls. Previously too small, the witty little fellow with two brains now had legs strong enough to join in the walks. It was Eleanor’s turn to embark on new travels in the imagination with her beloved Dada.
Youngest in the family by a decade and home-schooled by her father, Tussy was as much in the company of grown-ups as her peers. During her fourth and fifth year stories and books became her closest companions and friends. As real as ‘kissing the new carpets’35 and playing with the puppy on the felt hearthrug, the enchanting worlds magically compressed into the books on the second-hand shelves propped in every room in Grafton Terrace flowed into the reality of everyday life. The bookcases could be measured in feet, but the stories within them, as Tussy memorably put it, could be ‘measured by miles’.36
In the company of her father, the tales left the house and took to the hills of nearby Hampstead Heath on their family walks. Carried on Mohr’s shoulders, or her hand nestled safely in his, Tussy absorbed new worlds in words; characters and their adventures taking shape out of the leafy woods and wilderness. After the fecal-stinking midden, slop and smut of their former Soho lodgings, the Hampstead hills were breezy Elysium. It was perfectly sensible to imagine such a verdant fairyland to be the happy hunting ground of supernatural inhabitants and parallel realms.
The tales of the Brothers Grimm, the collected works of Shakespeare and Aristotle, Robinson Crusoe, The Song of the Nibelungs (Das Nibelungenlied) and the recently republished Arabian Nights numbered amongst the classics in the Marx family library. There were stacked serialisations of popular fiction and novels by Balzac, Dickens, Gaskell and Wilkie Collins in the house, and volumes of poetry by Goethe, Shelley, Blake and family friend Uncle Heine. Deep collections of history, science and philosophy – including the works of Hegel, Rousseau, Fourier and Darwin’s recently published On the Origin of Species – held out the promise of mysterious undiscovered terrain for future exploration. The Talmud in Hebrew and Dutch, the Lutheran Bible in German and the King James Version in English sat alongside works on economics and natural sciences.
Everyone in the household was literate. Everything encouraging to the development of Tussy’s mind was placed within reach. No stories, books, ideas or questions were out of bounds. Magazines, periodicals, journals, papers, playbills, handbills, flybills, meeting notices, leaflets, letters, free concert programmes, parliamentary reports, legal tracts, postcards, calling cards, birthday cards, Christmas cards, scrapbooks, notes, notebooks, mu
sic sheets, exercise books bound in Italian marbled boards, blotting paper, reams of writing paper: these were permanent residents of Tussy’s family home. The Marx children were allowed to pick up, read and touch any and all printed words.
In her infant years, the household was short of most things, but books and paper and pencils and ink and nibs and needles, brushes, glue, sewing thread and stubs of charcoal were in plentiful supply. Whatever the other household debts, deficits and scarcity, books, paper and writing materials were as plentiful as the rich deposits in Britain’s great industrial coal pits and the newly discovered gold seams of California.
Möhme noticed immediately her baby daughter’s love of words and tales. ‘The most striking thing about her,’ Jenny wrote to a friend in Germany, ‘is her love for talking and telling stories.’
This she got from the Grimm Brothers, with whom she does not part night or day. We all read her those tales till we are weary, but woe betide us if we leave out a single syllable about the Noisy Goblin, King Brosselbart or Snow White. It is through these tales that the child has learned German, besides English which she breathes here with the air.37
British children usually encountered the amusing and instructive tales of terror by the Brothers Grimm in the English edition published in 1823, translated by London lawyer Edgar Taylor and illustrated wittily by George Cruikshank. Eleanor, the child of parents steeped in central European romanticism, entered the world of Grimm in the original sonorous German.
In these, her first and favourite stories, native imps, pixies, dwarfs, giants, kobolds and brownies returned from the ancient past to enthral her. Supernatural changelings switched places with healthy human babies to boost their puny physique; animals of all sorts talked, sang and went on fur-raising adventures; elves and fairies skipped on sunbeams. Repulsive frogs, wily foxes and beggars turned out to be virtuous, handsome and eligible young princes or marriageable older King Grisly-Beards in disguise.38 Tussy revelled in the account of the princess-sisters who slipped out secretly to dance holes in their slippers every night. There were stories of maidens frozen in eternities of time, betrayed to wicked stepmothers by talking mirrors, who ate poisoned apples, were spied on, tricked, entranced and fell into deep comas, only to be awakened by the reviving kiss of handsome total strangers. Whether princess or peasant, girls were liable to be transformed by fairies into caged nightingales or offered up to a lion for his dinner in exchange for a garden rose.
Grimm tales are often gratifyingly violent and sexual: doves peck out the eyes of wicked stepsisters, first cousins are marriageable, unwanted stepsons are decapitated, witches murder their own daughters, dance to death in red-hot iron slippers, or end up baked alive in the oven. Tussy was absorbed by worlds that sprang such marvels.
As her mother notes, it was from the Brothers Grimm that Tussy got her earliest vernacular German. In the same way, it was from the household bible that she first encountered English poetry. That bible was the complete works of Shakespeare, from which her immigrant father studied and improved his knowledge of the national language of the land that hosted him in his exile. When he arrived in England, Marx had a very limited grasp of English. During the early years of their London life he systematically sought out and classified all Shakespeare’s original expressions in longhand and then memorised them in order to improve his knowledge of the language. Little Laura and Jenny, whose first languages were French and German, bettered their English by reading aloud and performing Shakespeare. Tussy arrived in a family who knew most of Shakespeare’s works by heart. Shakespeare was recited, acted, quoted and debated at the hearth and in the little garden. Tussy’s sister Jenny was particularly smitten by the bard and made a shrine to him in her bedroom, described by her mother as ‘a sort of Shakespeare museum’.39 Avid theatregoers, the Marxes followed all aspects of London theatre life, spending money on cheap tickets instead of food and fuel, arguing over the relative merits of actors Sarah Siddons, Ellen Terry and John Kemble, and reading over Möhme’s drama reviews for the press.
Aeschylus and Shakespeare, Marx explained to tiny Tussy, were ‘the greatest dramatic geniuses humanity ever gave birth to’.40 A quick student with a sharp ear and retentive memory, Tussy learned fast: ‘By the time I was six I knew scene upon scene of Shakespeare by heart.’41 She recalled that her favourite scenes ‘were the soliloquy of Richard III (“I can smile and smile and be a villain,” which I KNOW I loved because I had to have a knife in my hand to say it!) and the scene between Hamlet and his mother!’ Möhme played the queen, and Tussy would declaim, ‘Mother you have my father much offended,’ looking at her father ‘very pointedly’42 when she said it, and then collapsing with laughter.
Tussy inherited Marx’s unconditional love of Shakespeare. The source of the Marx family passion for Shakespeare was Tussy’s maternal grandfather. She would later discover that it was Ludwig von Westphalen who introduced her own father to Homer, Dante and Shakespeare when he was a young Rhineland schoolboy.
As to that other Bible, Christianity, Marx explained to Tussy, figured as an important part of history and a great story cycle alongside all the other great classic texts. Tussy vividly recalled her father telling her the story of Christ: ‘the carpenter whom the rich men killed’.43 Marx christened his baby daughter’s imagination with words that glowed and burned long after the telling: ‘I do not think it could ever have been told so before or since.’44 She remembered too his commentary, recalling his observation that, ‘After all we can forgive Christianity much, because it taught us the worship of the child.’45 Her Protestant mother was baptised at birth and her Jewish-born father was baptised a Lutheran Protestant aged six, but Tussy – like her atheist-born sisters and brothers before her – was never baptised.
Respect for children and their rights was one thing, religious adherence to a monotheistic Abrahamic faith quite another. Tussy could recite tragic Shakespearean soliloquies on state power and regicide long before she first set foot in a church. A family trip to a Catholic church to listen to a free concert of ‘beautiful’ music when she was six brought on unprecedented ‘religious qualms’. Confiding these instantly to her father when they got home, she sat upon his knee as he patiently explained that it was the beautiful music that she could hear calling and not the voice of God; ‘he quietly made everything clear and straight, so that from that hour to this no doubt could ever cross my mind again.’46 Tussy was interested in the action-packed, exemplary stories of Jesus and the prophets, but demonstrated no further childhood curiosity about the questions of the Christian Trinity or existence of this particular God. Her ideal Father was already in the house. She had no need of reference to another.
It is easy to underestimate how unusual and radical it was to bring up such an unreligious child in the middle of the nineteenth century. Tussy was never required to pray, sing to God or go to church.
Marx read aloud to his children: ‘Thus to me, as to my sisters before me, he read the whole of Homer, the whole of Das Nibelungenlied, Gudrun, Don Quixote, the Arabian Nights, etc.’47 For a long time Getwerg Albericht, heroic superdwarf of Das Nibelungenlied (Song of the Nibelungs), gave Tussy her nickname at home.48 The fearsome Albericht, ‘trusty treasurer’ to the German folk hero Siegfried, guards the Nibelung treasure locked deep in the heart of the mountain. ‘Dwarf Albericht’ was an entertaining soubriquet for Tussy, poking fun at her questioning, combative and contrarian spirit, and acknowledging her trusted status in the Marx household as her father’s most devoted lieutenant, despite being its most diminutive member. Loyal Albericht is Siegfried’s little man: ‘Whatever Siegfried wanted the dwarf was ready to do.’49 But Albericht the bold is no slavish follower – he tests his master and his loyalty has to be earned.
We know from her partiality to Richard III that Tussy liked swaggering with swords and daggers, and like the Getwerg Albericht she kept the whole castle awake with her forcefield of energy – chattering, gymnastic tumbling, pranks and uproarious laughter.
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sp; It’s pleasing to think of the Nibelung treasure buried deep inside the mountain as a metaphor for Marx scribbling away in his upstairs study on what Engels called his ‘fat book’ – his historical and scientific exploration of political economy and the workings of capital. Tussy had dolls, kittens and puppies, but her father’s study was her playroom. Later, she marvelled at her father’s tolerance for her constant disruption of his work and thinking, remembering ‘the infinite patience and sweetness with which . . . he would answer every question, and never complain of an interruption. Yet it must have been no small nuisance to have a small child chattering while he was working at his great book. But the child was never allowed to think she was in the way.’50
Whilst her father worked on the masterwork that became Capital: Critique of Political Economy he created a story saga for Tussy whose antihero Hans Röckle became her great favourite. A swarthy, black-eyed, bearded magician who spends most of his time conjuring wonders at the workbench in his cluttered, fabulous toyshop, Hans Röckle bore a striking resemblance to his creator. ‘Of the many wonderful tales Mohr told me, the most wonderful, the most delightful one was Hans, Röckle.’ It was magical, lively, funny, scary, mysterious, thrilling, by turns tragic and moving, and Tussy eagerly anticipated each instalment. ‘It went on for months and months, it was a whole series of stories . . . so full of poetry, wit, of humour!’ Hans Röckle, as Tussy describes, was Mohr’s own dark materials, his Karl Marx and the Philosopher’s Stone:
Eleanor Marx Page 3
