Eleanor Marx

by Rachel Holmes

  Brittle paper, drier ink; Tussy’s 150-year-old letters, held in the hand, still seem to crackle with energy. Her script is generous in size and forthright in proportion. Paper and ink, we get the sense, were not items in short supply in this household. Tussy treated them as toys and tools, not a luxury. Her family home was often short of food, fuel, clothing, shoes, furniture and medicines, but nowhere can be found a lament for lack of paper or ink. Growing up in a trilingual household, she had an acute ear, whilst her erratic spelling as a youngster made her sensitive to the puns, multiple meanings and poetic transpositions revealed by slips and malapropisms.

  At the beginning of 1861 the New York Daily Tribune turned its attention to the impending American Civil War. Reducing its coverage of Europe, it halved its commissions from Marx, immediately cutting the family income by 50 per cent. Marx went to visit Uncle Lion in Zaltbommel and his mother in Trier to try and raise loans against his inheritance. Henriette refused to help him. She was unwavering in her complaint that her son would do better to earn money rather than to keep writing about it unprofitably. Uncle Lion resolved Marx’s cash-flow problem by agreeing to a bridging loan for his nephew against his future inheritance.

  Her father’s absence for nearly three months prompted Tussy’s curiosity about the Dutch relatives who were keeping her beloved Dada away for so long. ‘My grandmother,’ she wrote later in an account of her Dutch ancestry, ‘belonged by descent to an old Hungarian Jewish family driven by persecution to Holland . . . known by the name of Pressburg, really the town from which they came. These Pressburgs, of course, intermarried, and my grandmother’s family name was afterwards Philips.’19

  In 1879 Uncle Lion’s grandsons, the brothers Gerard and Anton Philips, were fascinated by the incandescent lamps demonstrated by Thomas Edison; they started experimenting with electric light with a view to developing it commercially. Financed by their inheritance from their magnate grandfather, the brothers set up the first Philips factory. In 1891 the family founded the company of Philips Lamps in Eindhoven to meet the growing demand for light bulbs following the commercialisation of electricity. The company remains known as Philips to this day, the multinational electronics company worked on and established by Tussy’s Dutch cousins during her twenties and thirties.

  The going at home was tough whilst Mohr was away. Lenchen fell ill, and Möhme ran out of money. Ashamed, she had to ask Engels for help until Marx returned, an episode witnessed by the perceptive Tussy. Their economic situation worsened in 1862 when Marx’s work for the Tribune ceased altogether. Tussy burrowed into her adventure novels and wondered at the hushed discussions between her mother and Lenchen about Marianne Kreuz, their maidservant. Marianne, thought to be Lenchen’s younger sister or cousin, had joined the Grafton Terrace household in 1860. In their present circumstances, a maidservant was an unaffordable luxury. In fact, they were helping Marianne conceal an unwanted pregnancy. The rent was a year in arrears. Möhme was battling a clinical depression tactfully diagnosed by Dr Allen as a stress-related illness, producing tension between her and Marx.

  Despite domestic problems, Marx’s work on the draft of the first volume of Capital seemed to be progressing well. But even he had to admit that this time they were sliding too close to penury. Much to Engels’s amusement he received a letter from Marx telling him that he had just applied for a clerical job with an English railway company. His mother’s nagging that he find a proper job to provide for his family seemed to have prodded his conscience. Fortunately, Capital avoided the fate of being shunted into the sidings of history thanks to its author’s illegible handwriting. The railway company rejected Marx’s submission because they couldn’t read his application for the job.

  Unlike the hiring committee of the English railway company, Tussy could decipher her father’s handwriting. This unremarkable aspect of the relationship between father and daughter might appear insignificant, had it not changed the course of history. The only other people who could reliably transcribe Marx’s writing were his wife and Engels. In the meantime Marx’s most valuable asset, which Engels called his mighty ‘brainbox’, was functioning highly effectively, and he was making what Möhme optimistically described as ‘gigantic strides towards completion’,20 despite his persistent liver trouble. Laura started going with Mohr to the British Museum to help him with his research. Meanwhile her sister Jenny’s health caused great concern. She was rapidly losing weight, and her obstinate cough wouldn’t go away. It didn’t occur to anyone that Marx’s smoking had anything to do with it.

  Dr Allen insisted that Jennychen needed sea air and bathing to restore her health, but there was no money for trips to resorts. In early July an unexpected windfall arrived from their friend Berta Markheim. Berta, Jenny and Karl had become friends in 1852, when the German writer spent some time in London. At that time she was still Berta Levy, sister to the well-known poet, novelist and librettist Julius Rodenberg. In 1854 Berta married businessman and gymnastics pioneer Joseph Markheim. Hearing of the Marx family’s financial straits, Berta dispatched a kind letter and postal order to Jenny, who was surprised that Berta had been thinking of her ‘with love, loyalty and sympathy, without so much as a reminder on my part’.21 Berta’s generosity enabled Jenny to take the children for a holiday to Ramsgate whilst Mohr went on another fundraising expedition to the Netherlands and Rhineland. Jenny never knew that her husband had secretly prompted the Markheims’ act of generosity.

  This was Tussy’s second seaside visit. Her first had been a rainy fortnight in Hastings when she was five. Built in the 1840s, and one of the earliest railways in England, the London to Ramsgate line made quick, cheap travel to the coast possible for southern urbanites. The Ramsgate line terminated at the harbour – a working port and pleasureground. Tussy’s first views were of trim-skiffs (paddle steamers), tugs, boatmen and the lighthouse, framed by clifftops and enticing seascapes topped with tall-ship masts. Popular since the Napoleonic period when it served as a garrison town, Ramsgate, ‘a delightful and beautifully situated spot’22 according to Tussy’s mother, attracted holiday makers of all classes and notable visitors such as Coleridge, Queen Victoria, Prime Minister Lord Liverpool and George Canning.

  Lenchen encouraged Jenny to bathe her smallpox scars in the healing salty sea.23 ‘We spent our time,’ Jenny wrote to Berta, ‘either beside, upon or in the sea.’24 The five women enjoyed three blissful weeks of swimming, reading, walking, shell-seeking, munching paper cones of cockles and clams and ice cream, and people-watching. Jennychen stopped coughing and gained weight. The Ramsgate holiday was the high point of 1862. In August Library, Ernestine and little Alice returned to Germany after twelve years in exile. Tussy and Alice became penfriends, but missed each other.

  Möhme went to Paris to try and secure a loan from Monsieur Arbabanel, a banker she and Karl had got to know when they lived there. Monsieur Arbabanel was paralysed by a stroke a few hours before she arrived and she returned home empty-handed on 23 December, to learn that Marianne Kreuz had died the same day from a heart condition diagnosed earlier in the year by Dr Allen. As she could not be buried until after Christmas, her body stayed at Grafton Terrace until her funeral on 27 December. With a corpse in the parlour and money tight, it was a glum Christmas.

  During the night of 6 January 1863 Mary Burns, Engels’s beloved, died suddenly. In shock, Engels wrote the next day from their shared home in Manchester:

  Dear Moor,

  Mary is dead. Last night she went to bed early and, when Lizzy wanted to go to bed shortly before midnight, she found her already dead. Quite suddenly. Heart failure or an apoplectic stroke. I wasn’t told till this morning; on Monday evening she was still quite well. I simply can’t convey what I feel. The poor girl loved me with all her heart.

  So ended their relationship of two decades, begun in 1842 when Engels was twenty-two and his father sent him to England to learn the textile business. Engels admired Mary for her inborn, passionate feeling for her class and her staunch l
oyalty: she ‘stood by me in all critical moments more strongly than all the aesthetic nicey-niceness and wiseacreism of the “eddicated” and “senty-mental” daughters of the bourgeoisie could have done’.25

  How Mary and Engels met is unconfirmed, but it seems that she and her sister Lydia (Lizzy) were working as mill-hands in an Ermen & Engels factory in Manchester. ‘She was,’ Tussy later recalled, ‘a very pretty, witty, and altogether charming girl . . . a Manchester (Irish) factory girl, quite uneducated, though she could read, and write a little.’26 Tussy said that her parents were ‘very fond’ of Mary, and spoke of her with the ‘greatest affection’.27

  Recent work by Roy Whitfield and Tristram Hunt28 has done much to reconstruct the life of Mary Burns and restore her significance to history. Her role in politicising Engels is proven. Engels took Mary to bed; Mary took Engels to the tenements and to the heart of the Irish immigrant community of Manchester. She showed and explained to him the conditions of factory and domestic workers. Her role was directive and Socratic.29

  Two years after meeting Mary Burns, in 1844, Engels produced The Condition of the Working Class in England. This detailed social survey of the ‘condition, sufferings and struggles of the working classes of Britain and their middle-class opponents’30 produced a critique of ‘the cause of contemporary class antagonisms’31 and his condemnation of capitalism. Engels left England with his political consciousness awakened by Mary Burns and revolutionised by his experience of the world into which she had initiated and guided him. This was not exactly what Engels père had had in mind when he sent his greenhorn son to Manchester to study the family business.

  Mary later joined Engels and the Marxes in Brussels. The couples lived in adjoining apartments and Jenny and Mary became friends. Möhme liked Mary, and respected her free union with Engels. Contemptuous of the sexual double standards of ‘bourgeois nicey-niceyness’, Jenny refused to acknowledge or greet any of the mistresses, chatelaines and latest passing fancies the jovial philandering Engels had a habit of bringing to public social events. Jenny was as unbending in her loyalty to Mary as Engels was to Marx, and Engels knew better than to expect Jenny to act the polite hypocrite in these circumstances. When Engels and Lizzy Burns later moved to London, it was Jenny who house-hunted and found a home for them, located as close to her own family as possible. The relationship between Engels, Mary and subsequently Lizzy Burns played a crucial role in Tussy’s development.32

  Engels famously received a breathtakingly insensitive response from Marx to the news of Mary’s death. Mohr sent a letter prefixed with only the most abrupt commiseration, ‘She was so good-natured, witty and closely attached to you.’33 Without further solace Mohr launched into a detailed list of his own current calamities – lack of money, inability to get credit, school fees, rent, impossibility of getting on with work, unpaid bills, lack of presentable clothes, shoes in hock – concluding with the great flourish that surely it would have been preferable for his own mother, who ‘has had her fair share of life’,34 to die rather than Mary. ‘It is dreadfully selfish of me to tell you about these horreurs at this time,’ Marx acknowledges. ‘But it is a homeopathic remedy. One calamity is a distraction from the other. And, in the final reckoning, what else can I do?’35 Like all mumbo-jumbo homeopathic remedies, Marx’s prescription was useless. Inexcusable as his letter was, it’s odd that Marx’s postscript is never remarked upon. ‘What arrangements will you now make about your establishment? It’s terribly hard for you, since with Mary you had a home to which you were at liberty to retreat from the human imbroglio, whenever you chose.’36

  Engels waited nearly a week before replying. As the friends usually corresponded daily, his silence was eloquent, as was his unusually formal address:

  Dear Marx

  You will find it quite in order that, this time, my own misfortune and the frosty view you took of it should have made it positively impossible for me to reply to you any sooner. All my friends, including philistine acquaintances, have on this occasion, which in all conscience must needs affect me deeply, given me proof of greater sympathy and friendship than I could have looked for. You thought it a fit moment to assert the superiority of your ‘dispassionate turn of mind’. So be it, then!37

  Contrite, Marx wrote a penitent response, a rare apology that the big-hearted Engels readily accepted, confirming their friendship saved and restored, and signifying business was as usual by sending a cheque for £100 that averted Marx’s imminent bankruptcy. Engels was cash-strapped at the time, so stole a cheque from Ermen & Engels and made it over to Marx, ‘an exceedingly daring move on my part’.38 This was the first and last time there was a threat of a rift between the two.

  As children do, Tussy played a vital role in tempering the desolation Engels experienced following Mary’s sudden death. Like many other youngsters of the 1860s, Tussy was seized by the new craze for stamp-collecting. Engels sent her new additions for her album and enjoyed her enthusiastic thank-you letters. When he wrote to Marx, he enclosed more stamps for her, revealing the source of his supply: ‘A great deal of thieving in this article is going on at the office just now.’39

  In this way, Mary’s death at the beginning of Tussy’s eighth year strengthened her relationship with Engels, her ‘second father’. It was the substantive beginning of an intimate relationship that shaped both of their lives, and political history.

  On 30 November Henriette Marx died, bequeathing £600 to her indigent son, the remainder of his legacy. Marx was now an orphan, and Tussy without grandparents.

  5

  Abraham Lincoln’s Adviser

  One cold Saturday in early 1864 Jenny took ‘the whole gang’1 to the West End to see the American actress Kate Bateman in Leah the Forsaken, the role that was making her famous on both sides of the Atlantic. The previous year Bateman had become the first actress to play a Jewish woman on the American stage.2 The twenty-one-year-old, Baltimore-born actress was the daughter of a theatrical manager and started her career touring with P. T. Barnum. New York critics panned the play but theatregoers loved it; it became an instant hit, transferring to London in the winter of 1863.

  Eleanor was mesmerised by Leah the Forsaken. This was one of her very first experiences of a new drama. Kate Bateman sounded and looked to Tussy like her sisters. And, perhaps, a version of her possible future self. Tussy knew the biblical story of the sisters Leah and Rachel, wives of Jacob, and recognised instinctively the play’s depiction of virulent anti-Semitism. She already knew by heart Shylock’s speech from The Merchant of Venice.

  The role of Leah became a popular star vehicle for leading actresses and held the stage for the next three decades. There were to be four productions of the play in London during Tussy’s life and she would see all of them – most memorably in 1892 when the lead role was played by the Jewish star Sarah Bernhardt.

  George Curtis, political editor of Harper’s Weekly, drew an analogy between the depiction of the persecution of the Jews in the drama and the persecution of black people in the Confederacy. Mid-war, Curtis wrote, ‘Go and see Leah and have the lesson burned in upon your mind, which may help to save the national health and mind.’3 This analogy between anti-Semitism and slavery is unlikely to have occurred to Tussy as she sat captivated at the London premiere of Leah, but she absorbed much of the zeitgeist from family trips to the theatre.

  This happy outing ended with the rare treat of a cab home. It was the highlight of an otherwise tough, freezing winter for the women. Tussy celebrated both Christmas and her ninth birthday without her father, who was away for nearly two months settling his mother’s estate with Uncle Lion and condoling with his aunts. Tussy missed her father and eagerly anticipated his homecoming, as Möhme described to Mohr:

  The little one can scarcely wait for you to return and says daily, my dada is coming today. She enjoys her holidays thoroughly and since she did not have a Christmas tree, her sisters made her more than 20 dolls in all sorts of costumes. Amongst the grotesque figures one
fencer is Ruy Blas and an excellent Chinaman with a long train that the children made from Tussy’s hair and glued on to the bald Kui Kui.4

  In Victor Hugo’s tragic drama set in the reign of Charles II, Ruy Blas is a lowborn poet who dares to love the Queen of Spain. As he’s an indentured commoner, his love is wildly inappropriate. Even Tussy’s dolls were radicals.

  Spring did its job and delivered new beginnings. In March 1864 Henriette’s legacy floated the family into a new house, 1 Modena Villas,5 in Maitland Park Road, Hampstead. It was a large, detached home with the previously unimaginable luxuries of a big garden, conservatory and a study with a park view for Mohr. Möhme was energised by the upturn in their fortunes and the excitement of setting up what she beamingly called the palace. She overspent on new furnishing and interior decorations and became a regular at the local auctions. Jennychen decked out the conservatory with flowers and climbing plants which flourished beneath her green fingers. Best of all, ‘the Medina of the emigration’ or ‘Maidena Villas’, as Engels laughingly dubbed it, was sufficiently spacious for each of the three sisters to have a separate bedroom. Tussy now had her very first room of her own.

  A menagerie of puppies, kittens and birds also took up residence at the new palace. Being the youngest, Tussy was the final arbiter of their names. As if growing into the new space she ‘shot up’ in height and, as her complacent mother reported to Ernestine Liebknecht, ‘engages in a host of unprofitable pursuits’.6 In this as in so many other areas, then, she was clearly emulating her father.

  Chief amongst her unprofitable pursuits at nine years old was her love of chess and gymnastics. Founded by the Swedish, the popularity of gymnastics spread throughout Europe primarily as a physical training method for the military. From the 1820s pioneers of gymnastics campaigned for the benefits of physical training for girls as well as for boys. German immigrants opened the first gym club in Britain in 1860. British interest in gymnastics grew in the 1860s after the Crimean War revealed how grossly unfit British soldiers were. Calisthenics, a feminised version of gymnastics, was invented to deal with the argument that physical exercise was inappropriate for girls. Eleanor was clearly doing more than handstands, forward rolls and cartwheels in the garden; in 1868 her father asked Engels to pay the £1 5s fee for Tussy’s gymnastic course at the German Gymnasium which opened nearby in St Pancras in 1865.