Eleanor Marx

by Rachel Holmes

  At chess, she excelled. In Mohr’s study there was always a game on the go between them. ‘She is’, Möhme boasted, ‘a first-rate chess player and Mr Wilhelm Pieper came off so badly against his opponent that he lost his temper.’7 Möhme’s impatience with the ineffectual Pieper must have made Tussy’s victory all the sweeter. To her delight, her father also grouched at her chess prowess. ‘I am getting on very well with my chess,’ she reported to Uncle Lion, ‘I nearly always win and when I do Papa is so cross.’8 Tussy had clearly picked up some Mohr-beating moves from Lenchen.

  Tussy’s love of fairy stories, histories and adventure novels teeming with military campaigns, guerrilla combat and piracy combined with her love of Shakespeare’s history plays ably equipped her to understand the strategies of the chess board. From Engels she knew the story of the origins of chess.9 He loaned her Firdousi’s Sháh-Námah – Lives of the Kings – teasing that she would have a job getting through such a long, multi-canto work. Chess, Tussy learned from Firdousi’s preamble to the tale, was introduced into Persia from India. Like China, the Middle East and Indian subcontinent were established early in the geography of Tussy’s imagination. All of these parts of the world would play key roles in the politics and passions of her adulthood, but it was the Middle East and Palestine that would figure most distinctly.

  But in 1864 Tussy was looking west. Her father and Engels had been writing extensively about the American Civil War since its outbreak in 1861. Now Tussy joined in, feeling strongly that she needed to share her opinions directly with the president. ‘I remember, I felt absolutely convinced that Abraham Lincoln badly needed my advice as to the war, and long letters would I indite to him, all of which Mohr, of course, had to read and post.’10 In fact, Mohr never posted the letters, but kept them to show to Engels, to the great amusement of them both.

  Abraham Lincoln’s self-appointed Special Adviser in London also shared her views on the conduct of war with Lion Philips: ‘My dear Uncle . . . What do you think of affairs in America? I think the Federals are safe, and though the Confederates drive them back every now and then, I am sure they will win in the end.’11 Six days after USS Kearsage sank the British-backed Confederate commerce-raider CSS Alabama12 off Cherbourg, a jubilant Tussy further remarked to her uncle, ‘Were you not delighted about the Alabama? Of course you had known all about it; at all events a Politician like you ought to.’13

  Tussy’s letters to Lion Philips illustrate how clearly her young mind has grasped Britain’s complicity in the slave trade and her natural allegiance to the Union cause. The seafaring adventure of the Alabama incident united two of her favourite themes: the American blood-brother theme of Fenimore Cooper, and the lusty sea-battles between merchant, mercenary and naval ships of Captain Marryat.

  Along with her growing interest in the American war, Tussy was fascinated by the visit to London in the spring of Giuseppe Garibaldi, republican leader of the Italian Risorgimento. Following his month-long stay in Tyneside in 1854 on his way back from South America and New York, Garibaldi was already a popular figure with working men and women in northern British cities; now the working classes of London received the great Italian with ecstatic enthusiasm. Vast crowds of republican Londoners poured on to the capital’s streets, marshalled, as the New York Times sneered, by ‘the refuse of the trade societies’ and ‘noisy, blaring bands’.14

  Marx and Engels followed Garibaldi’s progress systematically from his conquest of Sicily with his volunteer Redshirt army in May 1860 and wrote political journalism on this and his campaign to take Rome in 1862: Roma o Morte – Rome or death. The quintessential romantic hero, Garibaldi was Tussy’s first revolutionary idol. Given her support for Abraham Lincoln and the Union cause, she doubtless approved of Garibaldi’s public offer to fight in the US Army.

  Whilst Tussy improved her chess game, dished out political advice to Abe Lincoln and practised her gymnastics, Möhme continued to decorate Modena Villas. She was nesting, ‘and instead of being obliged to furnish as before in the most sparing fashion,’ as she told Ernestine, ‘this time we set aside something more for the furniture and the decorations, so that we can receive anyone without embarrassment. I thought it better to put the money to this use,’ she adds endearingly, ‘than to fritter it away piecemeal on trifles.’15 Their parents seemed to be trying to compensate Laura and Jennychen for their childhood privations.

  Jenny and Karl were determined to expand the social horizons of their now nineteen- and twenty-year-old elder daughters. They proposed holding a proper ‘ball’ at Modena Villas. Invitations were sent to about fifty of their friends and, on 12 October, they threw open the new house with a great party for the young people, who danced until breakfast time. Tussy got to throw her own impromptu children’s gathering for all her friends the next day, feasting on the leftovers – though doubtless she’d been up all night with the grown-ups too. Jenny’s intentions in organising this party were clear, as she explained to Ernestine: ‘It has become possible to provide the girls with a pleasant and respectable setting, so appointed that now and again they can receive their English friends without fear or shame, we had placed them in a false position and the young are still thin-skinned and sensitive.’16

  This fun revived the spirits and health of the whole family. Practically speaking Modena Villas was in a healthier, elevated position, freestanding and with a well-laid-out garden and clear view directly on to Hampstead Heath. The air was fresher than in Kentish Town and Soho. However, all their spending, not to mention the three-year lease on the new house, exceeded the actual sum of Marx’s maternal legacy. Had it not been for the unexpected death of their dear friend Lupus – Wilhelm Wolff – they would have been on their uppers once again before the year was out.

  A farmer’s son and student revolutionary from Silesia who spent four years in a Prussian prison for his defence of freedom of speech and the press, Lupus met the Marxes through the Communist League in Brussels in 1845 and remained ‘on the closest terms’ with them and Engels until his death from a cerebral haemorrhage on 9 May 1864. ‘With him,’ Engels wrote in his biography of Lupus, ‘Marx and I lost our most faithful friend, and the German revolution a man of irreplaceable worth.’17

  A committed believer in liberation through education, Lupus dedicated his post-activist life to private tutoring in Blackburn, to where he moved in the 1850s after failing to raise the means to emigrate to America. Fond of children and without his own, Lupus cared particularly for the Marx sisters and was greatly cheered by the letters Tussy wrote to him through what turned out to be his final illness.

  Lupus continued teaching up to the end and bequeathed the parsimonious savings from his annual salary of £60 per year to the Marxes. He left a handsome estate of £825 to the family – almost a third greater than the £580 Marx inherited from his mother. Volume I of Capital is dedicated to Wolff, ‘My unforgettable friend; intrepid, faithful, noble protagonist of the proletariat.’ It was appropriate acknowledgment that Lupus’s generosity ensured the completion of the book by supporting the Marx family at a critical time.

  Eleanor expressed an instinctive empathy with Lupus when he was dying, just as she had been concerned about Engels when Mary died the previous year. Aged nine, her ready force of feeling for other people starts to take distinct shape as a defining characteristic of her personality. Here was the dynamic contradiction of one of Tussy’s greatest strengths combined with a potentially perilous weakness – an overdeveloped ability to empathise, too much feeling. The weakness of her primary instinct for self-preservation and good old Darwinian self-interest was badly aligned to the contemporary historical conditions of a culture enforcing self-sacrifice and self-abnegation in women. Her father and mother probably realised this long before she did.

  But although she was naturally too nice, Tussy was neither a simpering nor a saccharine child. Physically robust and fearlessly brave to the point of risk, her empathy was direct, big-hearted and entirely sincere. She hated to see things
suffer and was carefully protective of her set of dolls and the family’s seven pets.

  What prevented Tussy from the immense dullness of being too good and tempered her unrestrained emotional nature was her fine humour and sense of the comedic. No possible joke could be left unexplored. Every opportunity for a pun should be pursued, and her poor spelling gave rise to a steady stream of malapropisms and unintentionally poetic turns of phrase. She played with words as easily as she played with her kittens, puppies, dolls and stamp collection.

  Tussy was quick to sniff out posers and didn’t suffer fools. Her droll response to the death of Mohr’s erstwhile friend Ferdinand Lassalle is a case in point. Lassalle was a longtime comrade and family friend who had been very generous with financial assistance, but he and Marx fell out irrevocably in 1862 over growing political differences and what Marx regarded as Lassalle’s absurd self-interest and ambition. He nevertheless regretted the news that Lassalle had been wounded fatally in yet another of his many duels over women. Lassalle’s serial romances were well known in the family; as Laura remarked, he would declare to every lady that he could love her only for six weeks. To which the sanguine Tussy retorted, ‘So he is warranted for six weeks.’18

  Lassalle’s nationalistic egomania was utterly opposed to Marx and Engels’s belief in the urgent need to establish an international organisation of workers in order to oppose the forces of nationalism and capitalism. On 28 September 1864 Marx went to St Martin’s Hall in Long Acre to attend the founding meeting of the International Working Men’s Association (IWMA). The gathering elected a committee that was directed to prepare provisional rules and a constitution. The committee comprised twenty-one Englishmen, ten Germans, nine French, six Italians, two Poles and two Swiss.

  Marx wrote the First International’s Provisional Rules, approved by the Provisional Committee on 1 November 1864 and published as a pamphlet and in the press the same month. He wrote them in English, and they are a concise statement of the purpose and objectives of the organisation:

  Considering, That the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working class themselves; That the struggle for the emancipation of the working classes means not a struggle for class privileges and monopolies, but for equal rights and duties, and the abolition of all class rule; That the economical subjection of the man of labour to the monopoliser of the means of labour, that is, the sources of life, lies at the bottom of servitude in all its forms of all social misery, mental degradation, and political dependence; That the economical emancipation of the working classes is therefore the great end to which every political movement ought to be subordinate as a means; That all efforts aiming at the great end have hitherto failed from the want of solidarity between the manifold divisions of labour in each country, and from the absence of a fraternal bond of union between the working classes of different countries; That the emancipation of labour is neither a local nor a national, but a social problem, embracing all countries in which modern society exists, and depending for its solution on the concurrence, practical and theoretical, of the most advanced countries; That the present revival of the working classes in all the most industrious countries of Europe, while it raises a new hope, gives solemn warning against a relapse into the old errors and calls for the immediate combination of all disconnected movements; For these reasons – The undersigned members of the committee, holding its powers by resolution of the public meeting held on September 28, 1864, at St Martin’s Hall, London, have taken the steps necessary for founding the Working Men’s International Association; They declare that this International Association and all societies and individuals adhering to it, will acknowledge truth, justice, and morality, as the basis of their conduct towards each other, and towards all men, without regard to colour, creed or nationality; They hold it the duty of a man to claim the rights of a man and a citizen, not only for himself, but for every man who does his duty. No rights without duties; no duties without rights.19

  Fine words to live by. Or to rebel against, if written by your own father.

  The programme of the International ‘is not a mere improvement that is contemplated,’ said a leader in The Times of London four years later, ‘but nothing less than a regeneration, and that not of one nation only, but of mankind. This is certainly the most extensive aim ever contemplated by any institution, with the exception, perhaps, of the Christian Church.’20 Tussy, as we have already seen, dispensed with Christianity at the age of six. These provisional rules of the International were the articles of faith by which she was to try and lead her life.

  The principle of internationalism in a socialist form was to be at the heart of Eleanor’s existence. In the 1860s the proletariat regrouped all over the industrialised world. Proletariat, at that time, meant the people – everyone who was not gentry, aristocrat or, in a nutshell, amongst the ruling classes. As the principles of the IWMA written by Marx lay out, the social and economic problems suffered by the labouring underclasses were neither just local nor national, but included all societies in which modern industrialisation existed. Between the 1840s and 1860s modern capitalism had developed into an international force, therefore socialist organisation to manage and resist its consequences needed to be international too. There could not be capitalism in one country; nor could there be socialism in one country, or city states of socialism. The capitalist economy changed in several substantial ways in this period.21 The first industrial revolution was driven by new forms of power: electricity, oil, turbines and the internal combustion engine. From the 1860s this was superseded by a new technological era, with machinery based on new materials such as steel and alloys and new science-based industries like the organic chemical industry. Domestic consumer markets emerged, driven by sheer demographic growth and rising mass incomes in the United States. This was the beginning of the age of mass production: consumer capitalism and market globalisation had arrived.

  Proletarians and their supporters in all industrial countries needed to coordinate their efforts and organise collectively. As 1848 showed everyone, disconnected national movements could not succeed. In Britain, many people from previous socialist-inspired campaigns joined this new attempt to create an international socialist movement. British Chartists and Forty-Eighters from the European revolutions were key amongst them, and Eleanor’s father was their leader – as an organisation the IWMA became known as Karl Marx’s First International. Leaders of the English working-class movement were frequent visitors to the Marx home, including journalist Ernest Jones; Chartist, socialist and old family friend from the 1840s Julian Harney; and ‘the aged patriarch of socialism’, the great Robert Owen.22

  There is no neat story of the origins and rise of British socialism qua socialism in Britain because by character socialism was a combustion of widespread social, political and industrial activism and cultural engagement, made up of broad alliances of radicalism from industrial unionists and pro-statist democrats to anti-statist anarchists. As a general overview, British Chartism grew into socialism. The beginnings of unionism lay partly in the early co-operative movements of socialist idealism, but were not confined to it. Mass urbanisation of the former peasantry and appalling conditions in unregulated modern factories brought many different interest groups into what, in the 1860s, were still nationally uncoordinated trade union campaigns. British Trade Unionism became a unified movement from the 1860s to the 1880s because of the transnational European ‘socialist international’ and its filial relations with American and colonial organisation, such as in India and Australia.

  ‘The proletariat, like the bourgeoisie, existed only conceptually as an international fact.’23 Marx and Engels wrote in The Communist Manifesto that ‘working men have no country’,24 but for many people, political consciousness was always in some way or another nationally defined. However, there were many practical aspects of labour and market organisation that could be addressed and tackled. Many of the issues that led to the unions are famously depicted in Dickens’s Har
d Times, published the year before Eleanor’s birth. Despite the collapse of British Chartism in the 1840s and the failure of the Communist League in the 1850s, Britain had one of the strongest traditions of working-class organisation in the world. Outside of Britain, the United States and Australia, trade unions and strikes were legally prohibited – banned by the state – in most of Europe and its colonies. As a result, if workers in Britain and America went on strike to improve pay and conditions, employers and shareholders would ship in pressed labour from continental Europe and the colonies, where strikes were banned. This successfully undermined industrial action in the countries where it was most organised – Britain and America. One of the very workable and practical objectives of the IWMA and the First International was to put an end to this divide and rule attitude to the global labour force.

  The founding of the IWMA, the First International and the rise of the new trade unions movements around the world were a political progression from the experiences of the 1848 nationalist revolutions, driven largely by Forty-Eighters who, like the Marxes, were refugees and exiles of this earlier failed social uprising. Nine years old when her father went off to the founding meeting of the IWMA, Tussy soaked up the atmosphere, conversations and events around her during these formative years. She was a child of the age of collectivism and internationalism. These precepts did not only shape the external events of her life, they directly shaped her mind and personality. Eleanor’s internationalism started in her family.