Eleanor Marx

by Rachel Holmes

  There is an intriguing photograph dating from this time of the founding of the First International. The image captures Tussy, Jennychen, Laura, Marx and Engels posed in front of a background garden scene of trees and a white picket fence. Whilst both Mohr and Tussy’s ‘second father’ are present, neither of her mothers appears in the picture. The family portrait seems incomplete without them. How incomplete would not be visible to Tussy for another thirty years, when this rare image revealed secrets obscured by the framing of the photograph.

  Tussy sits centre stage in a jaunty straw boater between her sisters, who are dressed in matching crinolines and awful flowery hats. Marx and Engels stand behind them. Marx, Jennychen and Laura look directly at the camera shutter; Tussy and Engels look away. She looks only fleetingly poised; Laura clasps her hand, as if restraining her. Tussy’s summer dress reveals bare legs and ankle boots. She wears a too-big hand-me-down jacket over her sundress. The outsize arm seam slips over her shoulder clownishly and the wide cuff flaps around her thin wrist. It might of course be a jacket adapted for the ceremonial wardrobe of the Empress of China. Tussy’s face has an expression of lively amusement and unmistakable impishness.

  She looks like trouble.

  The only known surviving photograph of the three siblings together, this image illustrates strikingly the age difference of a decade between Tussy and her now grown-up sisters. Finding gainful employment was now amongst the questions uppermost in Jennychen’s mind. Secretly, she sought opportunities for work as a governess or personal secretary. As the oldest of the three sisters, she was anxious to help her parents; she was the most acutely aware of the financial brinkmanship on which the family constantly teetered. Jennychen was by this time accompanying her father and Laura to the Reading Room at the British Museum to help them with research and transcription. It was work for which she volunteered and she enjoyed it.

  Despite his own obsessions, Marx never compelled any of his children to follow in the family business, though all of them did. He may also have hoped that Jennychen’s book-worming with him at the library would broaden the scope of her social life, the limitation of which was all too evident at her twenty-first birthday party on 1 May, where the majority of guests were her parents’ friends and political contemporaries, mostly from the IWMA. Gallingly, her younger sister Laura received her first marriage proposal – instantly rejected – at the party.

  The Marx daughters were a catch. You’d wonder why, given their unconventional upbringing and absence of any dowry prospects. No one outside their inner circle knew until much later the extent of financial commitment by Engels and their other friends to supporting the family. Jenny and Laura were not beauties in the way that their mother had been, but they were striking and self-composed and had inherited the charm, wit and vivacity of their parents. They were both well read and highly intelligent and they were the offspring of Europe’s most inspiring and calumniated revolutionary thinker. Depending on where you stood, these attributes were either intriguing or rendered them totally unmarriageable.

  Given that they’d met each other as children, Mohr and Möhme didn’t have much useful experience with which to equip Laura and Jenny for dealing with these circumstances. They were anxious that their daughters did not repeat the errors of their own wayward youth. If they hoped that well-meaning attempts at social engineering like the October party at Modena Villas would put their daughters in the way of a future more secure than their own, they were roundly disappointed. Mohr and Möhme miscalculated on one very crucial point: they were soulmates who set a very fine example of that elusive human state – a truly successful marriage.

  In February 1865 Tussy wrote in confidence to Engels asking him to please send a few bottles of hock and claret for a surprise belated party she and her sisters were planning for Möhme’s birthday, ‘as we are going to give the party ourselves without any help from mama we want it to go off very grandly’.25 Cutely, Eleanor asked Engels for this secret delivery of provisions for her mother in lieu of her own Valentine from him. Engels dispatched the wine immediately and Tussy wrote him a thank-you letter the following day: ‘now we have wine and everything ready for tonight we shall have a jolly time of it.’26

  Throughout 1865 Marx was seriously ill, his health and nerves straining under the pressure of completing the first volume of Capital. He’d been at it for over a decade. What started as a thirty- to fifty-page essay had long ago developed into his life’s work. He was determined to finish the first part by the end of the year and despite his physical infirmity, his ‘brainbox’ was working overtime, fuelled by passion, adrenalin, tobacco, insomnia and the rousing encouragement of his family.

  In December he announced that the first volume was finished. There was no money, therefore no Christmas but the completion of ‘that damned book’ was as fine an advent in their lives as they could wish for. Concurrent with his full draft of the first instalment of Capital, Marx had also started developing his address to the General Council of the IWMA given in June of that year, a speech that later became Value, Price and Profit. These two milestones in the progress of her father’s work accompanied Tussy’s tenth year. She and Volume I of Capital had spent a decade growing up together.

  The year had brought another significant development in the form of a fiancé for Laura. In mid-February 1865 Paul Lafargue, a debonair, wild-haired young French medical student, sailed from France for England. He arrived in London in time to join in the 24 February anniversary of the 1848 revolution with fellow émigrés and exiles, and presented a report on the development of the working-class movement in France to the committee of the IWMA. Six months later he was Tussy’s prospective brother-in-law.

  Born 16 June 1842 in Santiago de Cuba, Paul Lafargue was the only child of a wealthy coffee planter. In the language of the day, the Lafargues were mestizos – of mixed ancestry, excluded from access to higher education and socially marginalised. His family emigrated to France in 1851, where his father became a rentier and wine merchant in Bordeaux. François Lafargue moved to France largely to provide greater opportunity for his son. Paul went to school in Toulouse and enrolled to study medicine at the University of Paris. The Faculty of Medicine was conveniently located in the Latin Quarter, where Paul soon fell in with radical student politics and opposition to the Second Empire.

  Paul was at the centre of a group influenced by the social critic Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and the revolutionary Auguste Blanqui. Mostly medical and law students, they made Blanqui their mentor, like him rejecting a comfortable academic career, identifying themselves with the ‘damned of history’ and becoming active revolutionaries. Paul wrote for a prestigious student newspaper, La Rive Gauche, edited by a senior student, Charles Longuet.

  Lafargue arrived in London in early March 1865. Proposed by watchmaker and council member Eugene Dupont, he was elected to the International General Council. His fellow student activist, Charles Longuet, was also on the council. Lafargue focused on the Spanish labour movement and wanted to establish a section of the International there. Fluent in Spanish, he wrote for El Obrero – organ of the recently founded Spanish workers’ federation – and by the end of the month was Secretary of the International for Spain, a post he held until 1870.27

  Soon after his arrival in London,28 Lafargue visited Marx at Maitland Park Road. ‘I was then 24 years of age. As long as I live,’ he wrote later, ‘I shall remember the impression that first visit made on me.’29 The unforgettable impressions of that first visit included his first encounter with Laura. Captivation struck twice in one day. Lafargue left the Marx home ‘seduced and conquered’.30 Six months later, Laura and Paul announced they were half-engaged, prompting Engels – who sent them a celebratory £50 – to inquire if he should offer half or the whole of his congratulations. Perhaps if they’d been fully engaged he would have sent £100.

  In the autumn of 1865 Lafargue was expelled from the University of Paris for his role in the first Students’ International Congress in Lièg
e. He relocated to London, where he enrolled at Barts – St Bartholomew’s, one of the oldest hospitals in the world – in the hope of taking an English medical degree. His tutor, Dr Carrière, was a revolutionary refugee.

  Tussy was an instant hit with the outgoing Lafargue, who declared her ‘a charming child with a sunny disposition’.31 She was equally charmed and allowed Paul to join the elect who contributed to her stamp collection. The two became firm friends and Tussy an important go-between, mediating the sometimes rocky road of Paul and Laura’s courtship.

  As well as providing Tussy with the attentions of a charming older brother and sharing her love of her pets, Paul’s political engagement in all things Spanish and Latin-American would prove decisive in the not-too-distant future in Tussy’s initiation into political activism and, excitingly, espionage.

  For the meantime, Paul dedicated as much energy to seducing Laura as he did to political activism. It’s a moot point how much time he devoted to studying physics and chemistry at Barts. Tussy soon identified a shared love of popular fiction with Paul, quizzing him for his opinions of Walter Scott, Paul de Kock and Alexandre Dumas senior, and reading with him on the sofa in her father’s study when Mohr was away. Paul was generous with his father’s allowance and loved treating the appreciative Tussy to new books. Writing to her father away in Germany, she told him:

  Paul has been keeping me in books, he got me Cooper’s Deer­slayer, Homeward Bound, The Eppingham32 . . . Good Friday I eat [sic] 16 hot cross buns, Laura and Jenny ate 8. Tommy, Blacky and Whisky send their compliments. Paul and Laura have had three riding lessons. Laura looks very nice in her riding habit, and Paul looks a little shaky.33

  Receiving this letter, Marx was probably less worried about Tussy’s record-breaking consumption of hot cross buns than he was about Lafargue taking up residence in his home in his absence. Aware of how much Paul was adored by the women of his family, he knew he would be indulged. Marx observed, ‘The young man first attached himself to me, but soon transferred his attention from the Old Man to the daughter.’34

  With the completion of the first part of Capital and the arrival of Lafargue in their lives, 1865 was a good year for the still carefree Tussy. Two months after her birthday, in March, she played the popular party game Confession with her family. Her game sheet provides a telling self-assessment of herself at ten. Time would show how many of these preferences would continue or change into her adulthood. Confident in all other categories, it’s intriguing that the only category tomboy Tussy failed to complete was her favourite virtue in woman.

  Your favourite virtue: Truth

  Your favourite virtue in man: Courage

  Your favourite virtue in woman: [left blank]

  Your chief characteristic: Curiosity

  Your idea of happiness: Champagne

  Your idea of misery: The Toothache

  The vice you excuse most: Playing the truant

  The vice you detest most: Eve’s Examiner

  Your aversion: Cold Mutton

  Your favourite occupation: Gymnastics

  Your favourite poet: Shakespeare

  Your favourite prose writer: Captain Marryat

  Your favourite hero: Garibaldi

  Your favourite heroine: Lady Jane Grey

  Your favourite flower: All flowers

  Your favourite colour: White

  Your favourite names: Percy, Henry, Charles, Edward

  Your favourite maxim and motto: ‘Go ahead’35

  6

  Fenian Sister

  And go ahead she did.

  To her great annoyance, in 1866, at the age of eleven, Tussy started attending school regularly. It’s endearing that Tussy cheekily confessed to truancy as the vice she most excused and school exams the vice she most detested. The disliked ‘Eve’s Examiner’ in her Confession was not a witty reference by the young atheist to either God or the Devil, but more prosaically to Charles Eve’s unfortunately bestselling textbook The School Examiner, published in 1852 and containing 4,000 examination exercises in the subjects of Sacred History, Geography, Arithmetic and English Grammar.

  In 1866 Paul thrilled Tussy with a great surprise – he built her ‘a delicious swing’1 in the back garden of Modena Villas, with seat and handles hand-stitched in soft white leather. As she kicked up her heels and swung higher she could see the wild abundance of Hampstead Heath over the fence, in harmony with her own ungovernable nature. She wrote to Alice excitedly to tell her about the swing, ‘on which I would willingly forget school and everything else’.2

  Misses Boynell and Rentsch who ran South Hampstead College for Ladies found they had their work cut out with the unbiddable youngest Miss Marx. Tussy grumbled to Alice that she had too little time now, ‘as I have so much to do at school’.3

  Regular schooling weighed uneasily on Tussy. She was already functionally numerate, highly literate – although her spelling was sometimes erratic – and a dedicated enthusiast for her chess and gymnastics. South Hampstead College placed more emphasis on the required upright deportment and decorum of young ladies – who were not meant to tumble, leap, do handstands, cartwheels, headstands, forward rolls or have firm opinions on political matters.

  The concept of a young lady was in itself worrying and questionable to gypsy-spirited Tussy, excluding as it did the possibility of being taught the skills required to pursue a life at sea, in frontier exploration or international politics.

  Tussy liked her peers, and her sense of fun and disregard for hierarchy made her a popular ringleader and playmate, but academically she was bored and her teachers made easy targets. She disliked authority. On the upside, the school was non-denominational and taught comparative religion and history to its diverse pupils. She evidently enjoyed the handwriting and spelling drills. Her exercise books – all second-hand, pasted over and repurposed from her father’s study – are full of doodling marginalia alongside disciplined ranks of neatly executed spelling exercises marching across the pages.

  ‘Benediction’. ‘Cheerfulness’. ‘Improvements’. ‘Temperate’. ‘Fashionable’. These were inspiring words. Restraint, needlework and the bland poetic homilies on the general accomplishments of femaleness were not. These she instantly dispensed with. They were in too marked a contrast to her home schooling and mentoring by her mother, father and Engels, who now took an increasingly active role in her education, continuing to send her books and discuss them with her. In 1866 her class were set an assignment to practise their longhand by transcribing an annoying poem by David Bates, a saccharine lozenge beloved of Victorian schoolteachers tasked with cultivating the dulcet tones and murmuring conformity of conventional femininity:

  Speak gently! it is better far

  To rule by love than fear

  Speak gently! let no harsh words

  Mar the good we might do here.4

  And so on, continuing in the same vein for too many stanzas. Tussy much preferred Lewis Carroll’s send-up of this poem, ‘Speak Roughly!’, in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the popular new bestseller published in 1865 that sold out instantly on its first appearance. The Duchess’s song to the pig baby offers a more rigorous parenting model:

  Speak roughly to your little boy

  And beat him when he sneezes

  He only does it to annoy

  Because he knows it teases.5

  Tussy’s school exercise books from this period are filled with sketches of her sisters, usually in profile, with wedding veils and fashionable accessories. These marginalia reflect the family pre­occupations of the period between 1866 and 1870, during which Jenny and Laura matured and left home; one to become a governess, the other a wife, the most conventional of outcomes for the daughters of a very unconventional family. On the cusp of puberty, Tussy watched the shaping of her sisters’ lives and wondered what her own might be.

  Less constraining than copying out homilies on the proper behaviour of children was writing letters to her father in Margate, where he was buffing up the
manuscript of the first volume of Capital and, on the advice of his doctor, recuperating for a month from the exertion of finishing it. Tussy recalled him imperiously to London, reminding him of his promise to attend a party she and her sisters had arranged for 22 March. ‘Now, Dr Karl Marx of bad philosophy, I hope you will keep your promise and come on Thursday.’6 How could he refuse?

  After the party, Tussy and her elder sister went back to Margate with Mohr. Tussy spent a blissful ten days walking, eating rock candy and ice cream, and playing with her father, liberated briefly from his study and in impish mood.7

  The whole matter of formal schooling was made worse in August, when Laura and Tussy were sent to Hastings to board for a month at the establishment of a Miss Davies. Their parents were eager to get them out of London for a while. There was unrest in the city, a result of the 23 July Hyde Park Riot over the Reform Bill and the cholera epidemic. Naturally, it was the risk of cholera and not the popular demonstrations that concerned Möhme and Mohr. Although it was only a circumscribed move towards universal male suffrage in the United Kingdom, the Marxes strongly supported the gradualist 1866 Reform Bill.

  Möhme and Mohr also wanted to separate Laura and Paul Lafargue – they didn’t like the intimacy between them and Paul had, without being invited, effectively moved in. Marx complained to Engels that ‘Lafargue is as good as living with us, which perceptibly increases expenses.’8 Paul’s father had written from Bordeaux asking Marx to give his consent for Laura’s hand in marriage to his only son Paul. Despite the kindly tone of the letter, Marx did not respond directly to Lafargue père but to the young man himself, with a firm and pompous refusal.