Eleanor Marx

by Rachel Holmes

  Laura likened the regular recurrence of meals at Miss Davies’s boarding school for young ladies to the march of destiny. The food haunted them; ‘like ghouls – the four monsters – breakfast, dinner, tea and supper . . . cast shadows before them and behind.’9 Prisoners of perpetual rain, they were stuck indoors behind closed, shuttered windows and subjected to the sensory torture of listening to pupils banging away all day on an out-of-tune piano.

  The sisters rebelled. Laura informed Miss Davies that Tussy and she would neither attend church on Sundays nor observe the daily 9 p. m. curfew. Ignoring Miss Davies’s threats to inform their parents, Tussy and Laura broke free and wandered the seafront of Hastings, spending their £5 pocket money on cab rides, fun fairs and sea-bathing; munching on spice biscuits from Lenchen and returning, when they felt like it, to an exasperated Miss Davies who had no choice but to let them in. When the £5 ran out, they asked their parents for some more and another £3 duly followed. They had clearly inherited the family talent for spending beyond their means.

  Following this detention without trial, it is hardly surprising that Tussy was further put off organised education as an alternative to home schooling. Nor that Laura reviewed her options and on her return to London redoubled her efforts to persuade her father to relent and consent to her marrying Lafargue. She would try and escape into marriage; Tussy, to her swing.

  Displeased by the couple’s persistence, Marx goaded Paul for his ardour, overzealous nature and skittishness, putting this down to his ‘Creole temperament’ and – as he got more wound up – coming out with racist broadsides about Paul being blemished by the customary faults of ‘the negro tribe – no sense of shame, by which I mean shame about making a fool of oneself’.10 Marx seemed suddenly very forgetful of his own lamp-post-swinging youth and unbridled florescence of ardour for Jenny.11

  You know that I have sacrificed my whole fortune to the revolutionary struggle. I do not regret it. On the contrary. Had I my career to start again I should do the same. But I would not marry. As far as lies in my power I intend to save my daughter from the reefs upon which her mother’s life had been wrecked . . . You, a man so practical that you would abolish poetry altogether, cannot wish to wax poetical at the expense of my child.12

  This Oedipal outburst galvanised the young lovers. A month later, on her twenty-first birthday, Laura announced her formal engagement to Paul. Tussy was jubilant but troubled by the realisation that her sister would be leaving home. Möhme was rather taken with her future son-in-law’s ‘dark olive complexion and extra-ordinary eyes’13 that reminded her of her little black boar of yesteryear.

  Lafargue père wrote from Bordeaux assuring Marx that he would continue to support his son financially and that Paul must pass his medical school examinations before he could marry. Möhme was comforted and started building castles in the air for Laura; after all, Paul’s parents were rich: they owned plantations and property in Santiago and Bordeaux, and Paul was their only child. They liked Laura, and welcomed her into their family with open arms.14

  These are effusions far more suited to a Mrs Bennet than to Europe’s most revolutionary mother. But how could she not hope that Laura would be spared her own suffering, endurance and quiet disappointments?

  Laura showed signs of embarrassment at the bohemian behaviour of her unconventional parents. She told her elder sister that she was mortified when their mother wandered into the parlour where she was having tea with friends. ‘Mama came in without her boots on and wearing just enough that one did not have to rely on the naked effect of nature and yet dressed in such a way that she showed more than she veiled . . . I simply closed my eyes and did not look where I could not look without blushing nor blanching.’15

  But Möhme saw the importance of Laura and Paul’s shared ideals, ‘particularly concerning religion. Thus Laura will avoid the inevit­able conflicts and sorrows that a girl with her convictions experiences in bourgeois society.’16 And as Mrs Marx, she should know.

  Laura and Paul’s engagement opened up the borders of Tussy’s world. Early in 1867, Paul’s parents invited the three sisters to spend a summer holiday with them at the newly fashionable tourist resort of Royan. Tussy looked forward to her first holiday abroad with great expectations, as she’d had a lowering winter. Uncle Lion Philips had died at the end of 1866 and for her twelfth birthday she’d got the measles. The upside of being ill was, of course, that she didn’t have to go to school – but her eyes were sore and she strained them reading. Her eyestrain shows in the few letters she wrote during her illness; the handwriting is spidery and awkward and the ink blotched. Sweetly, she copied out the Confession game for Alice so she could play it, signing off her letter with love to Alice’s Mama and Papa, ‘and tell them I will write a little letter to them soon’.17 But she never had the chance – Alice’s mother Ernestine died in April. The loss of a mother was unimaginable to Tussy.

  For her father, 1867 was all about the publication of Capital, meaning that he was away for much of the year. Marx took the final proofs to the Hamburg publisher himself in April, where Tussy wrote him a pining note, ‘I have not as I used to do looked in the bed for you, but I constantly sing, “Oh! Would I were a bird that I might fly to thee and breathe a loving word to one so dear to me”.’18 The same month, on 27 April, Engels announced that he was quitting filthy business in two years, perhaps prematurely confident that the publication of the first part of Marx’s magnum opus would now enable his impecunious comrade to earn a stable living by his pen.

  On 21 July the three sisters set sail for the French Atlantic coast.19 They were away until 10 September. This was the first and last holiday the unmarried sisters spent all together without their parents. They swam, went beachcombing, browsed bookshops and explored the villages around the port. Strong in French, Tussy was able to keep up with the local and national newspapers and journals, following discussion of the celebrated new poet and future Communard, Paul Verlaine, whose first collection Poèmes saturniens, published the previous year, rocketed him to controversial literary stardom. The Lafargues were generous hosts – the sisters enjoyed Charentais melons and the local aperitif pineau, as well as its more august and world-famous elder brother, cognac. Best of all, they ate a lot of seafood – Tussy’s favourite.

  Four days after the sisters returned to London the first volume of Capital was published in Germany. Marx had drawn up the initial plan of Capital in 1857. His final plan was completed by 1866, based on nearly a decade of research. In the twentieth century Marx’s great masterwork would become a bestseller, but in 1867 the publication of the first instalment of the book that has become as eponymous as the Bible and Shakespeare passed entirely unnoticed except by Marx’s family, friends and immediate political circle. Although Engels dearly wanted a clear plan for the publication of the subsequent volumes, Marx’s mode of production made it impossible to stick to a time-defined schedule. Marx owed delivery of Volumes II and III to his publisher before the end of 1867, but this transpired to be one of the most famously unmet deadlines in publishing history. Volume I was the only part of Capital to be published whilst he was alive and no English edition ever became available during his lifetime. Engels brought out Volume II in May 1885, almost two years after Marx’s death, and the third and final Volume III followed in 1894.20

  Laura and Paul married in the spring. Chivvied by Engels, who paid for their wedding, Marx relented. On 2 April Tussy watched eagerly out of the front parlour window of Modena Villas for the new Mr and Mrs Lafargue to return from St Pancras Register Office, where Marx and Engels had witnessed their civil marriage.

  Möhme, Lenchen and Jenny prepared an extravagant lunch party at Modena Villas and Engels, in his cups, teased Laura about what he supposed to be the imminent loss of her virginity. Years later she remembered fondly how he ‘cracked a lot of silly jokes at a very silly girl’s expense and set her a-crying’.21 The newlyweds set off for a honeymoon in Paris, soon followed by a letter from Mohr celebrating
‘the spring and sun and air and Paris jollities’ that ‘conjure in your favour’22 and attaching a long list of requests for books, articles and journals that he sheepishly asked Laura to find time to source whilst on honeymoon. He seemed amiably resigned to the match and was pleased when the couple returned in time to celebrate his fiftieth birthday with the family.

  The new Mr and Mrs Lafargue left for Paris in October, only to discover on arrival that Paul’s English medical degree was not recognised over the Channel and that he would have to sit a set of new exams in order to qualify to practise in France. This development kept the newlyweds economically dependent on their respective parents, forcing Jennychen to make haste finding paid work so she could contribute to the household.

  The same month she secretly got a job as governess to the children of a Scottish family called Monroe. When they found out, Jennychen’s clandestine move upset her parents. Dr Monroe was politically conservative, so Jennychen was reticent about the identity of her family. Even though Capital had only just been published in Germany and would take a long time to reach the awareness of a general readership in Britain, Marx was already well known by 1867 as the radical founder and leader of the International Working Men’s Association and a journalist. Jennychen’s governessing meant she no longer had as much time to assist her father with his book-worming in the Reading Room at the British Museum, so Tussy took her place, undertaking research and becoming his secretary. For the first six months Jennychen brought no additional income to the family, as the Monroes failed to pay her salary until Marx intervened and forced them to do so. Still they didn’t work out who he was.

  Conscious that Tussy might be missing Laura and Paul, Engels sent her a cheering letter with some stamps for her collection. He reported that he and Lizzy Burns had continued to celebrate her sister’s nuptials with such great gusto when he got back to Manchester that, whilst drunk, he had accidentally sat on his pet hedgehog, the Right Honourable, snoozing on the sofa. Tussy probably admonished Engels for being ‘on the spree again’,23 and was sad that she would now only see the Right Honourable stuffed, on his return from the taxidermist.

  In June, Tussy and her father, armed with a picnic from Lenchen, boarded the Great Northern Railway at King’s Cross bound for Manchester. It was a day’s journey. Through soot-flecked windows Tussy saw the smudged outlines of the Derbyshire peaks. They stayed with Engels and Lizzy Burns in Manchester for two weeks and, in that fortnight, Tussy became a Fenian.

  Engels, Mary and Lizzy Burns had lived in amicable unity from 1850, when Engels and Mary agreed their free union and set up home together at Engels’s ‘unofficial’ residence at 86 Mornington Street, Stockport Road, Ardwick, on the edge of the city. After Mary’s death in 1863 her sister Lizzy, baptised Lydia, took her place as head of the household, and in Engels’s bed. Two months before Tussy visited Manchester for the first time Engels quit his ‘official’ gentleman’s lodgings in Dover Street and moved into Mornington Street lock, stock and a multitude of vintage barrels. The household consisted of Lizzy Burns, her eight-year-old niece Mary Ellen – known to all as Pumps – and a maidservant, Sarah Parker.

  Like her sister, Lizzy Burns was a dedicated player in the Irish Republican movement, and 86 Mornington Street was a meeting place and a safe house for Fenian activists. Freedom-loving, uncorseted, fiercely political and sparkling with fun, Lizzy Burns was everything the Misses Boynell and Rentsch feared that Tussy might become without proper restraint.

  The background to Tussy becoming a supporter of the Irish Republican cause was the Fenian Rising the previous year, 1867, in County Kerry and then Dublin. The Irish Republican Brotherhood, founded by James Stephens in 1858, organised veterans of the American Civil War to support the establishment of an Irish Republic. Led by Irish-American officers of the US Army, the uprising was brutally quashed. Following this defeat the exiled Colonel Thomas Kelly, now leader of the Republican Brotherhood, rallied the movement and made Manchester its headquarters. Almost immediately, he was seized and arrested by the English authorities. An operation to rescue him resulted in the death of a policeman, sparking outrage in both nations.

  Tracked down and denounced by a crown spy, Fenian officers Thomas Kelly and Timothy Deasy had been remanded in Manchester city jail in September 1867. On 18 September they were brought before Bridge Street court and charged. They were driven back to Belle Vue prison in a horse-drawn Black Maria, followed by an escort of armed constables.

  As the police van passed under the railway viaduct on Hyde Road a posse of armed men ambushed it, cut loose the horses, smashed open the roof of the carriage, fired at the locks on the doors and succeeded in liberating Kelly and Deasy, who escaped. Tragically, police sergeant Charles Brett caught a fatal bullet in the crossfire. The English authorities arrested more than thirty Irishmen, five of whom later stood trial.

  The conviction of all five men on 1 November prompted national demonstrations in English cities, the raising of petitions and furious parliamentary debates. One man was conditionally pardoned; the sentence of another was commuted to penal servitude because he was an American citizen. The remaining three were hanged in Manchester on 23 November. All of them to the end refused to give up the name of their comrade Peter Rice, who fired the lethal shot that killed Brett.

  Catholic priests in Manchester denounced the murder of the martyrs from their pulpits. Masses took place across England, and in Hyde Park a peaceful demonstration gathered. Engels was present at the hangings of the Manchester Martyrs, one of the last public executions to take place in England. As he predicted, these events put the Irish question at the heart of English national politics. The Fenians now had martyrs, and Irishwomen a story of comradely heroism to sing over the cradles of their children.

  Marx thought the central importance of Irish liberation was profoundly misunderstood, and that Fenian radicalism, jailbreaks and martyrdom were unlikely to help clarify popular misconceptions. Later, in December, terrorist bombers blasted Clerkenwell prison in a failed attempt to release two Fenian detainees. All they managed to do was blow up some working-class houses and their inhabitants near the prison, tactics Marx condemned as melodramatic folly. Tussy’s father and Engels both sympathised with the cause of the Irish Republican Brotherhood but strongly disapproved of the use of armed struggle, conspiracy and violence. She disagreed.

  On her return to London from Manchester in 1868 she solemnly declared herself a partisan of what she called ‘the convicted nation’.24 When Jennychen told Tussy that she ‘had turned from her former higher Chinese character into a LOCALISED (IRISH) BEING and was therefore no longer showing due respect to the EMPEROR’, Tussy retorted, ‘Formerly I clung to a man, now I cling to a nation.’25

  She took to buying the Irishman, ‘from a little Irish Catholic shop. The woman always gives me her blessing because she says I am “true to the auld countryee”.’26 The Irishman was the leading publication of the Irish nationalist movement.27 Tussy had plenty of time to read journals. When she got back from Manchester she and Jennychen caught scarlet fever and were confined to bed. As good luck would have it, their physician and near neighbour Dr Korklow, an expert in the treatment of scarlet fever, was an Irishman of republican sympathies.28 Dr Korklow prescribed a diet of Liebig’s beef tea laced with port, the latter kept in generous supply by Engels.

  Delighted to be off school with her nose stuck in novels, the Irishman and letter-writing, Tussy dashed off regular letters to Lizzy, signing herself, ‘Eleanor, F. S.’ [Fenian Sister]. Her family scoffed at this militant affectation and dubbed her with the new nickname of ‘the Poor-Neglected-Nation’, the phrase she now most repeated. Whilst the Poor Neglected Nation languished in bed, she read up on the history of her latest passion – everything she could lay her hands on, including her father’s articles, journalism and reports to the IWMA on the Irish question. In the Marx family there was nothing out of the ordinary about their thirteen-year-old daughter sitting in bed sipping port during the day,
reading radical nationalist publications and humming Fenian freedom songs whilst dashing off letters on current affairs.

  Tussy wrote to Lizzy, knowing that Engels would read her the letters in his growlery – as he described his study-sitting room – presided over by the stuffed Right Honourable in his glass case. Tussy shared with Lizzy her amusement at the stamina required by the practice of democratic politics: ‘The Fenians have been having a congress, at which they sat for 19 hours without interruption! I should think they were tired after that.’29 She was delighted by new words for the British national anthem in the same edition, ‘God save our flag of green, Soon may it bright be seen,’ which ‘you as a Fenian sister will appreciate’.30 Her family were probably subjected to her loud renditions of this anti-monarchist version of the national anthem from her sickbed.

  In August everyone but Mohr and Lenchen decamped to Ramsgate. Laura was three months pregnant and Paul had at last completed his MRCS degree and was, he thought, qualified to practise. Paul’s parents joined the party from France. The news that Library had remarried reached the Marxes from Germany; little Alice now had a stepmother, the kindly Nathalie Liebknecht. The Marxes congratulated Library and warmly befriended Nathalie, who soon fell pregnant with the baby destined to become Karl Liebknecht, future co-leader of the Spartacus movement with Rosa Luxemburg.

  Fully recovered by Christmas, Tussy was in a party mood and ready to enjoy all the festivities. She was disappointed when an invitation to spend Christmas with some French friends meant that ‘we had neither goose nor turkey for our Christmas dinner, but a hare!!’31

  Having briefly neglected the Poor Neglected Nation, Tussy returned to harping on her Irish theme. She told her sister about the Christmas presents she had made for Lizzy and her niece Mary Ellen. For Lizzy she had made ‘a little satin collar, with a green ribbon in it, and pinned with a harp’, and for Mary Ellen she worked together ‘a very pretty steal [sic] cross in a green ribbon’.32 Here emerged her mother’s daughter: radical debutante Jenny von Westphalen had pinned the tricolour into her hair; for Tussy, it was green ribbons of Irish republicanism.