Eleanor Marx

by Rachel Holmes

  Tussy didn’t know that the reason for the gooseless, turkeyless Christmas was that her parents were flat broke by the end of 1868. Marx had recently failed to pass a medical examination required in order to secure a loan. He was no more able to raise the cash for a large goose or turkey than Bob Cratchit. Engels was working on his upcoming departure from Ermen & Engels and discussed with Karl and Jenny whether they could survive on £350 a year. They readily agreed, despite the fact that the budget they prepared against their existing accounts was incomplete. Engels arranged to make quarterly deposits, beginning 1 January 1869, to the Union Bank of London, a large joint stock bank with branches in the City and Chancery Lane.

  Tussy finished 1868 with a piece of theatre. She cast herself as the hero, with her close friends the Lormier brothers in supporting roles: ‘Louis, Ludovic and I are going to act a little play. I think Beauty and the Beast. Louis to be the Beast, Ludovic the Beauty, I to be the Prince.’33 The trouser role. Naturally. Tussy was director, producer, stage manager and lead. Beauty and the Beast at 1 Modena Villas on 29 December 1868 was Tussy’s first full theatrical production before an invited audience. It was a fitting and significant end to her thirteenth year.34

  On 1 January 1869 Tussy became an aunt. Charles Etienne Lafargue was born in Paris. Jennychen got leave from her governessing work for the Easter holidays and she and Tussy left London at the end of March to visit their sister and new nephew. Paris was in uproar over the revelations of Haussmann’s financial malfeasance, under investigation by the Chamber of Deputies.

  Though Haussmann’s financial reputation was in question, his rebuilding and modernisation of the city centre made it a place of breathtaking beauty and splendour, whilst over half of the capital’s population starved below the breadline in squalid, overcrowded slums in the outskirts of the city. Both Paris and her nephew seduced Tussy. She adored Schnaps – or Schnappy – declaring that she had ‘never seen such a lovely child’35 and admiring his good looks, intelligent forehead, amiable temper and early teething. As she was responsible for looking after him, it’s a good thing that she was so enamoured. Jennychen returned to work in London in mid-April, but no one seemed to think it pressing for Tussy to go back to school.

  Tussy nannied Schnappy in the small Lafargue apartment in the Rue du Cherche-Midi, but she also managed to have fun during her seven-week stay in Paris. She took herself ‘bockomanning’ in the city centre. This was a term invented by Laura to describe leisurely sightseeing on foot, punctuated by regular stops at bars and cafés for a small pression. Tussy started smoking regularly, no doubt lured by the satisfactions of sipping a small, cold beer and rolling a cigarette at a pavement café as she watched Paris life pass by. She sought out open-air puppet shows, enjoyed an outing to Sardou’s Séraphine at the Gymnase and went to the fun fair – calling it ‘the fair of the pain d’épis’.36

  Marx missed her. He wrote regularly, assuring her that Lenchen would forward on her copies of the Irishman and sending updates on her pets, which were in his charge whilst she was away. Blacky, he reported, behaved like a very dull gentleman; Whisky, her dog, was suffering as only a lofty soul could in her absence; and Tommy had just produced a large litter, proving both the error of her name and, Mohr said, ‘the truth of the Malthus theory’. He complained to her of auditory abuse from Dicky, her bird: he ‘treats me like Luther treated the devil’.37

  Möhme came to Paris in May and they returned home together. Barely a week later Tussy set off for Manchester with her father. Still there was no talk of her going back to school. They left London on 25 May from the new St Pancras station. An engineering feat of glass and steel, Sir George Gilbert Scott’s ambitious design enclosed a 243-foot span, making this airy transparent flying vault the largest undivided space ever enclosed – a futuristic marvel of modern architecture in Gothic revival style and the biggest structure of its kind in the world. The sparkling concourse of this cathedral of the railways offered to passengers travelling north on the new Midland Railway flower-sellers, tea shops and a W. H. Smith stand selling magazines, journals and cheap popular books. Victor Hugo’s latest serialisation, By Order of the King, in the Gentleman’s Magazine (May 1869), had just hit the racks. They boarded one of the fastest trains in the country, the high-speed express to Manchester. Connecting passengers to the Metropolitan Railway via Kentish Town and Leicester, the nearly 100-mile track to Manchester was the longest non-stop railway run in the world.

  Lizzy saw to Tussy’s practical education in history and politics by introducing her to the working-class districts of Manchester. At Tussy’s request, Lizzy led her around all the places of Fenian significance, as she told her eldest sister: ‘Mrs Burns and I went to see the Market, and Mrs Burns showed me the stall where Kelly sold pots, and the house where he lived. It was really very amusing, and Mrs B. has been telling me a great many things about “Kelly and Daisy” [sic] whom Mrs B. knew quite well, having been to their house and seen them 3 or 4 times a week.’38

  Engels put Eleanor on an intense course of literature, philosophy, political theory and poetry. He gave her an eclectic range of reading, including Goethe, the Icelandic Edda, Danish Kjampeviser, Firdousi, and Serbian folksongs in German translation.39 He also made time for recreation, talking to her on their walks around Manchester and its greener outskirts, just as her maternal grand­father had done with her father years before in Trier. Uncle Angel, as she now called him, joined in the fun whenever he could get away from his Ermen & Engels business, in which he was in the process of winding up his interest:

  I walk about a good deal with Tussy and as many of the family, human and canine, as I can induce to go with us . . . Tussy, Lizzy, Mary Ellen [Pumps], myself and two dogs, and I am specially instructed to inform you that these amiable ladies had 2 glasses of beer apiece.40

  This peripatetic education in the university of life was all very well, but what of school? She was, her father reported with satisfaction, ‘blooming’, and he thought ‘a longer stay in Manchester would do her good’.41 There is no record of the further discussions that must have taken place about the question of her necessary return to South Hampstead College. She simply didn’t go back. It’s clear that Mohr, Möhme and Engels made the assessment that Casa Engels had as much to usefully teach a wayward fifteen-year-old like Tussy as South Hampstead College. The investment in Jennychen and Laura’s schooling hadn’t altered the outcome of their pre-ordained lives as mid-Victorian women in any significant way: one married and baby-making, the other on the governessing treadmill at paltry wages.

  At the beginning of June the whole party took off on a three-day jaunt to Bolton Abbey in Yorkshire, where they stayed at the famous Devonshire Arms. Flanked by her father and Engels, Lizzy, Pumps and Sarah, Tussy saw fireworks at Belle Vue prison and, fleetingly, the Prince and Princess of Wales at the Royal Agricultural Show at Old Trafford. Eleanor suggested that the youth of Manchester should greet the royal couple by singing, ‘The Prince of Wales in Belle Vue jail for robbing a man of a pint of ale.’42 The director of political theatre was in the making.

  It was always open house at Uncle Angel and Lizzy’s place. Here Tussy met Sam Moore and Karl Schorlemmer for the first time; the Marxes nicknamed the latter Jollymeier. Close friends and comrades of her father and Engels, both men were significant to the political patronage of her future life. Moore, a lawyer, brilliant translator and businessman, translated The Communist Manifesto into English, and later co-translated the first volume of Capital with Edward Aveling. Schorlemmer, after her father one of the most influential men in the European socialist movement, was a talented chemist and taught at Owens College in Manchester, where later a Chair in Organic Chemistry was created specifically for him.

  Sam Moore and Jollymeier were eminent in their public lives but as with all these distinguished change-makers, Eleanor saw their human side. Chuckling, she reported to her sister that on one night of revelry Jollymeier ‘got so “screwed” that we had to make a bed for him an
d he slept there too, for he couldn’t get home’.43 Inebriation was common. Uncle Angel staggered home on foot from a particularly good party ‘as drunk as jelly’,44 and Lizzy and Tussy had to take off his boots and get him into bed.

  Engels had good reason to be in a party mood. He’d settled his severance negotiations with his partner Gottfried. The terms were much to his disadvantage, but he didn’t really care. Although he walked away a millionaire by today’s capital values, Engels’s settlement fell far short of what his share of the wildly successful international business was worth. He left the offices of Ermen & Engels on 1 July. Tussy recalled the momentous day in detail:

  I was with Engels when he reached the end of his forced labour and I saw what he must have gone through all those years. I shall never forget the triumph with which he exclaimed, ‘for the last time!’ as he put on his boots in the morning to go to his office. A few hours later we were standing at the gate waiting for him. We saw him coming over the little field opposite the house where he lived. He was swinging his stick in the air and singing, his face beaming. Then we set the table for a celebration and drank champagne and were happy.45

  The next day Uncle Angel confirmed his delight at liberation: ‘Hurrah! Today doux commerce is at an end, and I am a free man . . . Tussy and I celebrated my first free day this morning with a long walk in the fields.’46 The coincidence of Engels’s final departure from doux commerce and what turned out to be Tussy’s five-month stay in Manchester clearly settled the matter of her non-return to school. Engels now had time to spend with her and educate her for a substantial period, an arrangement that alleviated the financial pressure of paying tuition fees.

  Thanks almost entirely to Engels, Eleanor grew up in a family where alcohol flowed quite freely. Lenchen and her parents were convinced of both the medicinal and convivial benefits of small beer, port, wine and – Tussy’s favourite – champagne. In their Soho days it was certainly safer and preferable to drinking too much of the water from the street pumps. Möhme thought parents who did not give their children wine a little odd, rather mean and proscriptive.47 Engels’s motto, ‘take it aisy’, was ably abetted by the passionate and uninhibited Lizzy, who Engels, once released from the conventions of acting the businessman, now openly and lovingly referred to as ‘my dear spouse’. Writing to ‘My Dear Mrs Burns’ in October 1868, Tussy added this postscript:

  Paul and Laura are going away tomorrow and we have just been drinking a bottle of champagne to their health, so you must excuse the smears in this letter, as the champagne has [ink blot] had a little effect [another ink blot] upon my head, and also on my hands for I can’t write a bit.

  Good [blotch, blotch] bye.48

  Preceded by a very fluent and chatty four pages, this letter demonstrates that Tussy had taken on her Uncle Angel’s good habit of still seeing to his correspondence even if he was semi-inebriated.

  By the time of Tussy’s return to Manchester in 1869 ‘My Dear Mrs Burns’ had become ‘My Dear Lizzy’. Lizzy was Eleanor’s first female mentor. Tussy responded to her bracing unladylikeness and her inborn, passionate feeling for her class.49 Marx and Engels clearly conspired to ensure that Tussy was not subjected to becoming ‘heddicated’ and ‘sensitive’ by the second-rate education available to women.

  Tussy helped Lizzy in turn by reading to her, suggesting they went to the theatre together and teaching her to play the piano. Eleanor was also resolute in her determination to educate everyone out of their deference to Karl Marx’s daughter. Irritated by the absurdity of respectful submissiveness, she characteristically tackled the problem with humour. ‘One evening,’ she told her sister, ‘they had all called me Miss Marx. So I made Auntie [Lizzy] and Moore and Jollymeier and Sarah all stand in a row and say Tussy 24 times . . . I’ve also made a rule that if anyone did not call me Tussy they had to stand on a chair and say Tussy 6 times & if I said Mrs Burns I had to say Auntie.’50

  If she wasn’t making them stand on chairs, she was up to other mischief. Engels returned one hot afternoon in July to discover his home taken over by a riotous petticoat party. Tussy, Lizzy and the housemaid Sarah had been superbly lazy, ‘all lying’, Tussy confessed, ‘our full length on the floor the whole day drinking beer, claret etc . . . with no stays, no boots and one petticoat and a cotton dress on and that was all.’51 Engels, delighted at his harem en deshabille, doubtless joined in.

  Engels intended to write a book about the history of Ireland as his first post-capitalist project, and celebrated his liberation from business with a trip to Ireland with Lizzy and Eleanor. They travelled by sea from Liverpool. Eleanor’s excitement at her first trip to the homeland of the Poor Neglected Nation was irrepressible. They visited the Wicklow Mountains, Killarney and Cork. They drank Guinness by peat fires, and told each other ghost stories in the Irish mists. Tussy was dazzled: by the sea, by the song, by Irish storytelling and stew.

  Her first visit to Ireland took place at the same time as a new groundswell of support for the national liberation movement, prompted by the demand for amnesty for the Fenian prisoners. Nearly a quarter of a million people demonstrated in Dublin and Limerick. The English government was petitioned for the release of the maltreated prisoners. Tussy, Engels and Lizzy found the country bristling with troops and the armed Royal Irish Constabulary. Field batteries patrolled the centre of Dublin and Ireland was effectively under military dictatorship.

  Tussy returned to London in October. Eleanor, Fenian Sister, was beginning to hold sway over her family and bring them round to her way of thinking: ‘Tussy has returned from Ireland a stauncher Irishman than ever.’52 Fired up by her recent return from the Emerald Isle she was determined to go to a demonstration in Hyde Park on 22 October where 100,000 gathered to demand an amnesty for Fenian prisoners. Her family resisted but eventually relented. She ‘did not rest,’ Jennychen wrote to their family friend Dr Ludwig Kugelmann, a respected gynaecologist in Hanover, ‘until she had persuaded Mohr, Mama and me to go with her.’53

  Red, white and green banners rippled through the crowds, amidst a profusion of red Jacobin caps and placards proclaiming ‘Disobedience to Tyrants is a Duty to God’. Tussy led her family in singing the Marseillaise. ‘We are all of us downright Fenians,’ Jennychen told Kugelmann, admitting that ‘we all danced with joy’ when they heard the news of the election of imprisoned Fenian Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa to Parliament as member for Tipperary, a seat he was ineligible to take up. ‘Tussy went quite wild!’54 There was a valuable lesson for Tussy to learn from her support for O’Donovan Rossa, as Engels explained: ‘It forces the Fenians to abandon their conspiratorial tactics and the staging of minor coups in favour of practical activities which, though seemingly legal, are far more revolutionary than anything they have done since their unsuccessful insurrection.’55

  Most students join protest movements when they go to university; Tussy had returned from the University of Engels and Burns in Manchester a fully fledged youth protester. Less carried away by the political theatre, Marx optimistically identified the salient point: ‘The main feature of the demonstration . . . was that at least a part of the English working-class had lost their prejudice against the Irish.’56

  Towards the end of the year Tussy was an onlooker at a different type of protest. On Tuesday 6 November Queen Victoria opened the new Blackfriars Bridge and Holborn Viaduct, where, in Tussy’s words, she ‘stared fuming-mad and ultra-crabby’57 from her coach at the crowd as she made her way from the South Bank to the north side of the Thames. ‘Everywhere,’ Tussy told her father, was ‘overrun by police, as in France’,58 to prevent a threatened riot. In the weeks before the opening a few agitators had their fun circulating hoax handbills calling on the starving workers of the East End to present themselves en masse to the Queen at the opening and ‘de ne pas laisser passer la reine [not let the Queen pass]’.59

  ‘This week,’ Marx reported to Engels in November, ‘Tussy and I lost 3 days putting my workroom in order. It had become jumbled to the
frontiers of possibility.’60 By the end of 1869 it was accepted that Eleanor had taken Jennychen’s place as Marx’s secretary and research assistant. Engels wrote to her and asked her to work for him as researcher on his book on Ireland; ‘I am very much obliged to you for sending that advertisement,’ Tussy replied archly. ‘The situation is one that will suit me very well, so I shall lose no time in applying for it. You will I am sure give me a reference.’61 Her father suggested she start by combing Cobbett’s Political Register for something there about Ireland.

  Laura gave birth to her second child, named Jenny, on New Year’s Day of 1870, exactly a year to the day after the birth of her first. In July 1870 France declared war on Prussia. Marx, Engels, Lafargue and the movements of the socialist left regarded the Franco-Prussian War as fratricidal. Marx hoped for victory for the Germans and ‘the definite defeat of Bonaparte’62 as the best outcome, as it was likely to provoke revolution in France, whereas German defeat would only extend the life of the ailing empire. This judgement proved correct.

  This conflict had a considerable effect on Tussy’s adolescence. Engels started writing a series of war notes in the Pall Mall Gazette where he famously and accurately predicted the outcome of the Battle of Sedan. When Le Figaro, quoting Engels, referred to the ‘General Staff’ as if it were an individual, Jennychen christened him ‘the General’. Engels was the family expert on the military strategy of the Franco-Prussian War. As Tussy recalled, ‘Engels, after 1870, became our “General”.’63 The Pall Mall Gazette sent Marx a cheque for the first article, which ‘the ferocious girl’ Tussy tried to appropriate, announcing that she and Jennychen ‘should seize upon these first spoils of war as due to them for brokerage’.64