Eleanor Marx

by Rachel Holmes

  Following a visit to Brighton in late May, Möhme developed serious reservations about Tussy’s welfare. With all the very best of maternal intentions, she fussed over Tussy’s health and interfered with her professional life. She wanted Tussy to take a short mid-term break from work to accompany Lenchen on a trip home to the funeral of her sister in the Rhineland, and was put out when Tussy, of course, firmly rejected the proposal explaining that she couldn’t just suddenly take unscheduled holidays. Tussy was deeply embarrassed when her mother, thinking her direct request would resolve the matter, bypassed her and wrote directly to the Misses Hall instructing them to release Tussy from her duties so she could go to Germany. In a hilariously bad-tempered exchange of letters between mother and headmistress, the school refused – to Tussy’s relief.

  Her bid for independence had initially seemed successful but her parents combined got the better of her. Now fighting against their allied forces, Eleanor lost the battle in her first war of independence. Under pressure from her mother and father, she became stressed and anorexic. Reluctantly, she gave up her teaching job and returned to Modena Villas in September, deeply disappointed, extremely thin, and in a state of nervous collapse. Mohr had got his secretary back in his study and his favourite by his hearth, but she was resentful at her return, and physically unwell.

  The ongoing dispute between Lissa and Lafargue escalated still further and Tussy – confronted with her ‘secret’ engagement to Lissa – was forbidden from seeing him at all. Her parents proposed that father and daughter ‘take the waters’ in Harrogate for three weeks of mineral baths, cleansing Kissingen waters, reading and early nights, so in November Marx took her with him to chilly Yorkshire. Smarting from her recent defeat Tussy spent afternoons of watery sunlight in the spa gardens reading Saint-Beuve and sipping her sixteen glasses of sulphurous water per day swathed in damp mist and a fog of smoke from the cigarettes she puffed between each glass. Her chain-smoking didn’t annoy her father but she hoped that reading Saint-Beuve did – a pathetic twitch of resistance against her loving paternal tyrant.

  It was a tough call for anyone who loved Mohr to resist his nervous hypochondria and emotional blackmail. Unlike her mother and the General, Tussy had less experience of how to manage her father’s domineering nature. She put up a spirited resistance to his possessiveness, but she had inherited his propensity for stretches of intense, concentrated productivity punctuated by stress-related exhaustion.

  This was the great age of nervous anxiety and feverish repression labelled ‘hysteria’. Tussy contracted the whole infuriating syndrome of Victorian feminine neurosis so brilliantly depicted by Wilkie Collins, that great expressionist of the effects of patriarchal repression and thwarted desire on intelligent, ambitious daughters. For every stress-related carbuncle, ulcer, swollen foot and bout of intense depression acutely suffered by her father, Tussy could answer with her own particular array of feminine nervous symptoms. Forgetting to eat, preoccupied with proving herself in her job, Lissa, smoking and burning the midnight oil in order to understand the world, Tussy broke down. Fainting and anaemic, she was torn between her father, her lover and her independence.

  Tussy had lost the first battle, but stuck to her campaign. In March 1874 she wrote, ‘quite entre nous’, to her dearest Mohr:

  I am going to ask you something, but first I want you to promise me that you will not be very angry. I want to know, dear Mohr, when I may see L. again. It is so very hard never to see him. I have been doing my best to be patient, but it is so difficult and I don’t feel as if I could be much longer. I do not expect you to say that he can come here. I should not even wish it, but could I not, now and then, go for a little walk with him? You let me go out with Outine [another Russian revolutionary admirer], with Frankel, why not with him? No one moreover will be astonished to see us together, as everybody knows we are engaged . . .

  When I was so very ill at Brighton . . . L came to see me, and each time left me stronger and happier; and more able to bear the rather heavy load laid on my shoulders. It is so long since I saw him and I am beginning to feel so very miserable notwithstanding all my efforts to keep up, for I have tried hard to be merry and cheerful. I cannot much longer. Believe me, dear Mohr, if I could see him now and then, it would do me more good than all Mrs Anderson’s prescriptions put together – I know that by experience.

  At any rate, dearest Mohr, if I may not see him now, could you not say when I may. It would be something to look forward to, and if the time were not so indefinite it would be less wearisome to wait.

  My dearest Mohr, please don’t be angry with me for writing this, but forgive me for being selfish enough to worry you again.

  Your

  Tussy41

  Striking information from this beseeching letter is that the great Elizabeth Garrett Anderson is now Eleanor’s doctor. Born in Whitechapel in 1836 and brought up in Aldeburgh, Garrett Anderson was the first woman to qualify in England as a doctor, appearing on the Medical Register for the first time in 1866. Her sister was the suffragette Millicent Garrett Fawcett. Elizabeth Blackwell, who preceded Garrett Anderson, had to train in America. Garrett Anderson was admitted to the British Medical Association in 1873 and for two decades was its only female member.

  Tussy’s health was poor for most of 1874 and Garrett Anderson did a great deal to restore her to her robust self by the end of the year. The strain she experienced was compounded by the death of her eleven-month-old nephew, Jennychen’s son Charles Félicien, who was weak and sickly from the start. Eleanor nursed him day and night without a break – to Jennychen’s eternal gratitude.

  When he died, as he had been born, in his grandparents’ home at Modena Villas, Tussy collapsed completely. For nearly a month she was attended daily by Dr Garrett Anderson, who was under no illusion about the nature of Tussy’s ailments. She focused primarily on Tussy’s need to eat and build up her weight and strength, rather than living driven by cigarettes, air and repressed nervous energy. With firm diplomacy, Tussy’s woman doctor also focussed on her need for occupation. Tussy’s father was impressed by Garrett Anderson and influenced deeply by her practical diagnosis of the causes of so-called ‘hysteria’ that characterised so many specifically female complaints.

  Garrett Anderson sensed Marx’s contribution to Tussy’s weak health in unintentionally thwarting her youthful ambition and desires, but judiciously withheld comment and encouraged the whole family to build up Tussy’s appetite, which improved in ‘geometric proportions’42 according to her relieved and delighted father.

  Dr Garrett Anderson recommended that Tussy would benefit from a recuperative trip to the famous waters at Karlsbad. Marx’s own physician Dr Gumpert had ordered him to go to Karlsbad the previous year, an instruction that Marx, unwilling to leave England whilst Tussy was unwell, had ignored. Subsidised by Engels, daughter and father set off in August 1874 for the famous Bohemian spa resort where they stayed at the Hotel Germania. Marx applied for British citizenship shortly before they travelled, but as he’d heard nothing back from the Home Office before they left, he set off without the protection of a British passport. To avoid drawing attention to himself he took the precaution of registering at the hotel under the alias of Mr Charles Marx, Private Gentleman.

  The legendary health-giving waters at Karlsbad had made the resort popular with monarchs, millionaires and such artists as could afford it. Bach, Goethe, Schiller and Turgenev were visitors, as well as Beethoven, Leibniz, Paganini and Mozart.

  Tussy was enthusiastic about Karlsbad and enchanted by the ‘admirable scenery’.43 She told Jennychen that, ‘We are very exact indeed in all our duties. We take long walks, and altogether get on very well here.’44 No doubt, with the thorn of Lissa temporarily removed from Mohr’s side. They combined strict adherence to their medical programme with socialising. Their eclectic, noisy companions included painters, old fellow exiles, writers and aristocrats.

  Tussy was less enthusiastic about their old family friends the
Kugelmanns, who joined them on the trip to Karlsbad. ‘An impossible man’45 was how she described Kugelmann, agreeing with her father that he was an overly pedantic, small-minded, petit-bourgeois Philistine. And that was just for starters. What offended Tussy the most was how Kugelmann mistreated his ‘charming’46 wife and daughter, Franziska, with whom she became ‘very intimate’.47 Franziska confided to Tussy that her father verbally and physically abused both her mother and herself, and that she had longed for Karlsbad as a brief respite from their miserable lives at home in Hamburg under his tyranny.

  ‘It is a hard thing,’ Eleanor wrote to Jenny, ‘when a woman has no money of her own and her husband tells her every minute that she is ungrateful for all his “Wohltaten” to her and the child. You cannot imagine how brutish Kugel is and how shameless.’48 Initially allocated adjoining rooms, one night Marx heard appalling scenes through the hotel walls that left him in no doubt of Kugelmann’s behaviour. He asked to be moved to another room, and Kugelmann forbade his wife and daughter to speak to Tussy or her father.

  This episode sharpened Tussy’s awareness of the dangers of economic dependency for women within marriage. Here, along with her consciousness of the growing unhappiness and struggle of both of her sisters, are the first explicit signs of her nascent feminism.

  On their return journey they went to Leipzig to visit the Liebknechts for three days, which Tussy described as ‘a bright and joyous souvenir’.49 She and Alice were delighted to see each other and for the first time Tussy met Nathalie, Library’s second wife, and their growing family. The newest addition Karl Liebknecht was three years old and he and Tante Tussy struck up an instant and lasting rapport.

  Tussy confided her difficulties to Library. He was quietly sympathetic to her struggle with Mohr and her family’s opposition to Lissa. They agreed to work together on reciprocal briefings between the socialist movement in Germany and France, with Eleanor reporting on the progress of socialism in England. Library and August Bebel had founded the German Social Democratic Party on Marxist principles in 1869. Library’s Volksstaat was the publication for this German workers’ party. Lissa was about to launch a new weekly review of politics, Rouge et Noir, and Tussy in turn invited Library to contribute. Their reunion was a turning point in her restoration to full health. ‘I could not find words to tell you . . . how happy I was to see you all. It has been one of my dearest wishes to see you again, for . . . I have grown up with the remembrance of many a happy day spent with you.’50

  For the rest of 1874 Tussy worked on the first two editions of Rouge et Noir, for which she translated from German into French Library’s rather tiresome Reichstag speech demanding the lifting of the sentences of imprisoned Social Democrats and a review of the judicial process set to try them. Tussy agreed with Library’s position but not his didactic rhetoric, ‘Qu’est-ce que la bourgeoisie? – Tout. Que doit-elle être? – Rien.’51 She would have preferred clear analysis and persuasion. Rouge et Noir ran to just three editions, folding at the end of November. It turned out to be more a random review of Lissa’s thinking than a comprehensive report on international socialism, but Marx did not miss the extent to which Lissagaray was now clearly influenced by his own thought. Perhaps the most entertaining items in the short-lived journal were the lampoons of contemporary politicians, including radical enthusiast Victor Hugo, spokesman of the Assembly, characterised as having a tongue like a Parisian running sluice.

  Library’s well-meaning but limited rhetoric and Lissa’s generalised Marx-inspired Socialist sentiments in Rouge et Noir illuminate by contrast the sharp clarity of Tussy’s political thought before the age of twenty. She saw the practical need for the journal. The French press she dismissed as ‘thoroughly abject’52 and useless,

  That a socialistic movement is going on in Germany is a fact which the French people are quite ignorant of! It is necessary then for France that some publication should take place in which the Socialistic movement in all countries will be spoken.53

  Here is Tussy the ingrained internationalist, at nineteen. Here too in 1874 is Tussy making a brisk précis of the state of politics in England to her new frequent correspondent, Nathalie. The English worker movement is, she comments, at a complete standstill, overshadowed by the defeat of the Commune. Her visit to Germany, she tells Nathalie, has demonstrated to her what good work a repressive police force does ‘to help our Cause’.54 Revealing a strategic mindset of which the General would approve, Tussy expresses her great ‘regret that the Prussian regime is not possible in England. It would do more than all the Trade Unions and Working Men’s Societies put together to bring life into the movement here.’55

  Depression overcome, appetite regained, engaged in matters of the world at large, Tussy had won the first round in the match with the Victorian feminine malady. Perhaps reflecting on Dr Garrett Anderson’s role in her recovery, Tussy also told Nathalie about the launch of the first Medical School for Women, the initiative of Sophia Jex-Blake, supported by Garrett Anderson and Professor Huxley. Although, she observed, the Medical School would only help middle-class women, this was at least ‘always something’.56

  On her return to England in October, Tussy was in reflective mood on her recent past and immediate future. In the same missive she sent Nathalie a clipping from The Times: a personal advertisement from someone who, like Tussy and her eldest sister, sought to earn an independent living from teaching:

  A young lady desires an engagement as governess. She can give good references and teaches German, French, music and drawing, learnt abroad. Terms six shillings a week.

  Tussy wrote with the feeling of first-hand knowledge of how this advert demonstrated the absolutely ‘horrible position of governesses’.57 She had as examples her own recent experience and her eldest sister’s miserable servitude governessing to the Scottish Dr Monroe, who had summarily sacked her after three years’ good service the instant ‘he made the terrible discovery that I am the daughter of the petroleum chief who defended the iniquitous Communal movement’.58

  By the end of 1874 both the Lafargues and the Longuets had moved back to London and were living nearby in Hampstead. Longuet got a job teaching French at King’s College London and Jennychen secured a post at St Clement Danes Parochial School in central London. Jenny and Laura’s marriages had got them out of their parental home but neither were happy seconded to the demands of motherhood and their husbands’ careers.

  For a few years Tussy’s life had resembled that of the thwarted heroine of a Collins or Brontë novel. Now she was beginning to break the mould. She desisted from trying to beard her leonine father in his own den. She stopped asking for permission to continue with her liaison with Lissa and simply re-established the relationship in the open, daring anyone to challenge her directly.

  Coming of age in the epoch of the Commune, encountering all its challenges and contradictions, Tussy was presented with alternative versions of femininity and the possibilities of the life of woman. As a general political event, the Commune was a failure, but as a gender event it was an extraordinary landmark in the history of the emancipation of women. Tussy teased and loosened the bonds of the struggling Victorian anti-heroine. Where she was going others could only follow or criticise. And without satisfactory role models in family, fact or fiction, she really didn’t know the right direction herself.

  8

  Dogberries

  ‘A slim attractive girl of the German type,’ said the admiring Russian revolutionary Nikolai Alexandrovich Morozov, ‘she reminded me of the romantic Gretchen, or Margaret, in Faust.’1 The comparison with Goethe’s tragic ingénue would make Tussy roar with laughter.

  Morozov was just one of a large cast of colourful characters who visited the new Marx home at 41 Maitland Park Road, to where the family moved in March 1875. A new-build, four-storey, mid-terrace house just round the corner from their previous house, the rent was significantly cheaper. ‘A very ordinary suburban villa’ remarked Tussy’s friend Marian Comyn. ‘The cha
rm of the household, however, was by no means ordinary.’2 Another friend, the actress Virginia Bateman, thought it was ‘a horrid little house’.3 Maitland Park Road was convenient walking distance to Camden Chalk Farm station on the North London Line, which boasted a ladies waiting room on the bridge platform.

  A cadre of Narodnaya Volya, the secret unit for revolutionary struggle against tsarist autocracy, Morozov was part of the combat team with Lev Hartmann and Sofya Perovskaya who in 1879 tried and failed to blow up Tsar Alexander II in his royal train. Morozov fled to France and was arrested when he returned to Russia in February 1881. A month later Narodnaya Volya tried again, and succeeded in assassinating Alexander in a mission led by Sofya Perovskaya. Tussy’s interest was drawn to Russia’s political upheaval and she contributed several articles on the subject to St James’s Gazette.

  As Comyn knew already and Morozov was about to discover, the unremarkable front door of the ‘horrid little house’ in fogbound, suburban London opened into a parallel universe. Tussy’s friend Clara Collet described the crowded living room as ‘full of people all talking French at the top of their voices most of whom were refugees from the crisis after the Paris Commune . . . a Frenchman told [me] that in the event of a revolution everyone in the room was under the sentence of death – presumably he excused himself from the sentiment.’4 The Marxes at 41 Maitland Park Road became London’s most homely radical bohemian salon between 1875 and 1883.