Eleanor Marx

by Rachel Holmes

  Tussy paints a clear picture of her typical evenings in. Johnny is tucked up in bed, Lenchen and Pumps (Mary Ellen Burns, Lizzy and Mary’s troublesome niece) have gone to the theatre and Tussy is dashing off a quick line (four pages) to her sister ‘before I begin my evening’s work at the glossary’.40 She didn’t specify what or who the glossary was for; it seems to have been a commission from Furnivall for the Shakespeare or Chaucer Society.41

  ‘London is the brain of the world,’42 wrote Margaret McMillan, one of Eleanor’s contemporaries, and Eleanor was one of its busiest brains. Simultaneous to her work as an emerging woman of letters, hack researcher, running the Dogberries, acting as Marx’s correspondence secretary, translating Lissa’s revisions of his ever-lengthening book, writing her first reviews and political articles, and a catholic range of reading from political economy to poetry to exposures of fraudulent spiritualists, Tussy dutifully and devotedly cares for her parents and her nephews.

  Her dedication extends even to hated needlework. A sure sign of Möhme’s decline, ‘she can neither read nor write and her never-idle needle is beginning to rust at last.’43 Tussy takes over, butchering some red flannel into badly bunched petticoats for Jennychen’s little boys. ‘I fear you won’t find the making very brilliant – you know needlework is not my forte (entre nous it is not yours either) and you must take the will for the deed, remembering that if the buttonholes are weak the spirit has been willing.’44 Contradicting her own experience of juggling the competing demands of intellectual wage labour and unpaid domestic labour in a pitched battle between duty and desire, Tussy tries to reassure her eldest sister that the hiatus in her career is only temporary:

  Of course we know without telling what an awful time you must be having, in a strange house with three babies and no proper servant . . . It certainly would be a great pity if you had to give up writing but by and by when you’ve settled down and have a good servant you’ll find more time. Just now naturally every moment is occupied with the house or the children, but that will only be for a time.45

  As it turned out for Jennychen, the time that every moment was occupied with house and children was to be her lifetime. Even when the good servant finally arrived, Jennychen never again returned to her writing or active political engagement.

  By the early 1880s both of Tussy’s sisters had conclusively given up their working lives for children, husband and house. Möhme was incurably ill; Lizzy Burns dead. Amongst all the Marx women, Tussy was The Only Remaining Lady Candidate for emancipation from the damned future of the angel in the house.

  10

  A Line of Her Own

  At the end of 1880 Tussy gave a public recital of the Pied Piper of Hamelin at a Communard benefit held in a north London concert hall. Marx, Engels, Hirsch, Leo Hartmann, August Bebel and Eduard Bernstein were present for her first performance of Robert Browning’s retelling of the popular ballad, published in 1842. Bernstein praised her ‘tremendous verve and wonderful voice’, describing how she ‘spoke with a great wealth of modulation and earned a great deal of applause’.1 It was an encouraging start.

  Two men who were in her audience that night proposed marriage to her around this time, neither of whom were Lissagaray. A decade after the Paris Commune the amnesty campaign for the exiled and banished Communards was won. The fight had gained new momentum from the founding of the French Workers’ Party earlier in 1880, agreed in a motion passed at the third Socialist Congress in Marseilles in October 1879. Lissagaray and Longuet wrote in support of the motion on behalf of Communards in London. In March 1880 Paris openly celebrated the anniversary of the Commune for the first time and in July full pardons were finally implemented. Lissagaray left immediately for Paris.

  It was clear to Tussy that he would not return permanently to London. Jennychen and Laura started to make plans to move their families back to France with their French husbands. Lissa may have assumed Tussy would follow him. For ten years, enforced exile had preoccupied him; freedom to return to France would, he seemed to expect, allow all the other elements in his life to fall into place – including his marriage to Tussy, deferred by his banishment and his book.

  As Hartmann and Hirsch, both planning their proposals, watched Tussy’s performance of The Pied Piper they must have wondered which piper was finally going to call the tune in Tussy and Lissa’s longstanding betrothal:

  Brothers, sisters, husbands, wives –

  Followed the Piper for their lives.

  From street to street he piped advancing,

  And step for step they followed dancing.2

  But Tussy, much as she cared for Lissa, wanted to lead, not follow. With Lissa in France and Tussy showing no signs of following promptly, Hartmann and Hirsch took their chances.

  As for the subject of all this attention and desire, her passions lay elsewhere. Even though at twenty-five others might think she should be getting on with it, Tussy’s thoughts were not of marriage, but of the stage. The Dogberries were at their zenith and the source of new friends and opportunities. In April 1881 Tussy discovered a new ‘Wunderkind’3 who joined the Dogberries: Ernest Radford, a young English barrister, poet and critic who despised the law and wanted to give it up for a life in the arts. Tussy and Mohr thought he looked like a cross between Irving and the late Ferdinand Lassalle. Another Dogberry and friend of Tussy’s, the poet Caroline ‘Dollie’ Maitland, took a passionate interest in Edward and the threesome started to spend a great deal of time together, with Tussy as nominal chaperone. They went to the theatre as often as possible, including to see Irving in Hamlet. Edward, Tussy remarked to her sister, ‘is a very nice young fellow . . . he is wonderfully like Irving!’4

  Tussy, too, wanted to be wonderfully like Irving. He got all the best roles, after all. She identified with him rather than his brilliant stage ‘wife’ Ellen Terry because Irving was, like her, an outsider to the theatre world who worked his way on to the stage, whereas Ellen Terry, daughter of a theatrical family, was born into it. Until the end of the nineteenth century most actresses, like Terry, were stage children, brought up in theatreland. But Tussy was born and brought up in the world of politics. Women did not have the freedom to choose the stage as men did.5

  As well as Irving, Wyndham, Kendal and Willis, and the later generation of Beerbohm Tree, Maude, Bourchier and Hawtrey, many other male actors started out completely unconnected to the theatre. Conversely, Ellen Terry, Fanny Kemble, Madge Kendal, Marie Bancroft, Mrs Charles Young (later Mrs Vezin) and Mrs John Wood were born to the boards into acting families.

  The Dogberries formed an ensemble, led by Tussy, Dollie and Edward, and put on two one-act plays by Eugène Scribe, the father of the ‘well made play’, at the Dilettante Club in Regent Street. First Love was a vaudeville comedy and At a Farm by the Sea a drama. Scribe, the leading French dramatist and librettist of the first half of the nineteenth century, wrote some 300 plays and pioneered adeptly structured studies of contemporary bourgeois existence – in short, he was a modern.

  Engels took a party of friends to the show on 5 July and sent a prompt review to Marx and Möhme, away in Eastbourne under doctor’s orders. Tussy and Dollie, Engels reported, ‘played very well’:

  Tussy was very good in the passionate scenes and it was easily perceived that she took Ellen Terry for model while Radford took Irving, yet she will soon use it up; if she wants to make a public impact, she must absolutely strike out a line of her own and there is no doubt that she will.6

  There was the rub. Opposite Radford playing Irving, Tussy had no choice but to play the woman’s part. There couldn’t be two Irvings on stage. Tussy played Emmeline, who tests the maxim that the first love is the true love and that a person only loves once – with surprising results. Søren Kierkegaard loved the play so much he saw it repeatedly in Copenhagen and wrote one of his most famous essays on love about it.

  To develop her own style Eleanor first needed training – as well she knew. In the summer of 1881 Elizabeth and Hermann Vezin,
amongst London’s best-known theatrical couples, moved into the neighbourhood. Their coaching methods emphasised physiological approaches to elocution and theatrical performance. They credited their techniques to two influential contemporary pioneers of voice training, John Hullah and Emil Behnke. Hullah taught ‘Public Reading’ in the theology faculty at King’s College London. His classic The Speaking Voice (1870) summarises his approach to physical stance, deportment, modulation, structure of delivery and techniques for managing audiences – especially rowdy ones. Behnke focused on physical aspects, including diet, breathing and – especially for women – loose clothing.7

  Impressed by seeing Tussy perform, Elizabeth Vezin told her she had talent and suggested she come to her for professional coaching. Tussy explained her plan to take elocution and performance lessons so she could give professional recitals. Vezin opposed this, telling Tussy she was underestimating her talents and should aim for the full scope of an acting career. ‘Even if,’ Tussy wrote to Jennychen, ‘as I fancy will be the case, Mrs Vezin finds she has much overrated my powers, the lessons will still be useful to me, and I can always make the recitation venture.’8

  Nervously, she approached her father and asked him to help her pay for the tuition. Engels would have invested willingly in her training but as ever she refused to ask him for money – though Marx probably got it from him anyway. Her father had misgivings about her new choice of career direction. Her mother hedged and Jennychen, who Tussy looked up to, encouraged her ambition but tempered her support with cautions about the economic and practical obstacles.

  Tussy was fully aware that she needed to seek out her part in the world. ‘I feel sorry to cost Papa so much, but after all very small sums were expended on my education – compared at least to what is now demanded of girls – and I think if I do succeed it will have been a good investment. I shall try, too, to get as much work as I can so that I may have a little money by the time I need it.’9 Considerably more money had been put into Jennychen and Laura’s schooling and extramural accomplishments than into hers. She never had the music or art lessons dedicated to her elder sisters, both of whom also stayed at school for four years longer than she did. That said, when she did have opportunities for formal education she had in truth shown more desire to run away from school than to attend regularly. Her comment that it is imperative she continue earning and put by what she can is telling. Both of her sisters owed a large proportion of their livelihood and security to their husbands, in-laws and Engels. The first of these two she didn’t have and she wouldn’t take from the latter.

  Thanks to a chance encounter with John Mayall on an omnibus, Tussy picked up some regular work as a précis writer for a scientific journal at the handsome regular rate of £2 per week. She hoped this might release her from some of the other freelance work that sucked up so much of her time and create space for her theatrical training. ‘I have never tried it and don’t know if I can do it,’ she confided to Jennychen. ‘Well, I’ll try anyway – if I fail, I fail. You see, dear, I’ve a goodly number of irons in the fire, but I feel I’ve wasted quite enough of my life, and it is high time I did something.’10

  This is a concise expression of the condition of the odd woman, in George Gissing’s apposite formulation. The strain of nearly a decade of unpaid labour as dutiful daughter, correspondence secretary, parental companion, carer, and nanny to nephews and nieces were beginning to show. She desired romance, marriage and children but deferred, prompted by the still small voice that warned they were potential roads to future unfreedom. As a little girl she had written a loving letter to her ‘dear Dady’ [sic] – signing herself ‘Your UNdutiful daughter Eleanor.’11 How to recapture the unbounded optimism of the little girl bold enough to be an undutiful daughter?

  The urgency of Tussy’s need to ‘strike out on a line of her own’, as Engels elegantly put it, is not just a question of finding an original voice and style for her potential theatrical career – it is the need to find a voice of independence on the bigger stage of life beyond the extended Marx family. ‘Strike’ is the perfect verb for soul-socialist Tussy; ‘a line of her own’ the exact description of her rights and needs. Engels’s suggestion that Tussy needed to persue line of her own anticipates Virginia Woolf’s later proposition that a woman needs a room of her own and £50 a year in order to make a bid for a life of artistic freedom.

  Once settled into their new home, the Vezins went away until mid-August. Tussy forced a tense agreement from her father that she could start her training when they returned. Action being always the thing for Tussy, this deferral precipitated the nervous collapse her assertion of a definite life plan aimed to avert. Mohr, Möhme and Lenchen planned to be away all of the summer. They spent July in Eastbourne and then went to France to visit Jennychen and the children in Argenteuil. Lenchen went with them – she now never left Möhme’s side during her waking hours and when Möhme rested provided welcome companionship and support for Mohr.

  Tussy was left to the pleasure of her own devices for six weeks, working continuously, chain-smoking, forgetting to eat, sleeping very little and fretfully counting the days until she could start her tuition and open the door on a possible new life. Absorbed in her work, fuelled by nicotine, coffee, alcohol and sleeping draughts, she didn’t notice her body calling the game.

  A fortnight after their arrival in France her parents received an urgent telegram from Dollie Maitland telling them Tussy was seriously ill but wouldn’t let Dollie help her or call a doctor.

  Marx rushed back to London immediately to find Tussy in a state of nervous collapse. ‘For some weeks she has eaten nothing (literally),’ he wrote to Jennychen. ‘Her nervous system is in a pitiable state, whence continual insomnia, tremblings of hands, neuralgic convulsions of the face, etc.’12 Dr Donkin said there was no organic disease present, except for ‘a perfect derangement of the action of her stomach’13 due to her lack of interest in eating – based, implicitly, on a perfect derangement of the action of her brain to take proper care of herself. Tussy’s disastrous self-management was the mirror of her exemplary capacity to look after others.

  Dr Freud would have recognised the symptoms directly: he and Dr Marx would have concurred on the causes of her acute, ‘hysteric’ symptoms – the twitching, the shaking, the lack of appetite. Use of too many stimulants. Insomnia. Depression. Frustrated desire. Surfeit of unchannelled ambition, intellectual talent and energy. Resentment at being for so long a repressed, obedient daughter fighting her contrapuntal desire to break free and strike out on a line of her own. Passionate will to live her own life. Underpinning the intensity of her reaction: guilt, regret, foreboding, self-doubt, insecurity. And in the shared case notes might be a mention of her awareness – conscious, unconscious or mixture by turns of acknowledgement and denial – that she was losing her mother. Grief.

  Added to the mix was the fact of Lissa’s return to Paris and how to deal with her realisation that she would never follow him.

  Tussy was annoyed with Dollie for notifying her parents. Poor practical Dollie got short shrift from her workaholic, anorexic friend for trying to help her. Tussy agreed to follow Dr Donkin’s prescription for recovery, and the combination of regular eating, sleep and the assurance from her father that she could start her acting lessons as soon as she was recovered put her back on an even keel.

  It was a brief respite. Whilst Marx supervised Tussy’s recovery Möhme and Lenchen returned by slow stages from France, travelling first class and stopping at Amiens and Boulogne. Möhme now endured chronic pain and constant exhaustion. Lenchen managed their travel, gently nurtured, and administered her medication and morphine for what both sensed might be their last journey together. These two women had shared their lives since childhood, always lived together in the same homes, shared the flights of exile, brought their children into the world together, looked after Marx together, cooked and sewed, mended and made do in the hungry years, gone to the theatre and music recitals in each other’s company.
Their longest period of separation in six decades was seven months in 1851, when Jenny went home to Trier for an extended visit and Lenchen stayed in London to look after Marx. When Jenny returned, there had been a great row and temporary rift between them but they resolved the difference and never after revealed the cause. They had nursed each other through illness, fought and resolved the arguments of true friendship and now, both in their sixties, shared secrets that remained their own.

  For every hundred meals they cooked, Marx and Engels expressed an idea; for every basket of petticoats, bibs and curtains they sewed together, Marx and Engels wrote an article. For every pregnancy, childbirth and labour-intensive period of raising an infant, Marx and Engels wrote a book. Some years later the favourite daughter of these four friends postulated ‘a general idea that has to do with all women. The life of woman does not coincide with that of man.’14 In their lifetimes the friendship and comradeship between the inseparable Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels was legendary on at least three continents. Because, as Tussy puts it, the life of woman does not coincide with man, nor does her afterlife – or history. The comradeship between the inseparable Jenny von Westphalen and Helen Demuth is neither legendary nor generally well remembered. Yet at the heart of this female friendship rests the key to the secret of the Marx family household: the identity of the father of Lenchen’s only child.

  Tussy was physically recovered, ate and slept more regularly under her father’s watchful eye, and was revived as always by the pleasure of his company. On Möhme and Lenchen’s return, it was Marx’s turn to be sick, knocked down by a bad attack of pleurisy.

  With both parents now invalids and requiring round-the-clock care from Lenchen and herself, Tussy was once again grimly forced to defer the start of her professional coaching with Elizabeth Vezin. ‘Since Saturday I have not left Papa’s room – day or night,’ she told Jennychen. ‘Tonight however Helen will be with him as the doctor wants me to have a night’s rest. There is of course continuously something to do.’15 Alarmed, Jennychen wanted to come to London immediately to help, but Tussy had to discourage her as it caused Marx such great anxiety to countenance his grandchildren being left in the random care of their slapdash father. Emotional anxiety intensified Marx’s breathing difficulties, in turn increasing the frequency of Tussy’s need to administer his inhalation treatments.