Marx’s estate amounted to £250 cash. His literary legacy was of inestimably greater value. Eleanor was appointed his executor on 18 August, ‘according to English law . . . the only person living who is the legal representative of Mohr, in England’,3 as the General explained to Laura, who was upset about the decision to make Tussy, legally, sole executor. Tussy’s entitlement left Laura feeling abandoned. Engels shielded Tussy from Laura’s angry accusatory letters. He urged her to visit London, regretting that she had been unable to come since her father’s death. Unaware of Laura’s fury, Tussy wrote to her unreservedly about the labour now required:
. . . all the private letters I shall put aside. They are of interest only to us, and can be looked to any time. The other papers – Mss., International correspondence etc. – is what we must look to now. Would you like me to send you all your and Lafargue’s letters? If so as I find them I will put them together. This sorting of the papers will be terrible work. I hardly know how it is to be got through. I must give certain days in the week to it entirely. Of course I cannot sit down and do only that. I must keep up my lessons, and get all the work I can.4
Tussy returned to teaching at Mrs Bircham’s school in Kensington, adding an innovative Literature Class to her courses. She had neither the time nor the money to continue regular coaching with Elizabeth Vezin.
Despite her aspirations, Eleanor was sufficiently pragmatic to face facts squarely. She now understood that she lacked the qualities it took to become a first-rate actor on the English stage. This had also become apparent to Elizabeth Vezin, who reluctantly told her she was very competent, but ‘would never achieve real greatness on the boards – the glory would always fall short of the dream’.5
Eleanor’s reasons for letting go of this hard-fought-for dream appear at first prosaic: family illness and multiple deaths diverted her time and energies. She needed to find a new home and, for the first time, pay all the rent and bills. On top of her paid work, she must allocate several days a week for sorting Mohr’s papers. In its inimitable way, death clarified things for the maturing Eleanor. She couldn’t afford financial recklessness. After all, did the world need another actor more than it needed Marx’s intellectual legacy, secured by the one qualified, undaunted individual other than Engels with whom it could be trusted absolutely?
Interwoven with the practical, the ineffable, Eleanor discovered that she couldn’t pretend to be anyone other than herself. Onstage and off, she seemed unable to be convincing as anyone other than Eleanor Marx. This failure of aptitude for dissimulation was simultaneously one of her greatest assets and, given her aspirations, a significant disadvantage of her personality.
This aspect of her character sat uneasily with the context of the specific historical moment in which she lived, and where she was so often way ahead of her time. By temperament and aesthetic Tussy was a movie star rather than a stage actress;6 modernist naturalism was far more her style. George Bernard Shaw, who had recently introduced himself to Tussy in the British Museum Reading Room, said of himself that he was born ‘fifty years too soon’.7 The same could be said of Tussy. Born fifty years later, she might have found cinema the natural environment for her talent.
The repertoire available to Tussy in the theatre of her time was a world apart from the unacted parts she wanted to play. Though they profoundly interested her intellectually, Shakespeare’s women – Juliet, Lady Macbeth, Beatrice – constrained and frustrated her. From childhood it was always Shakespeare’s great male characters who intrigued and inspired Eleanor. She wanted to play Romeo, not Juliet; Macbeth, not his wife; Hamlet, not Ophelia; Richard, not Lady Anne; Mark Antony, not Cleopatra.
If she’d had a different, less conventional teacher than Elizabeth Vezin, perhaps Tussy might have found her voice. Like many other actors of her era – whether successful, would-be or failed – she longed for female roles articulating more truly her own experience as a modern woman. She needed, in short, the new theatre. Helen Alving in Ibsen’s Ghosts, not Lady Macbeth; Nora Helmer in A Doll’s House, not Cleopatra. The prototypes for the roles Eleanor desired were emerging from the pens of her contemporaries. Some of these pens were held in the grip of her closest friends and Eleanor herself was their inspiration and model. Tussy lived along new lines and not only expressed but acted in her real life new ideas of what woman was, wanted and could be.
In the early 1880s Tussy gathered around her a cast of remarkable people who took centre stage in her life after Mohr’s death. Had such a thing been possible for a woman in her era, Tussy would have made a brilliant theatre director. Instead, her theatre for creating a new cast of radical actors in English art and politics was the British Museum Reading Room, its lofty dome a metaphor for the seat of the brain, workspace for writers and thinkers.
Her father, Arthur Conan-Doyle and Bram Stoker had been amongst the first to apply for readers’ tickets to the new Reading Room when it was opened in May 1857; and it will be recalled that Eleanor had joined in October 1877, when she was twenty-two. Second in size only to the Pantheon, Sydney Smirke’s Reading Room was constructed from cast-iron arches and concrete in the central courtyard of the British Museum and lit with skylights and windows. Inside, hot-water pipes ran along the ground as warming footrests for readers. There were roomy leather-covered desks for 350 readers, each equipped with bookstands, a ready supply of free paper, ink and blotters. At the epicentre of the Reading Room was situated a desk for the librarians and attendants, with concentric shelves housing the famous catalogue, endlessly updated by cut and paste.
The circular interior with its librarians perched hawkishly in the middle was a reminder that the Reading Room was designed as a panopticon, the structure so beloved of Victorian public institutions and every social philosopher’s favourite architectural metaphor for the power of surveillance.8
It was here that Eleanor and her Victorian Bloomsbury group worked, flirted and subverted.
Those permitted access to the intellectual manufactory of the Reading Room included some of the leading dissidents of the Victorian age. The freely spacious, adventurous mind sat next to the pretentiously overcapacious; the intellectual fringe next to state- and law-makers. Women and men sat side by side. The Reading Room was unusual for being a public place where men and women had equal status and, almost, equal access to all subjects and resources of the mind.
Except when the subject was sex.
Tussy discovered that different rules were applied to men and women even in the democracy of reading when she submitted a ticket request to study the Kama Sutra. She was permitted to read it only at a specially designated naughty table under the direct supervisory surveillance of the librarian.9 Did the powers that be (whoever they might be) fear that the daughter of socialism would be inspired to make an impromptu, on-the-spot, practical demonstration of what she learned from its pages?
Mental and visual wandering was common in the charged, ambient hush. Women in the Reading Room were still a rare enough sight for their male peers to regard them as an oddity and, in the tradition of the library, to typecast them: ‘the serious writer’, ‘the lady novelist’, ‘the giggling girl’, ‘the conscientious10 scholar or researcher’, ‘the strident political battle-axe’. People knew each other by sight, if not by name.
Eleanor was easily recognisable. Her trademark pince-nez clipped to a long pinchbeck chain dangled over shapely breasts and waist that were, very clearly, as nature made them and not corseted. Her curls tumbled loosely and thickly to her waist – a style unusual for the time outside of factory, field, bedroom, brothel or dance hall. Tussy’s attempts to pin back her tresses were perfunctory, absent-minded operations, and she shed pins on the desks and in the catalogues.
Special occasion photographs in which her hair was carefully ironed and dressed into submission for the formal pose before the camera are deceptive. Her radical dress sense and relaxed physical bearing announced her as unconventional and avant-garde without a word being spoken. Beatrice Po
tter recognised her immediately, as she recorded in her diary on 24 May 1883:
In person she is comely, dressed in a slovenly picturesque way with curly black hair, flying about in all directions. Fine eyes full of life and sympathy, otherwise ugly features and expression and complexion showing signs of unhealthy excited life kept up with stimulants and tempered by narcotics.11
Beatrice Potter, later Mrs Sidney Webb, was one of Tussy’s many passing acquaintances in the Reading Room at this time. Beatrice introduced herself and suggested tea in the refreshment room, curious to hear Eleanor’s views on British secularist and journal editor George Foote’s recent prosecution for blasphemous libel. Foote had set up Freethinker in May 1881. Its regular sections included ‘Comic Bible Sketches’ and ‘Profane Jokes’. He was prosecuted for blasphemy in May 1882. When Foote’s sentence of one year with hard labour was passed down from the bench by Judge North, a Catholic, he replied, ‘My Lord, I thank you; it is worthy of your creed.’12
A fellow secularist campaigner called Edward Aveling, who contributed religious and scientific articles to the journal, was appointed acting editor during Foote’s imprisonment. In his editorials Aveling robustly continued to defend the ‘right to blaspheme’.13 Eleanor had first heard Aveling speak with Michael Davitt in 1880 during the Irish agrarian war, when she was present at the National Secular Society meeting in London to demand land law reform. The Dogberries also noted Dr Aveling’s lecture series on Shakespeare at the Hall of Science in 1881, and Eleanor was aware of him standing as a candidate for Westminster in the London School Board elections of 1882. As they talked about his acting editorship of Freethinker, Beatrice was unaware of any connection between Aveling and Miss Marx.
Beatrice asked Eleanor whether or not she thought Foote had exceeded the proper limits on freedom of expression by offending Christian believers. Eleanor replied she didn’t find Foote’s extracts particularly amusing, but could find nothing intrinsically wrong with them: ‘Ridicule is quite a legitimate weapon. It is the weapon Voltaire used and did more good with it than any amount of serious argument.’14 They discussed Christianity:
She read the gospels as the gospel of damnation. Thought Christ, if he had existed, was a weak-minded individual with a good deal of character but quite lacking in heroism. ‘Did he not,’ Eleanor said, ‘in the last moment, pray that the cup might pass from him?’15
To Potter’s proposition of ‘the beauty of the Christian religion’ Tussy replied that Christianity is an immoral illusion. The debate continued – no doubt drawing an interested audience in the tearoom. ‘The striking difference of this century and the last,’ Eleanor continued, ‘is that free thought was the privilege of the upper classes then and it is becoming the privilege of the working classes now.’16 Modern socialism, she put to Beatrice, aimed at educating people to ‘disregard the mythical next world and live for this world and insist on having what will make it pleasant for them’.17 And what, Beatrice asked Eleanor, was ‘socialist progress’?
She very sensibly remarked that I might as well ask her to give me in a short formula the whole theory of mechanics . . . I replied that from the little I knew about political economy (the only social science we English understood) the social philosophers seemed to limit themselves to describing forces that were more or less necessarious. She did not contradict this.18
Beatrice, of course, had to comment on the personal life that must surely accompany such revolutionary thinking:
Lives alone, is much connected with the Bradlaugh set, evidently peculiar views on love, etc., and should think has somewhat ‘natural’ relations with men! Should fear that the chances were against her remaining long within the pale of ‘respectable’ society.19
It would amuse Eleanor to know she had ever been in danger of consideration for entry to respectable society. More still that she was assumed to be an adherent of Charles Bradlaugh, a vigorous opponent of socialism.20 Tussy and Mohr disagreed on many things but one of the values they shared absolutely was religious unbelief. Yet it was true that a few years previously her mother and eldest sister had briefly tried out Bradlaugh’s secularist Sunday services. Mohr disliked secularism, and told Möhme that if she sought ‘edification or satisfaction of her metaphysical needs she would find them in the Jewish prophets rather than in Mr Bradlaugh’s shallow reasonings’.21 Edward Aveling was a prominent figure in the National Secular Society from 1880 and had seen – though never spoken with – Mrs Marx and her eldest daughter when they tried out Bradlaugh’s Sunday meetings.
Aveling started using the British Museum Reading Room in 1882. It was here that he finally approached and introduced himself to Eleanor. Aveling was well versed in the opportunities provided for flirtation and potential liaison in this studious space. He wrote a comic article on ‘the humours of the Reading Room’ for Progress, finding it ‘in equal degrees a menagerie and a lunatic asylum’ and playfully recommending that sexual segregation would achieve ‘less talking and fewer marriages’.22 This article appeared in May 1883, shortly after Marx’s death and at the same time that Eleanor began to speak publicly of her association with Edward Aveling.
Edward Bibbins Aveling was born in London on 29 November 1849 at 6 Nelson Terrace, a middle-class street in Stoke Newington, Hackney. Edward’s mother was Mary Ann Goodall, and his father the God-fearing Reverend Thomas William Baxter Aveling, a Congregational minister who presided over the Independent Congregational Chapel in Kingsland High Street for nearly half a century. The Avelings had three servants. Adult Edward claimed an admixture of French and Irish ancestry. His mother and paternal grandmother were indeed Irish emigrants to England, but there is no evidence of his claims to French blood. His mother Mary Ann was the daughter of a Cambridgeshire farmer and innkeeper, a great wit and, by the time of Edward’s birth, an alcoholic.
Reverend Thomas William Baxter Aveling was a distinguished Dissenter and republican who held honorary doctorates, chairmanships and leadership positions in Nonconformist organisations. It says something of Edward’s father that within fifteen years he had built a ministry that required the building of a brand new Gothic edifice to accommodate his expanded congregation of over 2,000. The parishioners clubbed together to buy a hideous pulpit from the Great Exhibition of 1851 and dubbed their new place of worship the ‘Cathedral of North London’.
Reverend Aveling advocated the establishment of schools for both sexes and was vocal about his belief in the rights of women to be educated. He didn’t, however, believe in pleasure, and there was none of the frivolity and fun in the Aveling household that surrounded Eleanor’s upbringing as a Marx.
Edward grew up in a large family of three elder brothers, two younger brothers and two sisters. A spine injury caused by a childhood accident gave adult Edward a slight stoop that contributed to his reptilian air. Sickliness resulting from this injury confined him to home for many of his early years, where he had the run of his father’s excellent library, the shelves of which housed Bunyan, Shakespeare, Defoe, Fielding and any number of theological texts. He was free to read what he chose except on Sundays, when he was forbidden to read anything except Pilgrim’s Progress.
In 1863 Edward and his younger brother Frederick were sent to board at the Dissenters’ Proprietary School in Taunton. Edward and Frederick were the first of the Aveling boys to be fully educated. At the same age, their elder brothers had all started work as apprentices and clerks. The benefit of this superior education came to Edward as a result of his eldest sister Mary marrying a bullion agent, enriching the whole family.
Edward stayed at Taunton for two years, after which he was privately educated by a series of tutors. He decided on a medical profession and enrolled at University College, London in the Faculty of Medicine in 1867. He won an entrance scholarship for £25 and garnered medals, prizes and first certificates for excellent academic performance in chemistry, practical physiology, histology and botany. In 1869 he won a scholarship to specialise in zoology, in which he took his BSc.
Edward was a hard worker and took a job as a lab assistant in Cambridge to eminent physiologist Michael Foster.
Edward’s choice to study medicine at the ‘Godless College’ – as University College was known – was logical. Dissenters were banned from holding public office under the Crown and barred from entry to the old universities – Oxford, Cambridge and Durham – until 1871. Conversely, London University was open to all creeds.
Edward took up a teaching post at Miss Buss’s North London Collegiate School for Girls in Camden Road, a pioneering institution for women’s education of which, not coincidentally, Edward’s father was a patron. Whilst studying for his undergraduate degree, Edward took on private coaching and published cheap editions of Botanical Tables and Physiological Tables for students. Various medical bodies, including the Department of Science and Art, subsidised the publication of these textbooks to prepare students for examination. The Department of Science and Art was set up to expand technical instruction and the training of qualified teachers, threatened by competition from foreign countries whose superior technical education was beginning to negatively affect British competence in trade, science and technology.
In 1875 Edward was appointed as a part-time lecturer in comparative anatomy and biology at the London Hospital; the following year, he obtained his DSc at University College, London, and was made a Fellow of the Linnean Society. In 1879 he applied for a vacant chair in comparative anatomy at King’s College London but didn’t get the job.
Eleanor Marx Page 22
