Edward Aveling was an intelligent, hard-working young academic with a promising career ahead of him. He showed no talent for original thinking but he was an excellent teacher and a highly competent scholarly writer. He was seriously committed to the public education of a mass, often working-class audience in atheism and Darwinian philosophy, through the popular platform of the National Secular Society.23 He stuck to his political principles at the expense of continuing a respectable, successful progression within conventional academic institutions. That his politics had cost him his academic career went a long way with Tussy and the General towards establishing Edward as a man who would sacrifice personal gain for political principle.
Inevitably, Edward had a religious upbringing from his ambivalent father, who was very receptive to Darwin’s theories. His education and training in the natural sciences coincided with the time when Darwin’s theories, propagated primarily in his On the Origin of Species, challenged both religious and previous scientific mythologies about the evolution of species. Edward was an enthusiastic Darwinian. Orthodox theologians objected, but his dissenting father remarked that the word of God ‘does not come to us to expound any science at all, except that of salvation’.24
Edward’s passion for art and theatre, on the other hand, was a source of anxiety and discord with his father. Edward was a born showman, infused with passionate enthusiasm and belief in the power of his own performance – on and off stage – during which he became completely absorbed in the sound of his own voice and lost himself as he spoke.
While a student, Edward married Isabel Campbell Frank – known to all as Bell – daughter of a well-off Leadenhall chicken farmer who came with a handsome dowry. The couple married in a service conducted by Edward’s father in the Union Chapel in Islington in July 1872. The marriage didn’t last long. By Edward’s various contradictory accounts, the – he claimed – ‘adulterous Bell’, who was religious, ran off with a priest and spread malicious gossip about her husband. Edward claimed to other people that they had parted amicably ‘by mutual agreement’.25 Edward’s younger brother Frederick, however, provided a different account of the separation. He wrote of Edward that ‘he married Bell Frank for her money (300 a year). She could only get half. He soon made her do that. When not able to get any more out of her, he left her.’26
In fact the dowry she brought to her marriage with Edward was a £1,000 legacy from her father, who had died four years previously, which was due to her when she either turned twenty-one or married. Frederick also pointed out that his brother’s separation from his wife coincided exactly with a series of rumours about extra-curricular sexual dalliances with his female students.
Edward’s mother Mary died of alcohol-related apoplexy in 1877, and his father, then sixty-three, remarried the sister of another Congregationalist minister. Edward adored his mother. It was after her death that he declared himself fully as an atheist. Charles Bradlaugh, President of the National Secular Society, in which Edward became extremely active, claimed that Edward’s involvement in the freethought movement cost him many old friends and family ties. It was nearer the truth that his friends and family were appalled at his shameless treatment of Bell Frank, and objected to his attempts at a disreputable theatrical career.
Edward worked for a while as the manager of a travelling theatre company but, stuck in amateur repertory, he transferred his skills as a performer into his travelling public lecture series and appearances in secularist movement entertainments. Like Eleanor, he gave recitations of poetry and prose at campaign rallies and benefits, from Shakespeare to Edgar Allan Poe. He excelled at reciting his favourite piece, The Bells by Poe, the long poem in which bells are tolled by ghouls. In 1881 Henry Salt was very struck by Aveling’s rendition of this piece at the Hall of Science, finding ‘something rather uncanny and impish in his nature which doubtless made him a good interpreter of the weird’.27
London University made its degree courses available to women in 1878. It was the first university in Britain to open its doors to women on equal terms with men. Four female students achieved Bachelor of Arts degrees in 1880, and two gained Bachelor of Science degrees in 1881. Inspired by this precedent, Annie Besant enrolled at London University. Dr Aveling was her tutor. As well as becoming his pupil, the two became colleagues in the Secular Society.
Annie Besant was two years older than Aveling and separated from her husband, a clergyman, as a consequence of her scepticism and secularism. Besant and Charles Bradlaugh soon emerged as the leaders of the organised movement of British secularism, and evidently were in love. Aveling’s arrival as their newest intellectual recruit who would bring scientific credibility to the work of the campaign also put the rather syrupy romantic Annie Besant in a position she liked and continually sought to reproduce – having her attentions fought over by (at least) two men simultaneously.
British secularism emerged as an organised movement in the mid-nineteenth century. Early freethinkers such as Jeremy Bentham, the father of utilitarianism, and Thomas Paine, author of The Age of Reason, led its thinking, inspired by the impact of the French Revolution. Publisher Richard Carlile was prosecuted and served a nine-year prison sentence for publishing Paine’s book. In broadest terms the practice of scepticism or indifference, secularism takes the view that considerations of religion and faith should be excluded from public education and all civil affairs.28
At the beginning of 1879, shortly after he turned thirty, Aveling started a series in the Secular Society magazine the National Reformer, outlining Darwin’s theory of natural selection. He published a statement in the National Reformer titled ‘Credo Ergo Laborado’ – ‘I believe, therefore I shall work’ – stating he had become a freethinker. ‘I desire . . . to labour for freedom of thought, of word, of act, for all men and women . . . Beautiful Nature, the eternal comforter, is with us.’29 Shortly afterwards, he successfully transcribed his lectures into a series of accessible, popular penny tracts published as Student’s Darwin and Darwin Made Easy (1881).
Edward delivered his first public lecture in the Hall of Science on 10 August 1879, with Annie Besant chairing. Percy Bysshe Shelley was his subject, and the central idea that this poet’s art demonstrated the unity of all forms of sensation and the kinship that exists between two related orders of thought, the scientific and the poetical. The argument was an expression of his thinking on materialism and efforts to integrate science and art. Besant gave a gushing vote of thanks from the chair, praising the ‘music’ and ‘artistic charm’ of Dr Aveling’s ‘exquisitely chosen’ and ‘polished’ language.30 This torrent of ego-enhancing admiration floated the pair away on a romantic interlude in the mountains of north Wales, where they penned explicit love poetry for each other.
There’s no record of how Charles Bradlaugh reacted to the entry of Edward into his relationship with Annie but publicly they continued to work together as a triumvirate known as ‘the great Trinity in Unity’,31 constantly extolling each other’s talents. It was the arrival of Eleanor in Edward’s affections that put the socialist cat amongst the secularist pigeons.
Passionately committed to the new cause, Edward toured all around Britain from Cornwall to Scotland, giving Sunday lectures on the subjects of secularism and science, problems with the Christian conception of God, and on evolution and Darwin’s theories. Aveling ably explained to his audiences Darwin’s contention that Christianity ‘is not supported by evidence’,32 and reassured them that Darwin himself had confessed to not giving up Christianity until he was forty years of age. Darwin had searched for empirical evidence based on proof against illusions – and found none.
In one of his lectures, entitled ‘Why I dare not to be a Christian’, Aveling explained that one of his reasons for giving up Christianity was the acute pain and agony of moral uncertainty he had suffered when adhering to the faith. Secularism, on the other hand, provided him with a form of undiluted utilitarianism: the right to unlimited pleasure. ‘In this, our creed, we have not to co
ncern ourselves with the will of a hypothetical being . . . There is for us the simple question ever recurring, will this act, or word, or thought of mine add to the sum of human happiness or of human misery?’33
In the 1880 general election Charles Bradlaugh stood for the two-member constituency of Northampton and was elected with radical anti-monarchist Henry Labouchère. Forbidden from taking the parliamentary oath and from making affirmation, when Bradlaugh claimed the right to be sworn in and refused to withdraw when he was blocked, he was physically dragged out of the House of Commons by the Serjeant-at-Arms. This struggle went on for some years. Bradlaugh was re-elected five times by the voters of Northampton and five times forcibly removed from the House before the constitutional battle to take up his seat was finally won. The campaign prompted Aveling to write a lecture on ‘Representation of the People’, reflecting on British constitutional rights, and proved a political education for Edward in activist politics that was a prelude to his entry into socialism.
Aveling delivered his manifesto for secularist thinking in his essay The Gospel of Evolution, published in a journal called the Atheistic Platform in 1884. Here he explains evolution as the idea of unity and continuity of all phenomena; the unity of matter and motion, and life itself as essentially ‘a mode of motion’. And who are the apostles of secularism?
The preachers of this new gospel are nature herself and all her children. Thus the history of man, all science, all human lives, we that live and love, are the apostles of the new evangel. And its temples . . . are the halls of universities, the state-schools, the science classes for our young men and maidens, the laboratories, and the studies of the philosophers, the hearts of all that seek truth.34
Aveling believed passionately in the importance of secular education. Education, he said, was the only means by which all people could be lifted above religious ignorance and exposed to the option of choosing atheist principles. His mission was explicitly evangelical: ‘The Board Schools of this century will be to the generations that succeed us as the churches were to those before our time.’35
Aveling stood for the Westminster Division at the London School Board elections of November 1882, declaring himself in favour of ‘free, secular, compulsory education’.36 The Westminster branch of the National Secular Society and Henry Hyndman’s Democratic Federation assisted his campaign. As well as Henry Hyndman, two veteran Chartists, the editor of the Labour News and several other members of the Democratic Federation worked for his nomination and election. He was returned with 4,720 votes.
As his speeches after his election make clear, Edward was now well on the road to socialism, explicitly supporting the cause of higher education and technical education as a rightful entitlement of the working classes. Westminster, his constituency, included ‘Soho, Peabody Buildings, Seven Dials, and the voices of the dwellers in such places as these are faintly heard; for over-work and under-pay, hardship and sickness, stifle them. I want to speak especially for such as these. The poor, the wronged, the untaught are, above all, my constituents.’37 Henry Hyndman declared of Aveling, ‘I did not like the man from the first’,38 but recognised his political usefulness and agreed with Annie Besant that Aveling’s election to the Westminster School Board struck ‘a sore blow to the Church and Tory party’.39
Edward was a prolific jobbing reviewer and critic of literature, history, theatre and music. He took over the Art Corner columns of Our Corner, the secularist magazine founded by Annie Besant in January 1883, and wrote many yards of copy on Irving at the Lyceum. With Bell Frank’s dowry to spend, Edward took boxes at the Lyceum for his friends and also treated them to shows and dinner at the fashionable Criterion Restaurant and Theatre in Piccadilly. Aveling suited his liberation from Christian morality to his predilection for self-gratifying hedonism. For Tussy, this was both an intriguing and a dangerous combination. According to Aveling’s self-portrait of the atheist, he was:
. . . not inclined to be miserable in this his only life. He loves it, joys in it, revels in it. He is not blind to its pains and sorrows. Bearing these as cheerfully as he may, he concentrates his attention on the pleasures and sweetness of life, and on . . . the task of lessening the aggregate of the world’s misery.40
And so Aveling was an attractive, clever cad who played a significant role in popularising Darwin and steering British secularists towards socialism.41 It’s easy to see why his anti-establishment, anti-religious, anti-materialist turn of mind appealed to Eleanor. And equally easy to understand how she failed to recognise that his character was the projection of a consummate actor.
Aveling claimed later to have known Marx before his death: ‘I stood by the side of his corpse, hand in hand with my wife,’42 by which he meant Eleanor. A touching conceit, though entirely untrue. Aveling was canny enough to lure Eleanor through her intellect. Just as the way to many a man’s heart might be through his stomach, the surest way to Eleanor’s heart was through her head. Offering his condolence on her father’s death, Aveling suggested she might like to write two articles about him for Progress, a monthly magazine ‘of advanced thought’ launched in January 1883 by Foote, with Aveling as co-editor.
To the satisfaction of both, this commission provided ample pretext for them to spend time together in the Reading Room and around its Bloomsbury precincts. Within weeks, Eleanor agreed to Aveling’s request that she assist him with the general editing of Progress – and thus arose more opportunities for them to put their heads together.
From the beginning to the end of their relationship, Edward almost always called her Eleanor. Amongst family and friends who knew her as Tussy this was unusual, and somehow a bit ponderous. Those close to her remarked on it immediately. There were occasions when Edward called her Tussy, but they were rare enough to be notable. Sam Moore and Jollymeier remembered her childhood rule, ‘that if anyone did not call me Tussy they had to stand on a chair and say Tussy 6 times’.43 Clearly the rules were different for Edward Aveling.
Eleanor’s articles about her father appeared in the May and June editions of Progress. The first was a biographical and historical account of Marx’s life, the second a concise explanation of the theory of surplus value. Thus Eleanor Marx became her father’s first biographer and posthumous exponent of his economic theory. The first essay was a personal human story; the second a clear, rigorous, macroeconomic exposition:
There is no time so little fitted for writing the biography of a great man as that immediately after his death, and the task is doubly difficult when it falls to one who knew and loved him. It is impossible for me to do more at present than give the briefest sketch of my father’s life. I shall confine myself to a simple statement of facts, and I shall not even attempt an exposition of his great theories and discoveries; theories that are the very foundation of Modern Socialism – discoveries that are revolutionising the whole science of Political Economy. I hope, however, to give in a future number of Progress an analysis of my father’s chief work – Das Kapital, and of the truths set forth in it.
Karl Marx was born at Trier, on May 1818, of Jewish parents . . . 44
And so ever since have all biographers of Marx followed suit, basing their account on the primary sources supplied by Eleanor immediately after her father’s death.
Moving from this succinct narrative of Marx’s life to the core of his thought, the second Progress article delivers, as promised, an explanation of the theory of surplus value. Undaunted by the task, Eleanor grasps the reader firmly by the hand and situates her father’s work within its longer tradition of economic analysis:
David Ricardo begins his great work, Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, with these words: ‘The value of a commodity, or the quantity of any other commodity for which it will exchange, depends upon the relative quantity of labour necessary for its production, and not on the greater or less compensation which is paid for that labour.’ This great discovery of Ricardo’s, that there is but one real standard of value, labour, forms the sta
rting-point of Marx’s Das Kapital . . . Marx completes, and partly corrects, Ricardo’s theory of value, and develops, out of it, a theory of that fearfully contested subject, currency, which . . . has carried conviction even into the heads of many political economists of the ordinary stamp.45
Eleanor proceeds to explain clearly and succinctly ‘the mode, based upon his theory of value, by which Marx explains the origin and the continued accumulation of capital in the hands of a, thereby, privileged class’.46 At this time only the first volume of Capital had been published, so Eleanor was working also from unpublished manuscript materials. Her biographical narrative was collated, in part, from the mass of papers, correspondence and interminable lucky-dip muddled-up boxes and files she, the General and Lenchen were painstakingly trying to sort into some sort of archival order in the move from Maitland Park Road.
It was during this period that George Bernard Shaw introduced himself to Tussy in the Reading Room. Imagining himself a suitor, he was initially unaware of the shadow of Edward Aveling hovering in the bookstacks, keeping a watchful eye on everyone Eleanor talked to. Shaw’s interest in politics was developing at the time he met her. His passionate newfound interest in socialism and her father’s work led him to read Capital, an experience he described as ‘the turning point in my career’.47
Shaw first studied Capital in Deville’s abridged translation, approved by Marx before his death and Engels after, and published in August 1883. He read it in the place where much of it was written, the Reading Room, the only library where the publication was accessible to him. From poring over the book that changed his life, it was only a short step for Shaw (GBS) to introduce himself to Eleanor and invite her to a nearby Bloomsbury teashop.
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