Eleanor Marx

by Rachel Holmes

  Eleanor enjoyed Edward’s intellectual and sexual energy, their tastes were much the same, they agreed on socialism, they both loved the theatre and they worked well together. These were all vitally important, positive aspects of their union, particularly along the scale of nineteenth-century marriage. More problematically, Eleanor wanted children but Edward prevaricated. She was resigned to housekeeping for both of them but hated it and was fairly bad at it.

  They had enough money troubles to worry them both into early graves. ‘I often don’t know where to turn to or what to do. It is almost impossible for me now to get work that is even decently paid for, and Edward gets little enough.’13 Shades of the penurious dog days of her mother and father, with the significant difference that, unlike her father, Edward simply didn’t care, as she wrote to Olive:

  And while I feel utterly desperate he is perfectly unconcerned! It is a continual source of wonder to me. I do not grow used to it, but always feel equally astounded at his absolute incapacity to feel anything – unless he is personally incommoded by it – for twenty-four consecutive hours. We, into whose hearts joy and sorrow sink more deeply, are better off after all. With all the pain and sorrow – and not even you, my Olive, know quite how unhappy I am, it is better to have these stronger feelings than to have practically no feelings at all. Write me a line in case I do not see you tomorrow or the next day. Just one line – say you love me. That will be such a joy, it will help me get through the long, miserable days, and longer, more miserable nights, with less heavy a heart.14

  Her friends, uncomfortable around Edward or just downright disliking him, began to avoid their home and social invitations. Eleanor found herself alone more often. She worked constantly. The entire burden of housework fell to her.

  Olive’s ‘intuition’ that Eleanor and Edward’s relationship was in trouble when they left their honeymoon early the year before in 1884 proved correct. Two months after Tussy wrote her miserable confessional letter to Olive, Shaw reported to his diary, ‘Rumour of split between Avelings.’15

  Tussy reviewed her options, trying to acknowledge head-on that Edward was not what he’d appeared to be and that the relationship wasn’t working. In another letter to Olive, her confidante in this dilemma, she proposed:

  One alternative, is to leave Edward and live by myself. I can’t do that; it would drive him to ruin and it wouldn’t really help me . . . My father used to say that I was more like a boy than a girl. It was Edward who really brought out the feminine in me. I was irresistibly drawn to him.16

  And here’s the nub of it. Eleanor allowed Edward to reinforce the cage of her unresolved femininity, in its nineteenth-century embodiment.

  When Marx said, ‘Tussy is me’, he was saying that she was more like a man than a woman. In so many ways that was true – her constant impetus to action, robust intellect, self-confidence, ability for leadership, camaraderie, original thinking, physical stamina, stomach for a fight; if these are characteristics that define masculinity, then Tussy was more like a boy than a girl.

  If femininity was the posture of subordination, self-doubt, concession, servitude, secondary status to an unelected superior, then there was little of natural ‘femininity’ in Tussy. But her body, the house of her femininity, the muscles, pulleys, levers and hormones designed to produce further life,17 combined with the social conditioning of her age, made her vulnerable to being caught in the trap of being more like a girl than a boy when it came to her own adult sexual relationships.

  Max Beer, so incredulous at Tussy’s choice of Edward, thought it was cultural compulsion that hobbled her. ‘How’, Beer said, ‘she could go on living with this man . . . is a riddle which puzzled us all’:18

  I, as a Jew, knowing the indestructible, age-long Jewish reverence for the sacred bond of wedded life, explain it by her Jewishness. She tried indefatigably to mend him, but, alas! he was past mending. Yet she clung to him with all the loyalty and devotion inherited from a long line of famous Rabbis on her father’s side.19

  It was a sharp insight. As Beer suggested, Eleanor was under the influence of her cultural ancestry, which presented the questionable example of loyal, dutiful wives and mothers. The formative examples of her Möhme and ‘second mother’ Lenchen, both utterly devoted to her father, shaped her attitude to Edward. But Aveling was no Marx. Unintentionally, Tussy’s mothers were dangerous, unhelpful role models, ill-equipping their daughter for freedom from subordination to romantic illusions.

  14

  Educate, Agitate, Organise

  ‘If scrubbing “is my vexation”, cleaning knives is “twice as bad”, joints “puzzle me”, and “potatoes drive me mad”,’ quipped Tussy. She resented domestic labour. ‘Who is the fiend who invented housekeeping? I hope his invention may plague him in another world.’1 There was no need for Eleanor and Edward to discuss the ethics of employing a servant; even if they wanted to they couldn’t afford one. Nor did it occur to Edward to share the domestic labour. He was, Tussy grouched to her sister, ‘the very devil for untidiness . . . and I’m a good second . . . I swear at myself all day.’2

  To Tussy’s delight, Laura came to visit in October 1884 for the first time since their father’s death. The visit confirmed their reconciliation. Eleanor enjoyed introducing her sophisticated French political sister to her new circle. Laura liked Olive, who became a friend. She reserved her views on Edward. Both sisters wanted a rapprochement and to rebuild their relationship. The Lafargues shared political common ground with Aveling, if not personal, and given their prominence in the socialist movement he was keen to curry their favour.

  Laura observed that, alongside her unpaid activism, Tussy was working harder than ever, writing, researching, teaching and translating. Encouraged by Edward, she had offered a course in the early summer on ‘The Reading and Study of Shakespeare’ at the Highgate Literary and Scientific Institution. Her twelve-lesson programme on As You Like It was fully subscribed. She offered students sitting the Cambridge Higher Local Examinations instruction in close textual study of the play. ‘Difficult references, archaic forms, and the dramatic construction of the play will be explained and discussed.’ Her students were women of all classes and working men excluded from the public and private education systems by gender, class, race, or all three. The cost of this Shakespeare course was £1 1s. Students who couldn’t afford the fees were subsidised by trade unions and other progressive organisations. And for those who couldn’t raise the money by any means, Eleanor just quietly overlooked the lack of payment. She recommended students borrow or buy the Clarendon Press edition of the comedy published by Macmillan, costing one shilling and sixpence (1s 6d).

  Eleanor’s course began with a group reading of the play and students continued to perform scenes and speeches throughout the programme. Her accessible teaching methods evolved from the Marx family Shakespeare readings and the Dogberry Club. Eleanor also delivered a series of lectures on economic and political subjects to her local Westminster branch of the Social Democratic Federation.

  Tussy spent a great deal of time voluntarily tutoring organisers and emerging leaders within the socialist and worker movement whose numeracy and literacy were rudimentary. Few working-class activists in the 1880s had the opportunity of more than a basic education, if any. Access to equal education was one of the rights for which they struggled. A score of memoirs by working-class leaders of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries bear testimony to Eleanor, who tutored them in reading, writing, accountancy, and political and economic theory, as well as speech writing and public speaking. Tussy’s passion and sometime training for theatre and performance were now playing out on the political stage. Marx demonstrated definitively the relationship between public life, performance, theatre and state politics in The Eighteenth Brumaire, one of his most brilliant and enduring works about Louis Napoleon Bonaparte’s coup d’état. Once again, the dynamic pattern between philosopher father and political daughter shows itself clearly: Karl Marx was the theo
ry; Eleanor Marx was the practice.

  Whilst Eleanor grafted, Edward was embroiled in public allegations of financial mismanagement of monies belonging to the National Secular Society, of which he was vice-president. Charles Bradlaugh alleged that Aveling had made personal use of campaign funds and not repaid them. The Democratic Federation – recently renamed the Social Democratic Federation – was annoyed that Aveling brought the organisation into disrepute. Hyndman thought that as Aveling was much disliked and Bradlaugh too careful to make unfounded allegations, the charges were likely to stick. Edward resigned his vice-presidency of the National Secular Society, making sure he was gone before the proposal to remove him from office was put to discussion and vote. He defended himself in an open letter to Justice in September:

  I am at the present time indebted in many sums to many persons. I am using every endeavour to clear myself of this indebtedness. But I wish to say that to the best of my knowledge and belief all monies received by me as funds in trust for others have been fully accounted for. My monetary difficulties have to do with my poverty and my want of business habits alone.3

  Eleanor took up a leadership role in the renamed Social Democratic Federation (SDF). In August, both Eleanor and Edward had been elected to the twenty-strong executive council at the SDF annual congress. William Morris, Ernest Bax, John Burns, and Henry and Matilda Hyndman were amongst the other members. From August 1884 to January 1885 Eleanor attended every meeting of the executive council, frequently taking the chair.

  Marx and Engels were sceptical about the Democratic Federation in its early days and disliked Hyndman. But the times were changing. In 1883 the SDF presented a clear socialist manifesto and in January 1884 it adopted an explicit socialist programme. The SDF was evolving into a new kind of political party. January 1884 was the same month in which the Fabian Society of London was founded, in which Shaw took a leading role. The Fabians, all men under thirty, dissociated themselves from other socialist organisations and opposed economic theories based on class struggle and political revolution. In the next century, GBS reflected back on the early Fabian eggheads, including himself. Not a working man or woman amongst them, ‘They paraded their cleverness . . . and spoke of ordinary Socialism as a sort of dentition fever which a man had to pass through before he was intellectually mature enough to become a Fabian.’4 However, GBS’s younger self was a committed Fabian gradualist. Billed as ‘Comrade Shaw’ to speak against the war in Sudan he tartly retaliated, ‘I am G. Bernard Shaw, of the Fabian Society, member of an individualist state, and therefore nobody’s comrade.’5

  The SDF was a broad church, as represented by the variety of different approaches to revolutionary politics amongst its council members. All agreed, however, for the meantime on the principal aims of the new SDF: universal suffrage, an eight-hour day for industrial workers, and the introduction of salaries for British MPs to enable representation of working-class people in parliament.

  The 1880s was a period of schism, fraction, split and regrouping in the socialist movement. Eleanor had to strategise on several fronts. First, there were increasing numbers of would-be Marxists who claimed their version of her father’s scientific philosophy to explain the processes by which societies develop as the ultimate, correct interpretation. Because they diverged from the fundamental prin­ciples of his analysis, Marx had firmly opposed these self-styled Marxist revolutionaries in his lifetime.

  Eleanor inherited the burgeoning problems of those amongst her father’s followers who either didn’t read his work properly, or were constantly at war with each other, or both. Secondly, Eleanor was sucked into the vortex of hostility between Hyndman and Engels. Hyndman’s hatred of Engels took in anyone associated with him, including and especially Eleanor, fellow elected member of the executive council of the SDF. This, combined with Hyndman’s doctrinaire, simplistic Marxism placed him and Eleanor at loggerheads. They moved and counter-moved against each other: she accused Hyndman and his henchmen of petty intriguing and foul play; he accused her of manoeuvring and exploiting the dubious clique of the ‘Old International’ that made one unholy family of British and continental European socialists. Engels, Hyndman claimed, was the devil behind the un-English aims of internationalism and the devil behind Eleanor.

  As an outsider, Shaw cast a sharp observational eye on the infighting in the SDF executive. He wrote to socialist activist Andreas Scheu telling him about the bad blood between ‘the Marx-Aveling party and the Hyndman party’:

  What we have got at Palace Chambers now is a great deal of agitating, very little organising (if any), no educating, and vague speculations as to the world turning upside down in the course of a fortnight or so. Aveling . . . is on for educating, but he is hard up, heavily handicapped by his old associations and his defiance of Mrs Grundy in the matter of Eleanor Marx, personally not a favourite with the world at large . . . 6

  The SDF schism happened at the end of 1885. Hyndman puffed himself up and treated the SDF as his personal vehicle, exacerbating internal conflict. A faction organised against him within the executive council. William Morris reluctantly understood that he had to reconcile himself to the split and step up to the plate. ‘More than two or three of us distrust Hyndman thoroughly,’ he wrote privately to a friend:

  I have done my best to trust him, but cannot any longer. Practically it comes to a contest between him and me . . . I don’t think intrigue or ambition are amongst my many faults; but here I am driven to thrusting myself forward and making a party within a party. However I say I foresaw it, and ’tis part of the day’s work, but I begin to wish the day were over.7

  Eleanor and William Morris led the cabal of ten secessionists, who met at her home on 16 December 1884. They were a good combination. Morris was aware of his shortcomings as an economist and political theorist: ‘I want statistics terribly,’ he confessed to Scheu. ‘You see I am but a poet and artist, good for nothing but sentiment.’8 Shorter on sentiment and long on statistics, with a formidable grasp of economics, organisation and strategy, Eleanor was Morris’s perfect political partner. She explained the fundamental causes of the split to Library:

  One of our chief points of conflict with Hyndman is that whereas we wish to make this a really international movement . . . Mr Hyndman . . . has endeavoured to set English workmen against ‘foreigners’. Now it is absolutely necessary we show the enemy a united front – and that we may do this our German friends must lend us a helping hand. If you want anything to come of the movement here; if you want to help on the really Socialist, as distinct from the Soc Democrat – jingo – Possibilist – Party – now is the time to it.9

  A vote was taken on 27 December and the resolution passed in favour of the internationalists against Hyndman’s ‘Jingo faction’ – as Eleanor called them – by a majority of ten to eight. Ten signatories, including Eleanor, Edward, Morris, Bax and Robert Banner, then handed in their resignation from the SDF. Given the narrowness of their majority, and Hyndman’s voracious political careerism, this was a sensible move. As Tussy told Laura, ‘Hyndman forced things to such a condition that it was impossible to go on working with him.’10

  Two days later, on 29 December, this small group of ten internationalists opposed to Hyndman’s attempts at autocratic mastery founded the Socialist League. Its principles were commendable but its prospects poor. The General was sceptical, as he wrote to Laura: ‘There is this to be said in their favour: that three more unpractical men for a political organisation than Aveling, Bax and Morris are not to be found in all England. But they are sincere.’11 To Bernstein he stated his concern at the well-meaning, predominantly middle-class leadership of the Socialist League: ‘Those who resigned were Aveling, Bax, and Morris, the only honest men amongst the intellectuals – but men as unpractical (two poets and a philosopher) as you could possibly find.’12 Though Tussy was irritated by Hyndman’s personal sniping, this was not the issue at stake:

  The personal question – inevitable personal questions will be mixed u
p in all such movements as these – is after all very secondary to the principal one – that of whether we were to sink into a merely Tory-democratic Party or go on working on the lines of the German Socialists and the French Parti Ouvrier . . . Our majority was too small to make it possible for us to really get rid of the Jingo faction, and so, after due consideration with Engels we decided to go out, and form a new organisation . . . Oh dear! Is not all this wearisome and stupid! But I suppose it must be gone through . . . I suppose this kind of thing is inevitable in the beginning of any movement.13

  Eleanor’s long view of history and its knack for repeating itself equipped her well for the political scrum. Dispute and intrigue were tiresome but to be expected. She deployed the General to round up international support from the old revolutionary émigrés of the 1848 revolutions and the Paris Commune. Her letters rallying support claimed repeatedly, ‘Our friend Engels is entirely with us.’14 She overstated the case; as the General told Laura, he thought the secessionists had moved too soon. Eleanor’s invocation of the name of Engels created, exactly as she intended, the impression that he was orchestrating events from behind the scenes, strengthening her call for support from old internationalists who knew and had worked with him. Having taught her strategy, he admired her use of it.

  Three days before Tussy’s thirtieth birthday the Socialist League issued its manifesto from its headquarters in Farringdon Road. To Socialists laid out the reasons for the split from the SDF and the formation of the new Socialist League. The manifesto was sent out to all SDF branches and Eleanor enclosed copies of it in all her correspondence to potential allies. To Socialists is a position paper that identifies a number of determining factors, such as opposition over questions of leadership, party structure and process, but essentially this founding statement boils down to the principle of internationalism. Under the ‘skilful and shifty’ leadership of Hyndman and his followers, ‘there was a tendency towards national assertion, the persistent foe of Socialism: and it is easy to see how dangerous this might become in times like the present.’15 Eleanor’s political foundations, to which the Paris Commune and the Irish Republican movement were so central, show through clearly at this defining moment in British political history.