Edward lumped all his expenses together, failing to separate out costs for doing his journalistic work, theatre tickets and entertaining expenses for Library and his daughter when they were all together in Boston. The executive had agreed to pay Tussy’s rail fares and include her on Edward’s hotel tariff, but Edward had lazily bundled all the receipts and invoices together and sent them with a cover note to the SLP executive, asking ‘it to decide for which it would feel the party was responsible’.55 His expenditure was flamboyant, his bookkeeping slapdash – and he forgot he was dealing with Germans.
Rosenberg charged Aveling with financial mismanagement and Tussy sat mortified and mute throughout the whole debacle. The executive committee agreed to honour Aveling’s submission of $1,300 for thirteen weeks’ touring, but deplored his presumption at their expense. The crowning humiliation for Tussy was when Herman Walther pointed in a rage to a charge of $25 for corsage bouquets: ‘Do you consider these legitimate expenses?’ he roared at Edward. Tussy had received a corsage bouquet from Edward during the trip but nothing like the hothouse of flowers required to run up this bill, and could only silently conclude that Edward had bought these bouquets for other women.
They left New York on Christmas morning. Wrapped up against the winter cold on deck, Tussy looked up at the resplendent copper statue, 151 feet high, with her uplifted arm holding a torch. Liberty Enlightening the World had been unveiled on 28 October by President Cleveland. Eleanor had read in the press that Lady Liberty’s pedestal was inscribed with ‘The New Colossus’, a sonnet by aptly named Emma Lazarus, an American poet, welcoming immigrants to the United States:
Give me your tired, your poor
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.
America’s contradictions – like Tussy’s own – were enough to fill her thoughts for the entire journey home.
17
Essentially English
Professionally, Tussy’s thirty-second year started well. The English translation of Capital came out in early January 1887 and Ernest Belfort Bax wrote an admiring review of Lissagaray’s History of the Paris Commune in Commonweal, saying that it ought to be in the hand of every socialist, and ‘the translation of the book . . . is excellent’.1 Her professional success, however, was eclipsed by Edward’s expenses scandal.
On New Year’s Day, whilst Tussy and Edward were still at sea, the Daily Telegraph had picked up the story from the New York Herald and handed Hyndman a weapon to discredit Aveling in England. By the time the ‘Costly Apostle’2 made landfall in Liverpool on 4 January, the ambush of press and his political enemies was well set. ‘Aveling’s Idea of “Unpaid Labour”, Corsage Bouquets and Theatre Tickets’, ‘A Deadhead at the Hotels’ and ‘Crisp Bills Flung in His Face’ ran headlines in left- and right-wing press alike. Tussy’s smoking habit was derided: ‘The extraordinary bill had a round sum of $50 for cigars to the doctor and cigarettes to his emancipated lady.’3 ‘Altogether,’ concluded the Evening Standard, ‘delivering lectures on socialism seems a lucrative business.’4
Aveling’s financial fiddling gave the SLP an opportunity to retaliate for their real grievance against him: his public recommendation, everywhere he went in America, that the SLP should unite with the Knights of Labor and other English-speaking, grass-roots American socialist organisations. Whilst Hyndman pursued his political advantage, Tussy and Edward had to camp with the General and Lenchen at 122 Regent’s Park Road until they found somewhere to live. The General was relieved to have Tussy under his protection. ‘Poor Edward’s’ reaction to the crisis was, as usual, to get sick, with quinsy this time, requiring him to duck out of London to convalesce. ‘He is not over endowed with power of resistance to malady,’ Engels dryly remarked to Laura, ‘and so this threw him back very much. He has been off and on at Hastings.’5
Publicly Engels supported Aveling and rejected official requests to boycott him. Although, he said, he had only known Aveling for four years, he had no reason to doubt his character or believe he had attempted to ‘swindle’ the party:
How could he do that during all his tour without his wife being cognizant of it? And in that case the charge includes her too. And then it becomes utterly absurd, in my eyes at least. Her I have known from a child, and for the last seventeen years she has been constantly about me. And more than that, I have inherited from Marx the obligation to stand by his children as he would have done himself, and to see, as far as lies in my power, that they are not wronged. And that I shall do, in spite of fifteen Executives. The daughter of Marx swindling the working class – too rich indeed!6
The General’s defence was all about Eleanor. There’s no doubt that Aveling crocked his accounts. He shrugged off the fraud with lame special pleading that his ‘artistic nature’ precluded him from being able to account or administer. Edward’s studied incompetence made the General worried about Tussy’s security but he excused Edward for being guilty only of witlessness, not political corruption:
The youngster has brought it all on himself through his complete ignorance of life, people, and business, and through his weakness for poetic dreaming. But I have given him a good shaking up, and Tussy will do the rest. He is very gifted and useful, and thoroughly honest, but gushing as a boy, and always inclined to some absurdity. Well, I still remember when I was just such a noodle.7
Eleanor was less forgiving. The General himself had taught her that financial and business competence were essential requirements of political probity. It wasn’t the first time she’d noticed that there was more social latitude given to men for sexual and financial impropriety than to women in public life.
From the outset of 1888 much of Eleanor’s time was taken up with public speaking. On 26 January and 2 February she gave lectures about America to packed meetings at Farringdon Hall. On 11 April she addressed an outdoor rally in Hyde Park of some 15,000 people, primarily working men, gathered to protest against the new criminal law for Ireland. By all accounts, Tussy was the most popular speaker. Even the reporter from the Daily Telegraph found himself seduced by Eleanor’s siren socialism:
Considerable interest was taken in the speech delivered by Mrs Marx Aveling, who wore beneath her brown cape, a dress of green plush with a broad hat trimmed to match. The lady has a winning and rather pretty way of putting forth revolutionary and Socialistic ideas as though they were quite the gentlest thoughts on earth.8
As another open-air meeting in Victoria Park, Hackney, around this time illustrated, Eleanor now came fully into her own as a popular public orator. She lectured on Socialism in America and The Relative Position of English and American Workmen at Socialist League branches all over London. She and Edward instigated what Engels described as ‘a very successful agitation in the East End of London’, speaking at the Radical Clubs – working-men’s clubs – on the American movement, and proposing the formation of a new working-class party based on Marxian principles:
. . . he and Tussy are very busy in the work. It is now an immediate question of organising an English Labour Party with an independent class programme. If it is successful, it will relegate to a back seat both the Social Democratic Federation and the Socialist League, and that would be the most satisfactory end to the present squabbles.9
Amongst the present squabbles were those between Eleanor, Edward, William Morris and the anarchists in the Socialist League. Eleanor’s campaigning aimed to persuade members that socialism was the best political framework and of the need for an independent labour party that, contrary to the anarchist approach of the SL, would stand for electoral representation within the existing parliamentary system and respect the rule of law.
Her experience in America had confirmed her belief in the absolute necessity for a parliamentary workers’ party. She travelled to places and institutions beyond London’s heartlands to spread th
is message, including to the Central Croydon Liberal and Radical Club, which she addressed on the subject of ‘Working Men and Politics’.
This mobilisation was contiguous with the gathering storm within the Socialist League that finally broke at its Third Annual Conference on 29 May. Whilst resolutely defending the condemned anarchists in Chicago, Eleanor was deep in ideological battle with the anarchists within the Socialist League. As she’d predicted from the outset, the anarchist tendency was the stronger force in the SL and would ultimately prevail. Up until now they’d ridden their differences but now came the crunch point, all ravelled up in Aveling’s disrepute.
On 29 May, Morris proposed an amendment committing to ‘the policy of abstention from parliamentary action’, carried by seventeen votes to eleven. Eleanor, representing the Bloomsbury branch, voted against this anarchist resolution not to participate in representative parliamentary democracy. She resigned from the SL the following morning, as did Aveling. The very same day, with disastrous timing, a sexual scandal broke over Aveling’s head in the indignant form of Gertrude Guillaume-Schack, a German anarchist and feminist. Aveling, she asserted, was guilty of disreputable sexual acts far more grave than his financial embezzlement in America and had been ‘slandering his own wife’, Eleanor.10 Tussy’s political decision to split from Morris’s now explicit anarchist policies and leave the SL on a clear vote was overshadowed by gossip about Aveling’s sexual philandering and disloyalty.
Tussy and Edward moved into New Stone Buildings at 65 Chancery Lane. Despite its name, there was nothing new about the tenement. Zinaida Vengerova visited Tussy in the tiny top-floor flat, describing ‘the dim gaslight of the endless staircase,’ which ‘entirely preserved the Dickens spirit of commercial slums.’ The flat was ‘grey, unattractive and thoroughly poverty-stricken’.11 Little wonder then that Tussy was thrilled when, later in the spring, a commission to write a series of articles on ‘Shakespeare’s Stratford’12 led her and Edward to stumble across a bolthole in the heart of Warwickshire.13
Following one of the bard’s favourite walks to Bidford, they passed through the hamlet of Dodwell (‘pronounced Dad’ll by the “natives” ’14), just off the old Roman Road from Evesham to Warwick.15 Tussy spotted two stone cottages on a farm, one with a sign to let. The surprised farmer told them it was two shillings a week, ‘but at first tried to explain these were only cottages for labourers – he could not understand our wanting to come.’16 They took up the tenancy immediately and brought their pets from London. Tussy was delighted to escape the pomp and circumstance of Queen Victoria’s golden jubilee and the self-congratulation of British imperialism in London, what William Morris described as ‘this vulgar Royal Upholstery procession’.17
Eleanor and Edward dug up potatoes and spent happy afternoons together sowing all sorts of vegetables and flowers: ‘Next Spring our garden will be not only ornamental but useful!’18 Dodwell and its neighbouring village had a combined population of 100 and boasted, as William Cobbett admiringly recorded, some of the richest soil in the kingdom. Until now urban to her bootlaces, Tussy was enchanted, outside and in. For the first time since leaving home she had her own kitchen, as well as a pantry, washhouse and quarter-acre garden. She invited Laura and Paul to come and stay:
I can’t tell you how charming this country life is after the hurry and worry and wear and tear of London. It is as Scott calls it – ‘the beautiful county’, essentially English of course, in character, as it becomes Shakespeare’s home to be. Think of it Laura, Shakespeare’s home!19
Tussy delighted in working a few days a week ‘at his birthplace (by permission of the Librarian)’, and, she continued with enthusiasm, ‘we have been over his home, and seen the old guild Chapel . . . and the old grammar school – unchanged – whither he went ‘‘unwillingly to school’’; and his grave in Trinity Church, and Ann Hathaway’s cottage, still just as it was when Master Will went a-courting, and Mary Arden’s cottage at Wilmecote – the prettiest place of all.’20
Tussy revised their articles on America, initially published in Time, for the forthcoming publication by Sonnenschein of The Working Class Movement in America. She enjoyed translating short stories by Norwegian writer Alexander Kielland, and having taught herself Norwegian with unassuming proficiency, determined to improve her understanding of Ibsen. ‘It is . . . a real duty to spread such a great teaching as his and my little effort is just a poor beginning.’21
Edward’s delay in delivering his work, a translation of Lev Aleksandrovich Tikhomirov’s Russia, Political and Social, meant that Sonnenschein witheld the royalties owing from the successful sales of ‘The Woman Question’. A nice irony. The last speech Tussy gave before leaving London for the summer had been to the Clerkenwell branch of the Socialist League, on ‘The Woman Question’, in which she described how the economic basis of gender oppression and exploitation cut across all classes of women. She knew what she was talking about.
Aveling was working on an adaptation of Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter and a production of his own one-act play, with the unprepossessing title of Dregs. This required numerous trips back to London to consult with – he claimed – a popular rising young actress called Rose Norreys, of whom no one had ever heard. Edward’s scope for dalliance in London whilst Tussy was tucked safely in the country was suddenly constrained when, not coincidentally, Olive rented rooms directly next door to them in Chancery Lane. Whilst Edward crept around with his young protégé elsewhere, beyond the watchful eye of Olive, Tussy, cheerfully oblivious, focused on Elizabethan drama:
Now that I have been in this sleepy little Stratford and met the Stratfordians I know where all the Dogberries and Bottoms and Snugs come from. You’ll meet them here today. Just near our ‘Kastle’ is a bank – many think it Titania’s for it is covered with wild thyme and oxlips and violets . . . I never knew before how Stratfordian Shakespeare was. All the flowers are Stratford ones and Charlecote I would wager is Rosalind’s Arden.22
Whilst midsummer-night-dreaming on Titania’s bank, Tussy received a letter from Havelock Ellis with a welcome commission to edit a new collection of unexpurgated plays by Christopher Marlowe. He also asked her if she would work on a drama ‘little known but of considerable interest, A Warning for Fair Women’.23 Vizetelly had recently appointed Havelock Ellis general editor of a radical new project, called the Mermaid Series, to publish plays by Elizabethan dramatists.
Content though she was, the biological clock of early-thirties baby hunger ticked through Tussy’s correspondence at this time. She yearned to see Johnny again, asked in great detail about her niece Mémé, Jenny’s daughter, sent the children books and toys that she could ill afford and fretted about their futures. ‘I wish I could have one with me. A house is so different that rings with a child’s laughter.’24
From the oxlips and violets of Shakespeare country Tussy returned to the capital in October and marched straight back into the smoke and steam of political proselytising in East London. Though not before visiting Lenchen and the General to proudly present them with a large hamper of produce, including butter she’d churned herself, fruit she’d picked, and eggs from her own ducks and hens. She’d slaughtered, plucked and trussed a few of her flock for Lenchen to roast for one of the General’s ‘usual Sunday debauches’,25 as Tussy called them. Not bad progress, Lenchen noted approvingly, for the city girl who a few years previously had panicked when left in charge of a few laying hens.
Eleanor returned to a London in ferment over Irish Home Rule. The Radical Clubs, Irish National League and socialist organisations were orchestrating massive agitation. ‘Everywhere large meetings are being held and for the first time the English working class is supporting Ireland,’26 Tussy reported to her family in Paris. She spoke all over London in support of Irish Home Rule, between teaching and her usual ‘devilling’ hackwork. During this autumn she also campaigned on behalf of the Chicago Anarchists.
In September, the Supreme Court of Illinois had rejected the app
eal and confirmed the death sentences of the accused. William Black asked Eleanor and Edward to mobilise working-men’s clubs in London to pass resolutions protesting against the decision and to get up petitions to the US President and US Supreme Court. Many Radical Clubs subscribed to a cablegram petition asking for mercy, organised by Eleanor: ‘we got – on the one day – 16,405 votes for the petition we cabled over.’27 Other sympathisers in England organised similar petitions, including Henry Hyndman and Annie Besant.
In an interview with the Pall Mall Gazette Eleanor drew the attention of its middle-class readership to the flouting of the rule of law perpetrated against the trialists: ‘There really was not enough evidence to hang a dog upon.’28 She made the case in more explicit terms to the socialist readers of Today. The eight-hour movement, she reminded readers, was the root cause of the events in Chicago: ‘the sentence is a class sentence; the execution will be a class-execution.’29
Petitions and calls for clemency failed to prevent the hangings. What Eleanor described as the ‘legal murder’ of the martyred Chicago Anarchists took place on 11 November. In the midst of the consternation over this outcome, Hyndman claimed publicly that one of the petition cablegrams had never been sent because Edward had trousered the subscriptions.
The issue over Irish Home Rule was but one part of the economic strife and political unrest that characterised Victoria’s jubilee year. The discontent of the London unemployed accelerated throughout the spring and summer months, catching the rising tide of industrial struggles around Britain inspired by the miners’ strikes in Lanarkshire and Northumberland earlier in the year. The Socialist League supported all the strike centres, evolving the slogan ‘UNION amongst ALL workers’ and proposing the necessity for education in socialism and a great federation of national and international labour. By 1887 large sections of workers had already found their own way to socialism, particularly in Scotland.
Eleanor Marx Page 34
