Just as they were beginning to analyse the possibilities for revolutionary social and economic change, the swelling movement of unemployed in London was left leaderless at a critical moment when John Burns and Henry Hyde Champion suddenly quit the Social Democratic Federation due to their discontent with Hyndman. People congregated in Trafalgar Square, holding public meetings, making speeches themselves, asking questions, discussing how to appoint new leaders and the viability of leaderless revolution. Trafalgar Square became a hub of daily democratic protest and free speech, within hearing distance of Parliament. The starving unemployed inconvenienced the shopkeepers, hoteliers and restaurateurs who paid high rents to be in the centre of the metropolis. Well-heeled day-trippers and tourists who came to London to spend money found their fun spoiled. After all, said the Illustrated London News, ‘Who would bring a party of ladies and children to a hotel at Charing Cross with the chance of their exit being blockaded all the afternoon?’30
As their numbers increased, repeated attempts were made to clear the square. During October assaults and arrests were made on the protesters using mounted policemen, truncheons and staves. On 8 November, the government banned all further meetings in Trafalgar Square and overnight Londoners mobilised to protect their right of free assembly. The Metropolitan Federation of Radical Clubs, Irish National League and Socialist League called for a freedom of expression and anti-coercion demonstration to be held on Sunday 13 November, under the slogan, ‘To the Square!’
Tussy and Edward marched at the front of the rally that started in the east of the city and converged with other processions on Trafalgar Square. They were greeted by armed military, foot and mounted police. The 300 Grenadier Guards and 250 Life Guards of the Household Brigade had twenty rounds of ammunition apiece and the total force awaiting the protesters, including the police, numbered 4,000.
Tussy threw herself into the frontline of demonstrators attempting to force themselves into the barricaded square. Fighting broke out. Many unarmed and frightened protesters fled in panic. Eleanor was dismayed at their cowardice: ‘only after I had shouted myself hoarse calling on the men to stand and show fight, did a few Irishmen close round. These attracted others, as you will see from the papers, we on Westminster Bridge made a fair sight. But it was sickening to see the men run.’31 She was horrified at the police brutality, kicking men and women where they had fallen, forcing people under their horses’ hooves, and striking them with their staves. Hundreds were injured, arrested, charged and later sentenced. More than 200 were hospitalised and at least three died as a result of their injuries.
Two bobbies got hold of Eleanor and tried to run her in, but she escaped and made her way back on foot to the General’s house in Regent’s Park. She’d lost Edward, who evaporated from her side when the skirmish began. Tussy turned up on the General’s doorstep with ‘her coat in tatters, her hat bashed and slashed by a blow’, as he told Lafargue, adding wryly, ‘Edward saved his skin, the contingent with which he found himself having hopped it at the outset.’32 George Bernard Shaw, who was in this group, cheerfully confirmed their manly cowardice. He described how he was paralysed with terror when the fighting broke out in Trafalgar Square and instantly ducked: ‘you should have seen that high hearted host run. Running hardly expresses our collective action. We skedaddled, and never drew rein until we were safe on Hampstead Heath . . . I think it was the most abjectly disgraceful defeat ever suffered by a band of heroes outnumbering their foes a thousand to one.’33
Tussy did not run but prepared another offensive. After they’d been repelled from Trafalgar Square, she’d led her Clerkenwell crowd through the backstreets of Victoria Embankment and over Blackfriars Bridge to join the battle on Westminster Bridge with those who’d arrived from the south. ‘I got pretty roughly used myself . . . I have a bad blow across the arm from a policeman’s baton, and a blow on the head knocked me down . . . But this is nothing to what I saw done to others.’34 The General was not persuaded by her version of events, as he wrote to Nathalie Liebknecht: ‘Tussy . . . was not the attacked, but the attacker.’35
Overnight, Bloody Sunday, as it was named, became one of the most notorious attacks on civil liberties in British history. The following day the Pall Mall Gazette dedicated the entire issue to the episode. Eleanor was furious with William Stead for publishing without her permission a note she had written to him the previous evening. ‘Karl Marx’s daughter writes to us as follows: “I have never seen anything like the brutality of the police, and Germans and Austrians who know what police brutality can be, have said the same to me. I need not tell you that I was in the thick of the fight at Parliament Street.” ’36 Stead set up a Law and Liberty League to assist victims of Bloody Sunday and subscribers put up funds for those who had been detained. Eleanor was amongst those who made bail for them.
Shocked and riled by the state aggression on Bloody Sunday, Eleanor revealed that she retained her militant instincts about the uses of violence. Reflecting on Bloody Sunday, she condemned the ‘lack of fight in the working men’ with as much scorn as she held for the police brutality. ‘If only Radicals were not so many of them cowards we could [have carried] the Square. As it is, they are all “funking” more or less.’37 Tussy thought state violence would do their political work for them by winning over better radical elements to socialism: ‘Last Sunday the troops had ammunition ready and stood with fixed bayonets. Next Sunday I think it very possible they will actually fire. That would be very useful to the whole movement here.’38
She noted that ‘our fire-eating Anarchists here as usual are getting frightened now that there really is a little danger’, and criticised Morris for proclaiming that the revolution wouldn’t be made until the people were armed: ‘He doesn’t seem capable of understanding that by the time all the people are armed, there will be no need for the Revolution (– with a very big R).’39 Tussy’s fearlessness is quite terrifying.
In May, at the Fourth Annual Conference of the Socialist League, the Bloomsbury branch, led by Eleanor and Edward, had been suspended for working together with the SDF to put up candidates for local elections. Morris remained resolute on his anti-parliamentary, anti-state position on electoral participation. The game was up at this conference anyway: the Bloomsbury branch put forward a motion to change the Socialist League’s constitution so that individual branches might ‘be empowered (if so disposed) to run or support candidates for all the representative bodies of the country’; it was defeated by a majority led by Morris. The Bloomsbury branch declared itself autonomous after the conference and announced to the League its intention to form a new organisation for the express purpose of running candidates at elections. Unsurprisingly, the branch was immediately expelled and dissolved.40 The anarchist majority in the SL, led by Morris, would not tolerate this parliamentary socialism.
What underpinned Eleanor’s ability to fight? Without context, she might seem like a blood-lusting scrapper, lacking pacifist constraint. Far from it. As a reflective letter to her sister written three days after Bloody Sunday reveals, Eleanor’s motivation to fight was prompted by her recent first-hand experience of the conditions endured daily by unemployed Londoners. Eleanor was now immersed in working in East London. The suffering she witnessed amongst the struggling unemployed was worse than any thump from a policeman’s baton:
To walk through the streets is heartrending. I know the East End well, and I know people who have lived there for years, both working men and people like Maggie Harkness, interested in the conditions of life in the East End, and all agree that they had never known anything approaching the distress this year. Thousands who usually can just keep going at any rate during the first months of the winter are this year starving . . . One feels almost desperate at the sight of it all . . . Is it not extraordinary that these people will lie down and die of hunger rather than join together and take what they need, and what there is abundance of ?41
It was meeting hungry people on the streets of London that made El
eanor wretched. Her response was not guilt, sentimentality or sticking-plaster philanthropy but to fight for justice.
In November Aveling put on a production of his play By the Sea at Ladbroke Hall. The play was an adaptation of a French piece based on an old Scottish folk ballad, ‘Auld Robin Gray’. Edward cast Eleanor in the role of erring wife and himself as wronged husband. The Dramatic Review judged her performance as shockingly bad:
small though the theatre was, she was frequently inaudible, even close to the stage, and never for a moment seemed to understand that she ought to be heard by anybody more than a few feet off. Some of her lines were prettily spoken, but she did not rise to the height either of the repentant wife, who grieves to have offended against her husband even in thought, or the loyal wife who repulses the still-loved lover of her childhood.42
So, Eleanor failed because she was utterly unable to perform the role of conventional wife convincingly. Could this cringing inaudible mouse possibly be the same woman who confidently commanded attentive audiences of workers in their tens of thousands at outdoor public meetings and in mass indoor meetings in packed, echoing halls with difficult acoustics?
And here was Aveling, so insecure in real life, convincingly strutting about the stage in the role of the wronged husband. The theatre press now spoke of him as Alec Nelson, the soubriquet Edward adopted in his stage work in order to separate his name from the financial and sexual scandals that had followed him.
Tussy was fed up. As a woman in public life there seemed to be no escape from being constantly sized up and evaluated by different criteria to men. Critical opinion that she was not cut out for the stage was old news; she’d long given up hopes of a theatrical career. It was rather the sense of weariness that everything a woman did in public life had to be sanctioned, or judged and found wanting.
Tussy ended the eventful year in gallows mood. She was depressed about the apparent world victory of capitalism, the cowardice of men, and her loneliness brought on by Edward’s emotional abandonment. Edward spent most of December in Torquay rehearsing repertory productions of two of his plays, By the Sea and The Love Philtre. Tussy would have enjoyed a break in the seaside town but Edward couldn’t tell her that her presence would interfere with his current holiday plum pudding in the form of a young lead actress. The Love Philtre was a well-turned piece and justly garnered plaudits. Its ingenious plot featured a love potion that made a young woman besotted out of blind duty with its purveyor. Eerie, how effectively Edward sucked all his successful themes from the marrowbones of his troubled relationship with Eleanor.
Tussy found herself pretty much alone at Christmas, too proud to throw herself on the goodwill of Engels and Lenchen or the many other friends who invited and would have welcomed her. As she wrote to Dollie Radford, who’d recently had a second baby, ‘Christmas without children is a mistake.’43 Dollie and Ernest Radford tried to tell her it was her relationship with Edward that was the mistake but Eleanor had to learn her own lessons and couldn’t hear them. As soon as Edward left town for Torquay, Tussy’s friends called to visit. Seasonal invitations – to her alone – flew in thick and fast. Realisation dawned. Fiercely loyal, Tussy was offended.
In a brittle note to George Bernard Shaw, Eleanor let him know she was now aware how things stood. ‘I am so used to being boycotted that it is no longer a novelty. I marvel much more now when I am not boycotted. You never come to see us now, and I have sometimes wondered if you were boycotting us too!’44 Three boycotts in as many sentences, from a seasoned politico who regarded boycott as one of the most practical strategies available to encourage engagement on difficult, apparently intractable issues.
She busied herself over the holiday season by sprucing up the dull flat in Chancery Lane. ‘I believe I have a genius for house painting,’ she joked to her sister. ‘We have a most splendid enamel here now . . . which I find invaluable. I enamel chairs, tables, floors, everything. If the climate only permitted I should enamel myself.’45 She also reported to Laura that blank warrants had been put out against her and Edward, ‘so that we can be “run in” whenever the police choose’.46 She was much more preoccupied with painting over the cracks in her love life with modern enamel than the open police warrants.
Havelock Ellis claims that Eleanor made a suicide attempt early in 1888. He records that she took a large dose of opium and that he – and by implication Olive – saved her by administering strong coffee, forcing her to vomit and making her walk up and down the room. ‘I never knew what special event it was in her domestic life which led to this attempt. Her friends were grieved; they were scarcely surprised.’47 Edward was still away in Torquay. Olive now begged her friend to separate definitively from him, without success. Henry and Olive conspired to help Tussy by putting her to hard literary and intellectual work, which always transported her away from dwelling on ‘the sense of the sadness of life’ that ‘comes upon us almost too painfully for endurance’,48 as she expressed it rawly to Dollie a week after her thirty-third birthday.
Vizetelly had just commissioned Ellis to edit the first volume of Ibsen’s plays in English, and he immediately employed Eleanor to translate An Enemy of the People, or as she chose to translate idiomatically, ‘En Folkfiende’ – ‘An Enemy of Society’,49 ‘for the magnificent sum of £5’.50 The two other works in the trilogy were Ghosts and The Pillars of Society. Tussy felt these plays ‘a very unwise selection’ and, whilst praising Henry for his excellent introduction, expressed frankly her great regret that Nora was not included in the collection. ‘It should have been, I think, in any first volume of Ibsen.’51 As Henry himself later admitted, the future success of A Doll’s House proved her right.
The year 1888 was one of intense literary production. Tussy cracked on with editing A Warning to Fair Women, the Marlowe commission Ellis had promised the previous year. Vizetelly covered her ten-shilling return fare to Oxford so she could consult the original manuscript in the Bodleian – ‘I fancy certain passages that seem corruptions may be simply due to the transcribers’ mistakes.’52 This scholarship would be unremarkable in someone trained to it but Eleanor had barely been to school, never mind had the benefit of a university education.
With a strong grasp of dramatic conventions, she structured the play into five acts, wrote stage directions on the locality of the scenes and recommended the printing of an old 1593 map along with the play: ‘It makes it all so much more interesting and amusing.’ She asked Ellis if he could give her another to do. ‘I have become much more interested in the subject as a whole. I used to know the individual plays well enough. I don’t think I before realised their value as “documents”.’53
Ellis and Vizetelly were impressed and delighted with her work. But shortly after Eleanor submitted the completed manuscripts, Vizetelly was prosecuted for publishing Zola’s novels in English and his trial, imprisonment and subsequent death stalled the publication of Eleanor’s text. A Warning to Fair Women was delayed publication until the next century, when it lasted as the definitive edition until the 1950s.
During the first half of the year Eleanor spent a large proportion of her time with dock workers in East London, organising union committees and campaigns for the eight-hour day:
To go to the docks is enough to drive one mad. The men fight and push and hustle like beasts – not men – and all to earn at best 3d or 4d an hour! So serious has the struggle become that the ‘authorities’ have had to replace certain iron palings with wooden ones – the weaker men got impaled in the crush! . . . You can’t help thinking of all this when you’ve seen it and been in the midst of it.54
She hoped that returning to Dodwell for the summer would make her feel better, but after her experience of the bitter struggle for basic survival in the docklands, the groves of Shakespeare’s pre-industrial imagination no longer soothed her. It rained constantly, and she now saw the privation of the small farmers and agricultural workers. The hay was spoilt, the potatoes rotted and the country tracks were full of ‘me
n, women and children who have trudged weary miles to come for the hay making, and who have to therefore trudge back again, starving’.55
She couldn’t turn away. She confided to Laura that she was suffering alternately from sleeplessness and nightmares: ‘One room especially haunts me. Room! – cellar, dark underground. In it a woman lying on some sacking on a little straw, her breast half eaten away with cancer . . . The woman was naked but for the scraps of an old red handkerchief and sail over her legs, surrounded by four children and a baby, all howling for bread whilst her husband tried to pick up a few pence at the docks.’56 Eleanor took the woman to hospital, only persuading her with great difficulty to leave her children in the care of neighbours, ‘but it was too late – and that’s only one out of thousands and thousands’.57
She appealed to her friends to give her some perspective, asking how they coped with the scale and pain of human suffering, apologising for her incoherence:
It is a nightmare to me. I can’t get rid of it. I see it by day despite our green fields and trees and all the flowers, and I dream of it o’nights. Sometimes I am inclined to wonder how one can go on living with all this suffering around.58
In a later age, Tussy, trying to articulate in rational terms why she felt so ‘sore at heart’,59 might have been diagnosed as clinically depressed.
Buoyed up by the positive reception for his adaptation of The Scarlet Letter, Edward thought he’d try his luck at conquering the American stage. He told Eleanor he had been invited to put on three of his plays in New York, Chicago and ‘God knows where else besides’,60 as the General put it. Edward promised Tussy that if he made it in the theatre, she could have the child for which she so ardently longed: ‘If only Edward goes well with his plays we want to try and have Johnny with us for good.’61
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