Eleanor Marx

by Rachel Holmes

  On 29 November Eleanor signed the purchase and paid £525. A fortnight later, on 14 December, she and Aveling moved in. On the borders of Lewisham, then West Kent, the house had a garden and good overground train and bus links into London. Yet despite its resolutely suburban location, there was something eerie and Romantic (with a capital R, as Tussy would say) about 7 Jew’s Walk. Built in the 1870s in high Gothic Revival style, the semi-detatched double-storey house had a large front door with a stone arch and stained-glass panels comfortably in keeping with the architecture of the Castle of Otranto. Four stone gargoyles, winged like vampire bats, kept sentry on the parapet of the large bay window downstairs. Rose bushes in dire need of pruning and shaping straggled around the garden path like images from a fairy tale and unpruned trees cast shadows over the frontage.

  Practical Tussy noticed nothing of these ominous aspects and Crosse thought it a bargain. ‘It is big for us (but I do hate small rooms),’ she wrote to Laura, ‘and Paul will turn up his nose at our little garden, wh. however, will be quite big enough for us.’20 And that is why the uncanny Gothic exterior signified nothing to Tussy. The small rooms that she hated were exactly what she’d been brought up in and lived in most of her life, always packing up, moving on, never able to put down roots or say, definitively, ‘home’.

  Discovering Freddy was her half-brother meant Mohr was not the father she’d thought him; nor were the relationships between her mother, Lenchen and Engels quite what they seemed. The General’s forced revelation shook the foundations of her life. Building herself some security with bricks and mortar was a phlegmatic reaction. As if underlining the point, Tussy immediately named 7 Jew’s Walk ‘The Den’. Here she would nest, work from home in a study of her own and welcome old friends.

  As a proportion, £525 was 10.5 per cent of Eleanor’s inheritance from the General. Pound-for-pound historical conversions postulate absolute values and are wildly inaccurate, because they fail to account for the relative values of things and how those change over time; for example, the rise in cost of housing from the nineteenth to the twentieth century and the impact of new technology on individual and family budgets. Of course, Marx wrote about all this in Capital, so Tussy knew it well. Better than her father, in fact, since she lived it. Heritage conservationists might remark on the ugliness of her house but architectural aesthetics were of no interest to Tussy. She chose 7 Jew’s Walk for the number and size of the rooms and for all the amazing modern technologies with which it was equipped, that made it affordable to run. Envisioning for the first time a family New Year in her own home, she wrote to the Lafargues inviting them for a holiday and took them on a virtual tour in anticipation of their visit:

  As to our house (I am Jewishly proud of my house in Jew’s Walk), voilà. Ground floor: Large room (Edward’s study and general room combined); dining room (opens on back garden), kitchen, scullery, pantry, coal and wine cellars, cupboards, large entrance hall. One flight of stairs (easy), bedroom, spare bedroom (yours), servant’s room, bathroom (large enough to be another spare room on special occasions). My study!!! [Original is triple underlined.] Everywhere we have electric light – which is far cheaper, as we are near the (Crystal) Palace, than gas, though gas is laid in too, and I have a gas cooking stove and gas fires in most of the upper rooms.21

  Laura, who had bought a grand cache misère that didn’t boast any of the modern amenities of suburban Sydenham, praised her sister’s choice: ‘a crystal Den it must be, what with gas and electricity, that would make us villagers stare.’22

  And, above all, Tussy had her own triple-underlined study. If she and Edward budgeted to live jointly on £90–£100 a year, they could bank on getting by to their dotage and the General’s legacy could support Eleanor to devote herself to her political work, her writing and Marx’s manuscripts. The General was subsidising her to do what she was best at – changing the world.

  Eleanor ended the year with a thumping great public row with SDF activist Ernest Bax over sex and the woman question. Engels famously described Bax’s ‘womenphobia’23 – Bax made a public case of his manic misogyny. Thus, when he passed public judgement on the personal life and behaviour of suffragette Edith Lanchester, he drew Eleanor’s fire. Eleanor knew Edith and their lives were drawing closer together personally and politically during this period. On 16 November Justice published a public letter from Eleanor to Ernest Bax, challenging him to open debate on the woman question:

  DEAR COMRADE, – As JUSTICE, ‘the Organ of the Social-Democracy’, appears to adopt comrade Bax as the exponent of its views on the sex (not woman) question, and as the subject is certainly one worthy of consideration and debate, I desire, through your columns, to challenge my friend Bax to a public debate with me on the subject. The debate to take place in some hall in London before the end of the year, so that the proceeds of it . . . may be handed over to H. Quelch, hon. treasurer of the Zurich Committee (of the International Trades Union and Socialist Workers Congress, 1896). The debate to follow the usual lines, say 30 minutes on each side, and then two quarters of an hour for each speaker consecutively. Bax, as propounder of the general proposition, to open. Chairman to be mutually agreed upon. – Fraternally yours,

  Eleanor Marx Aveling.24

  Bax responded, from his men-only gentlemen’s club in Whitehall, that he was perfectly ready to undertake a debate on the woman question in writing but refused public debate, as he was ‘too little au fait with oratorical tricks and platform claptrap to be able to successfully defend the most simple and obvious propositions under the conditions proposed even if there were no shrieking crowd against which my voice would find it impossible to contend.’25 Eleanor replied by reminding him that ‘tricks’ and ‘claptrap’ are not confined to the platform and that there are ‘literary tricks and journalistic claptrap’. Then she hauled him in on his misogynistic characterisation of women. ‘With a fair and able chairman there would be no shrieking crowd; and you have no more right to assume that those holding the views I should attempt to put forward would “shriek” than I have to assume that your supporters would howl.’26 She then took him to task on his wilful, liberal misunderstanding of what was at stake in the social revolution required to free women, and men, from capitalist patriarchy:

  I am, of course, as a Socialist, not a representative of ‘Woman’s Rights.’ It is the Sex Question and its economic basis that I proposed to discuss with you. The so-called ‘Woman’s Rights’ question (which appears to be the only one you understand) is a bourgeois idea. I proposed to deal with the Sex Question from the point of view of the working class and the class struggle.27

  Bax replied by rubbishing Eleanor’s ‘dwelling on the class wrongs suffered by the working woman (in common with the working man) as though they were sex wrongs!’ and once again refused her challenge to public debate. He hoped her ‘shrieking’ supporters would enjoy ‘the victory of aggressive womanhood over an absent antagonist’.28 Bax proved himself truly worthy of Engels and Eleanor’s description of him as womanphobic.

  Eleanor and Laura quietly made financial provision for Freddy and Harry from their inheritance. Crosse and Sam Moore knew that the sisters repaid in full loans Engels had made to Freddy from their portions of the estate. They knew nothing of these loans until after the General’s death. Although Engels had written off these loans to Freddy, Louise insisted that the debts were owed. She calculated, correctly, how sensitive the Marx daughters and Freddy felt on this matter and knew they’d pay up rather than contest it.

  Aveling and Lafargue knew about the financial arrangements Tussy and Laura made with Freddy but, aside from Crosse and Moore, no one else did. The significant capital value of Freddy’s estate when he died in 1929 was far greater than he could have saved from his annual salary, suggesting that the Marx sisters did the one material thing they could to try and compensate Freddy a little for their mother and father’s abandonment. But that remained a matter between the sisters and their new adult half-brother.

&nb
sp; Aside from sharing their material gains, Tussy shared everything else she had with Freddy and, from the day she moved into the Den on 14 December, her home and heart were always open to him. What conversations took place between them about their now-shared father and the lifelong, unbroken friendship between their mothers, neither Tussy nor Freddy ever recorded.

  To Tussy’s disappointment, the Lafargues were unable to visit for the New Year because they were too busy renovating their dilapidated villa. The year 1895 ended with two unrelated events that added to its general strangeness and distinct sense of it being a fundamental turning point in Eleanor’s life. First of all, she unexpectedly revealed, as if in passing, to the Lafargues and some of her intimate friends that Edward had for some time owned a share in a property in Austin Friars in the City. Eleanor told Laura and Paul it would be very unfair for them to think that she was paying for everything involved in setting up the Den. The value of Edward’s share in ‘the Austin Friars property,’ she told Laura, ‘has gone up so much that he has been able to get a very good mortgage (without of course, losing his rights in the property) on it and he is buying all the furniture that unluckily one can’t do without.’29 It was an extraordinary revelation to everyone that Edward owned a property and, moreover, had never before leveraged his interest in it in order to get him and Tussy decent lodgings or their own home. Baffled by this information, the Lafargues concluded that Edward had until now concealed his property interests from Eleanor and she was too shamed to admit it.

  From this moment on, Laura kept a much closer eye on her little sister, writing frequently, arranging mutual visits and, now she could afford to, being generous with money and gifts for Tussy.

  The second depressing incident of the Christmas season was the shocking death of Tussy’s friend Sergei Stepniak, longtime comrade and confidant of her father and the General. Two days before Christmas Stepniak was hit by an oncoming train as he stepped across the railway line in Acton, reading a book as walked, as was his usual habit. It was a gruesome death, and Tussy’s year ended by going to Woking for Stepniak’s funeral.

  In the New Year she fell prey to ‘the Influenza Demon’, writing glumly to her sister two days before her forty-first birthday, ‘I now undertand why so many people have committed suicide when in the Demon’s clutches.’30 But she fought off the blues when Harry and Freddy came to visit for a birthday celebration and she received a generous cheque from Laura that she delightedly spent on ‘getting all sorts of things I have long hankered after’.31 She bought the complete five volumes of the immensely popular Paston Letters, ‘and some other historical works I’ve much wanted’.32 She considered buying some decorative pigeons for pets, like the ones Paul kept so expertly, and was thrilled by his gift, ‘the delightful Hachette (most marvellous of books)’33 that arrived by post.

  Diligent swot that she was, and tasked with her new literary responsibilities, Tussy carefully planned her work on Marx’s manuscripts, essays and letters for the year. She decided also that she would begin research in earnest by compiling materials to write her father’s biography. She had started playing with this idea in ‘Karl Marx, Stray Notes’, her first stab at a biographical essay the previous year, written for the Austrian Workers’ Calendar. After Engels died she and Laura had published their public call for Marx letters and Tussy also wrote personally to literally hundreds of people she thought might have letters from her father, asking them to send them to her or Laura and offering to transcribe them and return the originals.

  Momentously, she decided to employ a domestic servant. She’d never been much of a cook, after all – and she hoped its electricity and gas fire would make the Den attractive accommodation. Tussy mused on what Lenchen would have made of her indoor kitchen with its hygienic meat safe and temperature-regulated gas cooker with oven for baking. In these ways, she made a meaningful New Year for herself. Edward appears to have been absent. She sat in her father’s armchair by the fire in her study and read up on the ‘wonderful’ financial scandals sweeping France, including the exposure of capitalist manufacturers and moneymen for blackmail, tax fraud and insider trading. Mohr had died in the armchair and the General had spent his last good days sitting in it before finally being confined to bed. Tussy drew great comfort from the continuity of that armchair in which so much reading and thinking had taken place.

  Her ‘four-footers’ sat on her lap as she read all the reports on ‘our own little troubles – the Transvaal, Jameson’s filibustering, the German Emperor, Venezuela’.34 Her correspondence shows that she was thinking about her Dutch family again in 1896, and the Jameson Raid and focus on Kruger and Rhodes in the press must have got her wondering about her aunt who had married into the Juta family, who lived in Cape Town and ran an expanding legal publishing house in South Africa.

  The Den became the headquarters of Tussy’s intellectual and literary operations from the beginning of 1896. From her desk she corresponded with Kautsky over the fourth volume of Capital, on which she asked him to resume work as soon as she discovered that Engels had, unaccountably, made Kautsky stop work on it not long before he died. She tussled over publishers for this new companion volume to Marx’s masterwork and corresponded with Kautsky and others about its preparation.

  Eleanor continued editing all her father’s essays and journalism written in English. Much difficulty was added to the task by Engels’s decision to split everything in Marx’s handwriting from his own manuscripts, causing problems with attribution for generations to come. She completed editing a series of essays published under Marx’s name in the New York Tribune, for which she’d found the original manuscripts in the Chancery Lane strongboxes. Tussy compiled these ‘eighteen articles on Germany’35 into a collection titled Revolution and Counter-Revolution, for which she wrote a fascinating prefatory ‘Note by the Editor’, written at the Den in April 1896. The compilation, she enthusiastically told Laura, would provide readers with ‘a wonderfully interesting history of ’48.’36 Louise Freyberger and Bebel, representing the German Social Democratic Party, refused to allow Eleanor access to the Marx-Engels correspondence at this time. Therefore, she was under the impression that her father had written these articles during the years of 1851–2. In fact, Engels had written the bulk of them in Manchester and sent them to Marx in London for final edit, approval and postage by mailship to New York. Without the correspondence between them, Eleanor had no means of knowing that the articles, written in her father’s style and tone, were in fact the work of Engels.

  Imagining that Mohr had written these essays at the kitchen table in Dean Street before she was born, Tussy drew on her mother’s autobiographical essay and her own memories of stories of family and friends to reconstruct the Marx family life in Soho in the years before her birth. There is a deep and resonant Freudian tale tangled with this Marx family narrative, for Freddy Demuth was born to Helen Demuth at Dean Street on 23 June 1851. The tempestuous family drama that raged in her family during 1851–2 coincided exactly with the period that Marx was supposed to be writing his regular essays for the Tribune. If Tussy had been given the access she wished to have to the correspondence between her father and Engels at the time, what would she have made of the following exchange between them in the new light of Freddy’s paternity?

  Engels, concerned that he had heard nothing from Marx for a fortnight after Lenchen gave birth, wrote and asked if he was all right – and how was he doing with his Tribune deadlines? Mohr’s panicked response would have clarified for Tussy one of the reasons why her all-too-human father had been unable to deliver his journalism on time. ‘For about 14 days I have not been able to write, for I was hunted like a dog all the time when I was not in the library.’37 Engels didn’t only give Jenny and Karl the enormous gift of friendship in covering for Freddy’s true paternity to the outside world, but he ghosted the paternity of Marx’s fine essays that made up the volume that became, under Tussy’s hand, Revolution and Counter-Revolution, so that Marx could sort out his person
al problems.

  During 1896 Tussy also worked on editing Marx’s articles on Palmerston, the Crimean War and his pieces on the secret diplomatic history of the eighteenth century. ‘Marx’s’ articles for the Tribune, again in reality penned by Engels, were scheduled for publication as a single volume at the beginning of 1897 under the title of The Eastern Question. Aveling worked hard and assisted ably in preparing this compilation for press, providing broad historical context and summarising where there was too much local detail. Eleanor was pleased the material was to be published but regretted the publisher: ‘I tried – for Sonnenschein is such a thief – to get another publisher: I have tried Methuen, Macmillan, Unwin (the only likely ones) and failed. I will make a last effort with Longman.’38

  Archivist, editor, agent: Eleanor had turned the Den into a one-stop literary factory and clearance house producing newly published works of Marx and, by default, Engels at an extraordinary rate of productivity. Her ethos of modern industrial socialism, harnessing every new technology to her human cause, anticipated the zeitgeist of a future age of which she paved the way. Marx and Engels wrote longhand by candle and gaslight. Tussy had electricity to light her way, and her typewriter – which she regarded as the most marvellous technical innovation for the world of letters since the printing press. Tussy knew she’d done good work on ‘The Story of the Life of Lord Palmerston’ and ‘Secret Diplomatic History of the Eighteenth Century’. Unaware she would not live to see them published, she could never know that both, produced from her father’s idiosyncratic notes and cryptic shorthand, would be ranked highly by literary posterity.