Eleanor Marx

by Rachel Holmes

  Tussy had never cared much about what she wore. Now she could afford a servant because of the General’s legacy. Gerty, in turn, probably pointed out that she could also afford to replace some of her exhausted, frayed and much-turned and trimmed wardrobe. Why wouldn’t Eleanor buy new clothes if she could afford them? Another exasperatingly ‘stupid’ line of thinking, in Tussy’s view, to whom commodity capitalism was simply the emperor’s new clothes. Eleanor hated shopping for anything except books, typewriters and nerdy time-saving gadgets but Gerty nudged and pestered her about her dated bohemian wardrobe and put some fashion magazines advertising department-store dresses under Tussy’s nose.

  Her new acquisitions included a dark blue velvet dress that became her favourite for winter, a brown skirt-suit for English summer and autumn, and a white silk cotton dress for when the sun really came out; this was also to be worn on happy days at home. White remained Tussy’s favourite colour, just as it had been when she was a little girl – the colour of the unwritten page, of possibility, and the bolts of bleached cotton Engels had shown her as a child in Manchester.

  In November Tussy was miserable when she was revisited by the Influenza Demon. She grumbled to Kautsky that she was ‘quite hors de combat’,53 but cheered up immensely when, in defiance of her doctor’s orders, she gargled salt and bicarbonate and headed off to Burnley with Aveling where they both gave lectures followed by a two-hander entertainment. Tussy lectured on the subject of anarchism and gave a turn of her popular Pied Piper of Hamelin; Aveling lectured on evolution and gave a recitation of his poem ‘Tramp of the Workers’, whose metre matches its flat-footed title. The two then gave a reading of By the Sea, Aveling’s 1887 adaptation of the French love story Jean-Marie by André Theuriet, about which the Dramatic Review had written so disparagingly after Tussy’s original performance. Tussy returned to London for Christmas in much higher spirits, telling Kautsky that ‘a week of hard work in Lancashire . . . has done wonders . . . If I had followed the doctor’s advice I should be quite a confirmed invalid now!’54

  Liebknecht’s memoir of Marx was published in December 1896. Much as she loved him, Tussy thought Library’s book ‘muddled finely’ and ‘disappointing in many ways’. But it was well intentioned and she thought it harmless, telling Kautsky he was wrong and alarmist to claim it would do Marx ‘infinite harm’.55 She asked Laura her opinion and acknowledged that it was hardly fair of her to criticise Library’s attempt to get the ball rolling on the biography of Marx without devoting more attention to getting on with her own. She wrote to Kautsky to assure him that she was now setting out on the project in earnest. Tussy’s anxieties will be recognisable to all biographers, as will her recognition that history is a collective project:

  The man is least known, most misunderstood. And Marx as a whole . . . was so very many sided that many sides of him will have to be considered . . . Not only science appealed to him – but Art and Literature. Mohr’s sympathy with every form of work was so perfect that it will take many men to deal with him from their own point of view. I only despair when I think of the task of gathering together all these loose threads and weaving them into a whole. Yet it must be done, though it is work to give the boldest pause.56

  23

  The Boldest Pause

  In April 1897 the National Union of Gas Workers and General Labourers gathered in Battersea Park in London to celebrate their eighth anniversary. The reporter from the Labour Leader layered on thick description of ‘a cutting east wind’, ‘dull sky’ and ‘fringe of dark trees’ in which to set the aspirations of the assembled gas workers:

  . . . under the platform a shock of upturned, anxious, toil-scarred faces. Around are the trade union banners gay with silk and paint. On the platform stands Marx’s daughter, as youthful and strenuous as ever.1

  Youthful and strenuous as ever, Tussy began 1897 in a pugnacious mood. The week before her forty-third birthday she chivvied the Social Democratic Federation (SDF) to up its game, claiming mis­chievously in Justice that capitalist society was digging its own grave so rapidly she was afraid it would tumble into it before the Social Democrats were ready.2

  The week after her birthday she condemned the ‘horrible fact’ that ‘the great mass of the workers in the north are devouring their children.’3 This gruesome Goya-esque image was conjured from her shock at seeing worker parents from Lancashire mills protesting against a proposal to raise the age of child labour. Everyone, Eleanor argued, was failing children on this crucial issue: ‘not only the great mass of the workers, but a majority of the Socialists, are as bad as can be on this question.’4 The SDF needed to launch an immediate campaign for child workers in northern factories.

  As she had recently rejoined the SDF and was rapidly becoming one of its most prominent leaders, she had good cause to drive it hard. Eleanor had resigned from the SDF in December 1884 in opposition to Hyndman’s anti-internationalist ‘Jingo faction’. For nearly a decade they’d found it impossible to work together. As political conditions changed during the 1890s, they resolved their differences. In 1895, the year he died, Engels said that whilst the socialist instinct grew stronger amongst the masses in England, as soon as it came to translating this into clear demands and action, everyone fell apart. Some went to the SDF, some to the Independent Labour Party and others stayed with their trade union organisations – all amounting to a lot of uncoordinated sects and a muddled ILP. The General also told Eleanor frequently that he was anxious that she was on too-good terms with SDF members. Eleanor responded that she shared his concern that the SDF leadership was for, rather than with, and of, the working class, but that the SDF grass-roots membership was moving towards more explicit internationalism and a socialist programme. A policy she played a significant role in encouraging.

  The alliance formed for the 1896 Fourth Congress of the Second International, which Eleanor played a leading part in brokering, strengthened the rapprochement between Eleanor and Hyndman. The SDF evolved into a more socialist organisation, ‘useful to the movement’.5 Another factor that bound them together politically was the worsening relationship with the German party: Bernstein’s belligerent Marxist revisionism in Germany, supported by Ernest Bax, drew Eleanor, Hyndman and Library closer together. Bernstein led the German SPD in the view that Marx’s analysis of capitalist society was no longer correct for the end of the nineteenth century. Eleanor suggested that all parties debate the case; Bernstein, in breathtakingly patronising and sexist terms, refused.

  The Freebooters briefed furiously against her in support of Bernstein and he started to behave badly, acting the sulking tyrant and being ‘terribly irritable’.6 He blew up at every imagined slight or sign of criticism. One evening at a dinner at the Den, when Library and Tussy supported Hyndman’s authority on the subject of India, Bernstein exploded into a state of almost frantic rage.

  Eleanor was intimate enough with her father’s work to argue Bernstein point for point, a knowledge that sparked his irritation. She was delighted to tell Kautsky that she was editing ‘a simply magnificent paper’ of her father’s that she’d found shuffled into his manuscripts, read by him to the Council of the International Working Men’s Association in 1865 – ‘(Oh! the work that man did!)’7 Entitled ‘Value, Price and Profit’, it was judged by Tussy ‘an admirable exposition’,8 which she edited with great care, intending to write a preface for its publication. Bernstein, the Freebooters and those within their faction knew that Eleanor was an insuperable obstruction to their desire to rewrite ‘Marxism’ to their own convenience.

  Democratic socialism in Britain was in a dilemma. Eleanor worried that Hyndman lacked the strength to stand up to it alone. The popular propagandising of revisionism under the guise of orthodoxy led by the irritable, bullying and petulant Bernstein required someone with the aptitude of an Engels to manage it. Someone, for example, like her. Eleanor also wasn’t as good at harbouring old political grudges as Marx and Engels. Slander and slurs from within the SDF continued against Ma
rx, Engels and herself but she ignored them. The new alliance was useful. The Hyndmans became family friends and regular visitors to the Den for lunch and dinner. Eleanor was far less emotional and more forgiving about personal feuds than Mohr and the General, which made her rather more dangerous in the realms of realpolitik.

  Hence by 1897 the SDF and its organ, Justice, and the newly launched monthly journal Social Democrat, were Eleanor’s official platforms. She continued to lead the gas workers and to be deeply involved in broad-based union work. The first issue of Social Democrat came out in January 1897, edited by Eleanor and Edward. In early editions she published a revised version of her biographical essay on her father written shortly after his death and published years earlier in Progress. She translated a section of Liebknecht’s memoir of Marx to offer a different biographical perspective on her father, and translated European dramatists and writers, such as Alexander Kielland, whose work she continued to follow. Aveling reviewed Olive’s brilliant, controversial new novel, Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland. His review, entitled ‘Filibuster Cecil Rhodes and His Chartered Company’, was one of the best pieces of literary journalism Edward ever wrote.

  The SDF and its allies took the lead in organised political opposition to British imperialist policy. In February Tussy weighed in on the SDF campaigns against imperialism in South Africa and what she defined as ‘British capitalist misrule in India’.9

  In the same month, Eleanor publicly welcomed South African activist Harriette Colenso in the pages of Justice. Colenso came to Britain for the first time on a tour speaking out against British foreign policy and informing people about the truth of the war atrocities taking place in South Africa in their name. Well known in South Africa for her anti-racist campaigning against British colonial policy, Harriette Colenso was the daughter of the late missionary Bishop of Natal, rumoured to have run wild with militant Zulus in ‘native’ Africa. Olive put Eleanor and Harriette directly in touch.

  Eleanor urged members of the SDF to take every opportunity to listen to what this resolute and brave campaigner had to say about the ‘horrors perpetuated in South Africa by the British forces and Mr Rhodes’.10 The same Mr Rhodes whom Olive Schreiner had cause to fall out with on the same issue. Tussy compared Colenso favourably with Hyndman, who was simultaneously campaigning robustly against the continued British occupation and economic exploitation of India.

  The appalling famine in India, Tussy concurred with Hyndman, was caused not by so-called underdevelopment but by colonial capit­alism that unbalanced the world economies. For her lecture series of 1897 Eleanor chose most frequently the subjects of imperialism and colonialism in India and South Africa, often giving variations on her lecture ironically entitled ‘Our Glorious Empire’.

  Harriette visited the Den in July 1897 to meet Library, who was in England for the annual conference of the SDF in Northampton due to take place at the beginning of August. Tussy explained, ‘He is very specially interested in the question of South Africa and most anxious to learn something of the real facts of the case.’11 Harriette came early so they could take advantage of the decent weather and chat in the garden before they ate. At this gathering Library offered Colenso a platform for her views in ‘the great daily paper Vorwärts’, of which he was editor.12 What tales Gertrude Gentry could tell of the people she cooked dinners for at the Den.

  Visitors flowed through the door of the Den during the summer of 1897 – ‘Come to the Jews and the Den,’13 Tussy wrote to Kautsky. Bernstein, for all his exasperation with her, never lost his fondness for Tussy and recalled how her face would beam with pleasure as she welcomed friends to her home.14 Freddy and Harry visited regularly and stayed over more frequently as Aveling was away at St Margaret’s Bay on the Kent coast, convalescing from a recurrence of his abscesses. Eleanor was preoccupied with the International Miners’ Congress at St Martin’s Hall.

  It was an enormously busy year. Eleanor’s new role in the SDF added further public speaking to her schedule – she was more in demand to speak than any other leader in the organisation. Henry Hyndman was as thrilled by her popularity within the SDF as he’d been furious when she was outside it. His wife Matilda, who never stopped secretly supporting Eleanor, was just as delighted. By June Tussy had delivered forty-one lectures and spoken or taken the chair at ten meetings in the past eight months, discounting the week’s lecturing in Holland in February. Her voice was giving out. She had to publish a public letter in Justice:

  BRANCHES TAKE NOTE

  . . . in order to save time and trouble, and postage stamps, will you let me tell the many SDF branches that are so kindly asking me to lecture for them that I am obliged to decline, for the present at any rate, all open-air work? My throat unfortunately will not stand up to the strain. Those who know me will not suspect me of shirking work . . . When the indoor propaganda begins again I shall, as always, be at the service of my comrades and of the cause.15

  As well as the physical demands of all this public speaking, Tussy found it increasingly difficult to manage her office, appointments, schedule, editing, research and correspondence. Gerty organised the Den on the domestic front but Tussy needed a professional secretary and researcher. To the mutual satisfaction of both, she employed Edith Lanchester for the job.

  Aristocratically born Edith Lanchester, who broke away from her privileged background and became a radical, self-defined New Woman, was an executive member of the SDF, where she met and fell in love with working-class James Sullivan, an active representative of the Battersea SDF. The couple announced they would live together in what they called a ‘free love union’. Their ‘marriage’ would begin on 26 October. Edith’s wealthy, upper-class family were appalled. Edith’s plan to live openly with a working-class man outside of matrimony clearly confirmed their suspicions that she was insane.

  On 25 October, as Edith packed up her possessions to move in with James, her father and three brothers turned up unexpectedly at her lodgings with a psychiatric doctor, who certified her as mad on the spot. They dragged her away to a secure psychiatric asylum. When Edith tried to resist, her father handcuffed her.

  The SDF attempted legal interventions to release her. All failed. James Sullivan and other SDFers stood outside the asylum wall beneath Edith’s barred window and sang ‘The People’s Flag’ to reassure her.16 She was subjected to disgusting physical, mental and sexual torture. Edith was perfectly sane when she was incarcerated; given the abuse she received it is remarkable she wasn’t driven mad by her imprisonment.

  Edith Lanchester emerged from her ordeal further resolved to live her life according to her own principles and to break the silence on her appalling treatment. And break the silence she did. She retrained in typing and shorthand after her incarceration but her notoriety made it difficult for her to find work.

  Eleanor took her on. Edith did Eleanor’s secretarial work at the Den, typed up her manuscripts and did research at the British Museum Reading Room for Eleanor. This was work Tussy had done unpaid for her father for years. Now, in her turn, she was able to pay Edith the proper wage due to a skilled secretary and researcher ensuring her financial independence from her tyrannical relatives. Betrayed by her own family, Edith desperately needed feminist sisters. Tussy gave Edith paid employment and nurtured, encouraged and protected her. The two became friends for the rest of Eleanor’s life.

  In June 1897, Edith and James had their first baby. It was a difficult pregnancy and birth, coupled with the added social pressures resulting from their openly having a love child. Eleanor invited Edith, ‘who is very ill after her confinement’, to stay at the Den ‘for a few weeks’ nursing’.17 Eleanor and Gerty looked after Edith and protected her, James and the baby from Edith’s family and social opprobrium. Gerty liked the couple and was a fierce champion of their cross-class love match, becoming very attached to their baby boy.

  Edward seemed more genial and kinder during 1897. Tussy felt they had at last settled into amicable companionship, fostered by m
aking a permanent home in Sydenham. He was away a lot but so was she; there was nothing new in that. Edward’s spending took them constantly over budget but he assured her that the money was being put to good use towards his work with the SDF and new fundraiser entertainments he was devising. As Eleanor had made clear in ‘The Woman Question’, woman needed to free herself from economic dependence on man. Tussy had achieved this; it mattered far more to her that she was economically independent than it did that her ‘husband’ was her financial dependant.

  What Tussy didn’t know, however, was that Aveling was now in considerable interest-free debt to George Bernard Shaw, the Radfords and many more of her friends in England and France. Nor did she know that he’d never repaid what he owed to William Morris before his death in 1896, though Tussy’s friend May Morris did. Had Tussy known, she would have instantly settled his debts in full, if she could, from the Engels legacy and her own income. Quite aware that this would be her predictable reaction, Edward had no intention of allowing Eleanor to disburse their capital by repaying bad debts that he could continue to dodge, interest free. Shaw, who knew very well by now that he would never get any of it back, continued to lend Edward money; he said, for the purposes of sociological observation. He planned to write a play about moral degeneration and how men abuse women in relationships, with a lead character based on Edward. The play became The Doctor’s Dilemma (1906). Shaw would not have been surprised to learn that his proto-moral degenerate protagonist Aveling was also ‘borrowing’ hush money from Freddy Demuth, on the threat of revealing his true paternity. How was Freddy going to tell Tussy that Edward was blackmailing him?

  Eleanor’s misperception that she and Edward had finally achieved a firm base for their shared future could not have been further from the truth. Unfortunately, as Edward, the consummate actor, was proficient at leading a double life, trusting Tussy had no idea how completely she was being duped.