Eleanor Marx

by Rachel Holmes

  In January 1897 Aveling – under his theatrical pseudonym Alec Nelson – organised a fundraiser of ‘Dramatic Entertainment’ at the Wandsworth Social Hall. Alec Nelson took the lead role in his comedy, The Landlady, playing opposite Miss Eva Frye, the twenty-two-year-old daughter of a music teacher and one of Aveling’s students. Eva sang ‘Love’s Old Sweet Song’ very prettily, to the evident delight of her co-actor. Eva Frye was the same charming talent who, under the name of Miss Richardson, had played opposite Alec Nelson in his one-act drama In the Train at the SDF Hall in the Strand on 15 June 1895, drawing the observation from Will Thorne that Miss Frye and ‘Dr Aveling became very familiar’.18

  Edward had had flirtatious affairs with students before, as Tussy knew, but she was not aware that Eva Frye was unusually persistent. Their trysts continued intermittently from 1895. Eva was a student on Aveling’s Wednesday night classes in the Strand, providing a useful cover for their after-class meetings. Edward dined the excited Eva at West End restaurants, and she prettily invited him to go to Shakespeare plays with her, where she dreamily cast herself as the romantic heroine and listened uncritically to his literary views in the intervals.

  Eva wanted a relationship with Edward, but Aveling saw no necessity of giving up all the material, cultural, social and political benefits of his relationship with Tussy whilst they still served him so well. He was also flattered by Eva’s feminine neediness, in such marked contrast to Eleanor’s self-sufficiency. Eva sent Edward clandestine little notes: when could they have dinner again? She had some tickets for a Shakespeare production, would he come? She was simply hopeless without him – and similar enticing appeals. On the other hand, Eleanor, as Edward once vehemently remarked, was ‘as strong as a horse’.19 And there it was – Edward’s envy of Eleanor, her intellectual capacities, robust brilliance, the warmth of her sunny disposition, her resilience and ingenuity. He and Eleanor had both hugely underestimated the impact of masculine insecurity when they discussed ‘The Woman Question’ in the 1880s. Men were brought up to be the centre of attention and with the sense of entitlement of being top dog. Edward needed to play the lead.

  June 1897 marked Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. Eleanor was in the final stages of completing the manuscript for The Eastern Question and had to push herself through the crowds in central London to get to the Reading Room at the British Museum. She grumbled to Kautsky about the anachronism of monarchy, attracting ‘idiots of sightseers – seeing “sights” that don’t exist, for anything shabbier or meaner than the London “decorations” you cd not dream in a nightmare’.20 She was wrong. A sight far shabbier and meaner had taken place the previous week. It was, however, a tawdry decoration to Aveling’s duplicity that Tussy could not have envisioned in a nightmare.

  Tussy was ‘very much worried’ about Edward’s health, as she’d confided to Library on 2 June. She took him to one of London’s best surgeons,21 who diagnosed that ‘the abscess in his side (open now for over 2 ½ years) may necessitate an operation (though we hope not), which would be a serious one.’22 Just a few days after this consultation, on 7 June, the Eighth Miners’ International Congress opened at St Martin’s Town Hall, opposite the recently opened National Gallery. Eleanor, as usual, was speaking, chairing and acting as an official interpreter. Edward was supposed to be resting at home. However, on 8 June Alec Nelson married Eva Frye at the Chelsea Register Office, a few miles west of St Martin’s Lane. Aveling doctored his age, faked his father’s name and borrowed someone else’s residential address on the marriage registration.23

  Understandably, the new Mrs Nelson expected a honeymoon. The following week on 19 June, Aveling set off, ostensibly alone, ‘by doctors’ orders’24 to ‘convalesce’ from his abscesses at St Margaret’s Bay at the Kent seaside. He was there with his new bride for a fortnight. Whilst Edward was away on his convalescent nuptials, Eleanor wrote the introduction to The Eastern Question, which was nevertheless published as a co-authored piece in both their names.

  Aveling was back in London for Library’s arrival in July and at the Den on Saturday 16th when the Hyndmans came to visit for lunch and a lazy afternoon that stretched long into the night as the party debated the harness of English capitalism on India. Hyndman complimented twenty-one-year-old Johnny Longuet, who was visiting Aunt Tussy, on his translation of an article of his on India published in Petit République. Johnny was a cause of concern to Tussy. She thought him hopelessly lazy, incapable of real work or sustained effort. As Johnny’s translation for the Petit République piece contained some fairly exacting economic analysis, it seems Aunt Tussy was perhaps being a little unfair to represent her nephew as a complete layabout – or indicates her hard-to-match standards of output.

  Eleanor, Aveling and Library attended the annual congress of the SDF in Northampton together on 1 August, where the revived and jaunty Aveling was elected to the executive council of the SDF at the top of the poll. He persuasively sponsored a resolution for co-operation between trade unionists and SDF members and, after the conference, toured South Wales on a lecture tour for SDF branches.

  Edward was sufficiently recovered to resume lecturing, speaking and teaching. On 22 August he gave a speech at a mass rally in Trafalgar Square. Sometime during the following week, he walked out of the Den without explanation, pocketing all the cash, money orders and movable valuables he could find.

  Tussy turned to Freddy for help. Apart from him, she discussed these events with no one. Gertrude Gentry, the other permanent member of the household, was the only person who might have known what was going on. Edward refused to offer any explanation for his departure. Eleanor was not to know his address. She was ‘permitted’ to write to him via ‘M—’, one of his actor friends.

  Shocked and confused, Tussy asked Freddy to intervene with Edward on her behalf. Freddy tried to find Edward. Although by now he might have dearly wished that Eleanor would just let Edward go, Freddy was also scared: Eleanor’s faithless partner knew the family secret.

  Aveling didn’t reply. On 30 August Freddy received a painful letter from Tussy:

  My dear Freddy,

  Of course not a line this morning! I have at once sent on your letter. How can I thank you for all your goodness and kindness to me? But, indeed, I do thank you from the bottom of my heart. I wrote once more to Edward this morning. No doubt it is weak, but one can’t wipe out 14 years of one’s life as if they had not been. I think anyone with the least sense of honour, not to mention any feeling of kindness and gratitude, would answer that letter. Will he? I almost fear he will not.25

  If only Tussy could have called on George Bernard Shaw, or if Olive had been closer to hand in England rather than in South Africa. Pride and confusion prevented Tussy from seeking Shaw’s assistance and distance prevented her turning to Olive, who no doubt would have been of enormous practical assistance to her at this critical moment in her life.

  Eleanor asked Freddy to find Edward and bring him home to the Den or arrange for them to meet. At the very least she deserved to know why he had so suddenly abandoned their relationship without explanation. She thought that if Edward was in London he was likely to be around his West End theatre haunts. The following evening was an executive meeting of the SDF, which she and Edward were supposed to be chairing. Eleanor couldn’t face going, ‘because if he is not there I can’t explain’. And if he was there, how could she pretend in public that everything was fine between them? ‘I hate to give you all this trouble,’ she apologised to Freddy, ‘but could you go . . . and find out if he is there?’26

  There is another aspect of this dispatch to Freddy as troubling as Tussy’s emotional anguish. Enclosed with it was a letter she had just received from Crosse. She wanted Freddy to read it and then return it to her. ‘I am now writing to Crosse to say I shall be there, but should like to see him before Edward – in the very improbable event of Edward turning up. ’27 As Freddy was to read it himself, there was no further explanation of the contents of Crosse’s unexpected l
etter. Most worrying, why had Edward independently been in touch with Eleanor’s lawyer? In turmoil, Eleanor failed to take sufficient note of Crosse’s sudden and unprecedented involvement in her private relationship.

  Much put-upon but valiant Freddy proved worthy of his namesake in his unflinching support of a Marx but to no avail. Edward was not to be found. Forty-eight sleepless hours later, Tussy received a note in the morning post: ‘Have returned. Shall be home early to-morrow.’ A few hours later a telegram arrived: ‘Home for good, 1.30pm.’28 Were these communications to be trusted? If only Tussy had refused to see him then. But she was still in shock and not thinking clearly. Her emotional reaction to stay and be at home that day for Edward’s possible return was one of the worst decisions she made in her life. Tussy still responded to an unwritten bond of love and responsibility towards Aveling and their relationship that he had long since abandoned. Tussy wrote to Freddy describing Edward’s return:

  I was working – for even with all the heartbreak one has to work – in my room – and Edward seemed surprised and quite ‘offended’ I did not rush into his arms. He has so far made no apology and offered no explanation. I – after waiting for him to begin – therefore said one must consider the business position – and that I should never forget the treatment I had been subjected to. He said nothing.29

  Aveling didn’t need to say anything. He’d already won the game: Tussy had let him back into the house. It was the oldest story of emotional abuse between man and woman in the book. Thanking Freddy again for all his support, Tussy ended her letter thus: ‘When I see you I will tell you what Crosse said.’30

  It can only have been property and his legal position relative to Eleanor that brought Aveling back. Whatever transpired between Mr and Mrs Nelson and Crosse in those fraught few days, Aveling quickly discovered that he stood to lose all his material and capital interests in the relationship with Eleanor unless they came to a mutual agreement. He had probably also misled poor Eva Frye about the financial security and interesting society Mrs Alec Nelson could expect to enjoy. Always living it large, Edward passed off Eleanor’s money, friends and connections as his own, borrowing light from Eleanor’s star.

  Within a few hours of that terrible afternoon Tussy understood clearly that Edward had not come back for her but for her money and a deal that they would be ‘friends’ in public, as they moved in the same circles. They argued all night. In the morning Tussy sent a hurried note to Freddy:

  Come, if you possibly can, this evening. It is a shame to trouble you; but I am so alone, and I am face to face with a most horrible position: utter ruin – everything to the last penny, or utter, open disgrace. It is awful; worse than even I fancied it was. And I want someone to consult with. I know I must finally decide and be responsible; but a little counsel and friendly help would be invaluable. So, dear, dear Freddy, come. I am heartbroken.31

  We don’t know what story Aveling told Eleanor when he came home; all that is clear is that it was not the truth. Eleanor still did not know that Aveling had recently married a mistress he’d been seeing for several years, of whose existence she was still unaware. Aveling held two trump cards: Eleanor’s shame at having misplaced her faith in him and defended him to people who warned her otherwise; and the answer to the true paternity of Freddy Demuth. Both mattered a great deal more to Tussy than they did to the rest of the world and, knowing this, Edward played her well. The world already held Aveling in disrepute as damaged goods; only Tussy’s good faith had stood between him and the cheap conman he really was. No one would be surprised.

  As to her father, most of the world knew that a ‘great’ man in private was a man like any other. An illegitimate son would hardly be unexpected. But Marx valued the good opinion of children, a view Tussy shared. Childhood past and adult present were inseparably enfolded in these affairs of heart, home, sex and family. Eleanor persisted in her loyalty to Marx, Engels and Aveling. All three men, whom she loved in different ways, lied to her about personal matters that had a substantive impact on her life. Freddy despaired at Eleanor’s refusal to judge Edward but, for all her emotional vulnerabilities, Eleanor was – annoyingly – consistent in her application of logic. As she withheld judgement on her father, mother and Lenchen on their sexual conduct, how could she fairly judge Edward?

  An incident concerning a private letter from Marx to his father, written on 10 November 1837, illustrates the dilemma. The previous year in 1897, Eleanor received a letter from her cousin Lina (Caroline) Smith, daughter of Mohr’s sister Sophie. Lina, who lived in Maastricht, had found this letter from her uncle to her grandfather when she was sorting through her late mother’s papers. Lina wrote Tussy a long letter bringing her up to date on all the news of her Dutch family and enclosed young Marx’s letter, in which he earnestly defended his recent engagement to Jenny von Westphalen and declared his inviolable love for her. This ‘extraordinary human document’32 struck Tussy deeply. As she wrote in her introductory remarks to the letter, it spoke from the past in the voices of these ‘two lifelong friends and lovers’ who ‘never faltered, never doubted’, and ‘were faithful till death. And death has not separated them.’33 Eleanor told Kautsky that she could hardly bring herself to physically copy the letter. After much vacillation, she finally decided to agree to Eduard Bernstein’s suggestion that the letter be published in a special edition of Neue Zeit but, as she told Kautsky, she changed her mind repeatedly, and writing the introduction ‘was worse than having a tooth out!’34 Unsurprising, given the perjury she committed in the introduction. She knew she had ‘a real duty to Mohr to show him to the world in “his habit as he really lived”’.35 How did she resolve that with the truth the General had revealed about Freddy? Tussy was torn:

  At the same time it is very painful to me, because I know – no one knows as well as I – how Mohr hated to have his private life dragged into public . . . So while I do feel this letter shd be published, I at the same time feel half a traitor in giving it to the world.36

  Half a traitor to her father, to Freddy and to herself. Eleanor agonised about what she should do – or not – about the family secret. Coupled with this problem, familiar to every biographer, was the fact that she could not gain access to the correspondence between Mohr and the General. That fatal clause in Engels’s will, ‘except my letters to him and his letters to me’, was making her biographical project seemingly impossible. In the midst of this, she had discovered that Edward was living a double life.

  Edward’s deceit began, of seeming necessity, at the beginning of their relationship. The story he told Tussy was that his first wife Bell – Isabel Campbell Frank – was emotionally unstable, difficult, vindictive and refused to divorce him. Therefore he couldn’t marry Tussy unless Bell died. In fact, Edward had walked out on Bell when he had run through the dowry she received from her father on their marriage. She was more than willing to divorce; he refused. As long as they remained married he stood to inherit her estate in the event of her death. Edward’s brother Frederick, who respected Tussy, tried to tell her that his brother wasn’t telling the truth. Lovestruck Tussy didn’t listen.

  Bell died intestate in 1892. Three weeks later, her ‘lawful husband’ Edward Aveling was granted administration of her estate and promptly collected the £126 15s 4d Bell had left. Within a few months, unbeknown to anyone else, he invested in a residential property in Austin Friars. Edward maintained the fiction that Bell was still alive for several years. When it came out accidentally that she was dead, Eleanor is said to have told Frederick, ‘Now Edward will marry me.’ To which his brother responded, ‘Oh no he won’t. I know Edward.’37 Again, Tussy paid no heed.

  Tussy was now confronted by the fact that Edward, after all his fine words about free love and open unions being as morally and emotionally binding as marriage under the law, was simply a liar. And she was a gull, a fool who had willingly suspended her disbelief – because she loved him. It was laughable. Tussy knew this dialectic. History repeated itself first
as tragedy then as farce. So much for Edward’s radical politics, free love and the feminist-inspired ‘woman question’ – Tussy was merely Edward’s cash-cow and passport to cultural capital.

  A fortnight after Edward’s return to the Den, he went with Tussy to visit her sister and Lafargue at Draveil. It was the first time Tussy had been to their ‘magnificent’, forest-fringed home on the banks of the Seine. Neither of the Lafargues seemed to notice any signs of trouble between the Marx-Avelings. Laura was happily absorbed in showing Tussy the house and grounds and Paul enjoyed showing off his vegetable gardens, orchards and livestock. Tussy thought Laura and Paul had found a ‘wonderful place – really a “propriété” ’,38 but felt uncomfortable with its grandeur. She suggested the huge ‘orangerie’ could be more usefully turned into a lecture and meeting hall for the local community, and the gardens and grounds opened as a public park. ‘I don’t think I would exchange my little Den with this palace,’ she told Kautsky; for all that it was ‘exquisite’ it also made her worry about the future of Marxism in France.39

  Tussy said nothing to Laura about the recent dramas in her personal life. Nor did she confide in anyone else. Only Freddy knew what had taken place over those stormy weeks in early August and why, superficially, Eleanor and Edward were reunited. Personal difficulties did not seem to throw Tussy off the forward march of her political work. She corrected the proofs for ‘The Story of the Life of Lord Palmerston’ and ‘The Secret Diplomatic History of the Eighteenth Century’, two highly achieved pieces of editing. At the same time, the engineering workers requested her help with their strike.

  The Engineering Employers’ Federation (EEF) was established in July 1897, with Siemens taking the presidency. Their aim, the Siemens spokesman told the press, was to get rid of trade unionism altogether’. In shortform, the EEF derailed negotiations with the eight-hour-day movement, the dispute intensified and a lockout began against workers who refused to submit.