Eleanor Marx

by Rachel Holmes

  As soon as she and Edward returned from France in September, Eleanor went to work long hours at the head office of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers (ASE) in Blackfriars. She was appointed foreign correspondent, fundraiser and campaign secretary for George Barnes, general secretary of the ASE. She dealt with all Barnes’s correspondence, wrote his speeches and statements and handled the media and liaison with all the international organisations supporting the British engineers. The ASE chose well. As foreign fundraiser Eleanor managed to bring in a staggering £29,000 to support the workers and their families over six months. This critical fund made the engineers’ lockout survivable. Tussy admitted that she found it ‘pretty heavy work . . . but this movement is worth the work’.40 The engineers’ fight for an eight-hour day proved to be the most protracted industrial dispute of 1897.

  Whatever compromise they reached enabled Edward to continue to base himself at the Den with Tussy and, without her knowledge, maintain his double life with his new wife until November, when he caught debilitating flu. Tussy interpreted this sickness as a symptom of his moral disease, for which he should not be judged:

  Dear Freddy,

  I know how kindly your feeling to me is, and how truly you care for me. But I don’t think you quite understand – I am only beginning to. But I do see more and more that wrongdoing is just a moral disease, and the morally healthy (like yourself) are not fit to judge of the condition of the morally diseased; just as the physically healthy person can hardly realise the condition of the physically diseased.41

  Eleanor tried to persuade Edward to stay behind and recover from his flu whilst she went on a speaking tour of Lancashire. Edward, reassuringly, insisted on coming with her to take his place on the hustings. The Burnley School Board election was due at the end of the month and they went to rally support, successfully, for the SDF candidate, Dan Irving. ‘We had “real” Lancashire weather,’ Tussy told Kautsky:

  What that is only those who have experienced it can say. But certainly if Dante cd have dreamed a Lancashire factory town in bad weather he wd have added circles to his hell, & to his ‘lowest depth a lower deep’.42

  They got wet through every day. Not, as Eleanor observed, weather ‘to cure an invalid’.43 By the time they got back to Sydenham Edward’s neglected influenza had ‘developed into congestion of the lungs and a touch of pneumonia’,44 as Eleanor, channelling her inner Jewish mother, reported in detail to the Liebknechts on Christmas Eve. Eleanor spent an unseasonal December ‘busy looking after Edward and after Barnes’ correspondence. In both cases it is a labour of love.’45 Or, in both cases, love’s labours lost. The bitter winter and pressure on the strike subsistence funds weakened the engineers’ ‘great Lock-out’.46 It looked like Aveling wouldn’t hold out much longer either. Tussy anxiously reported to Laura that

  the doctor told me Edward might at any moment (his temperature was up to 103 at times) ‘take a turn for the worse’ and that I ‘ought’ at once to communicate with his relations. Of course I did not, because (except perhaps sister, now living in Devonshire) there is not a relation he wd want to see at any time.47

  Not for the first time, both sisters wished they were a little nearer to each other.

  It was a muted festive season. Edward – seemingly – invalided, Tussy couldn’t go to France, and Library was serving a four-month prison sentence in Charlottenburg Prison under what Tussy jestingly called the ‘Little Anti-Socialist Law’ of 1897. On Christmas Eve she wrote a long letter to Library, designed to cheer him up. She put her best face forward on the engineers’ action, making no mention of her troubles with Edward. She recalled a previous Christmas at Grafton Terrace, shared with Library

  . . . and others who have now finished their work. Or rather their share of the work, for that is immortal, and lives more vigorously today than then. You are still at work and your magnificent courage, invincible good humour, and splendid cheerfulness are an example and a lesson to us all. ‘Stone walls do not a prison make/Nor iron bars a cage’, and the prison has not been built, nor the iron forged that could hold your spirit captive. I do not even feel it incongruous to wish to you a ‘Merry’ Xmas! A happy New Year I know awaits you, because work for others awaits you.

  Our love to you, dear Library, my kind, dear friend and friend of Mohr and Möhme and Helen and Jenny.48

  For reasons no one could foresee, a happy New Year did not await Library, nor anyone who knew and loved Tussy.

  24

  White Dress in Winter

  In the first week of January 1898 actress Ellen Terry wrote to George Bernard Shaw in confidence telling him that Edward Aveling had asked her for a loan. ‘His exploits as a borrower have grown into Homeric legend,’ GBS replied, informing Terry that for some years past Aveling had ‘been behaving well because Marx’s friend Engels left Eleanor £9,000 . . . But the other day he tried the old familiar post-dated cheque on Sidney Webb – in vain. And then, I suppose, he tried you. Must I really not tell anyone? If you only knew how utterly your delicacy is wasted!’1

  A few weeks later Tussy wrote to Laura thanking her for sending loving greetings and cash as an advance birthday present. ‘It was very welcome, for, as I hardly need tell you, illness means immense expense in every way. Doctors’ visits at 5/ a time, & sometimes twice a day – are no joke.’2 She made no mention of planning any celebration for her forty-third birthday.

  Eleanor was preoccupied with the engineers’ ongoing struggle for an eight-hour day and the horrendous suffering amongst the workers. She marvelled to Kautsky that how some of the families survived was a mystery to her and confided to Nathalie Liebknecht that, ‘unless much help is forthcoming (this of course entre nous) we are hopelessly beaten.’3 Everyone had given as much as they could; the funds to support the workers’ struggle against their immovable employers had run dry. They’d been starved out.

  She thought the SDF ‘pretty stupid in this matter’,4 and correctly anticipated that the Amalgamated Society of Engineers would be forced to withdraw their demands before the end of the month. Eleanor hoped this defeat might, in the long run, be more useful than a half-hearted victory. She observed that socialist feeling had grown rapidly amongst the engineering workforce as a consequence of the protracted dispute. ‘If only’, she mused to Kautsky,

  . . . we could now spread our Socialist nets properly we should get a splendid haul – but I fear our fishes slip away. You want to be in London – but sometimes I wish I could be, like you, in a country where there is a live movement. I suppose we shall move here one of these days – & this lock-out is helping to give what football players call a fine ‘kick-off.’5

  Tussy would have been better off sticking with fishing rather than football metaphors. When it came to sport, football was Edward’s first love. And come the New Year, he was kicking off again:

  Edward is better. Indeed, he is working again, though I wish he wouldn’t. But I did not exaggerate the danger . . . he is still terribly weak and terribly emaciated. He is a very skeleton – mere skin and bones. The slightest chill wd, the doctors say, be absolutely fatal – & Edward is a most unmanageable person. I write freely because he is in bed asleep (thank goodness he does sleep well!) & except in a letter to me alone you must not let him know there is still such cause for anxiety.6

  Tussy had no idea that, as she wrote this letter to her sister, Edward was once again trying to borrow money from her friends and was leaning again on Freddy. Encouraging him to rest and get away from the winter fogs that settled over the Thames Estuary, Tussy persuaded Edward’s doctor to send him to Hastings. ‘I am anxious at having to let him go alone, though the people he is with – we have lodged there before – will, I know, look after him . . . But I really could not go with him: these four weeks have cost too much to make this possible.’7 Aveling needed no persuading. Tussy wrote to Freddy:

  Yes – I sometimes feel like you, Freddy, that poor Jenny had her full share of sorrow and trouble, and Laura lost her children. But Jenny was f
ortunate enough to die, and sad as that was for her children, there are times when I think it fortunate. I would not have wished Jenny to have lived through what I have done. I don’t think you and I have been very wicked people – and yet, dear Freddy, it does seem as if we get all the punishment.8

  Aveling returned from Hastings at the end of January. His pneumonia had cleared up, but the old kidney disease had returned, accompanied by his recurrent abscesses. He was impatient and in a foul temper. Eleanor put it down to his illness, which he persuaded her was probably fatal. Eleanor didn’t know that Edward’s new wife had joined him at Hastings, where they came up with another plan, with which Edward returned to London. Tussy appealed once again to Freddy:

  I have to face such great trouble, and quite without help (for Edward does not help even now), and I hardly know what to do. I am daily getting demands for money, and how to meet them, AND the operation and all else, I don’t know. I feel I am a brute to trouble you, but, dear Freddy, you know the situation; and I say to you what I would not say to anyone now. I would have told my dear old Lenchen, but as I have not her, I have only you. So forgive my being selfish, and do come if you can.9

  At the beginning of February Edward went to London, ostensibly for medical consultations. He refused to let Eleanor go with him. The old doubts returned. She told Freddy, ‘Edward has gone to London today. He is to see doctors, and so on. He would not let me go with him! That is sheer cruelty, and there are things he does not want to tell me. Dear Freddy – you have your boy – I have nothing; and I see nothing worth living for.’10

  Alarmed by this nihilistic expression of desperation, Freddy finally dug in his heels and acted with purposeful resolve. Aveling be damned. She had to throw him out and cut off any further communication with him, come what may. Given Freddy’s social and economic vulnerabilities, this was a great act of solidarity. Hoping to bring her to her senses, Freddy finally spelled out to Eleanor the truth that Edward was blackmailing him and wanted more. Infuriatingly, Eleanor deflected Freddy and instead wrote him a rambling philosophical disquisition on forgiveness. She also promised that Edward had ‘no idea of asking you again for money’.11 She was sure Freddy didn’t understand how ill Edward was and that he would not see him again after his forthcoming operation.12 ‘In some,’ she confided to Freddy,

  a certain moral sense is wanting, just as some are deaf, or have bad sight, or are otherwise unhealthy. And I begin to understand that one has no more right to blame the one disease than the other. We must try and cure, and, if no cure is possible, do our best. I have learnt this through long suffering – suffering in ways I would not tell even you; but I have learnt, and so I am trying to bear all this trouble as best I can.13

  Two days later Edward was admitted to University College Hospital for surgery. Tussy wrote to Freddy, ‘There is a French saying that to understand is to forgive. Much suffering has taught me to understand – and so I have no need to forgive. I can only love.’14 Tussy’s forgiving love had become insufferable. She stayed in a bed and breakfast nearby the hospital in Gower Street. Edward had his operation on Wednesday 9 February. Twenty-four hours later it was clear that, though weak, he would survive. Tussy wrote to Kautsky to inform him of the news: ‘If you see any friends let them know.’15

  Judging by the drama Edward made of it, it would be fair to assume that his surgery was life-threatening. Tussy told Library that the thirty minutes that Edward had been in the theatre was ‘like the “toilette” of the condemned prisoner to me’ and that she ‘wd gladly have changed places with Edward and have counted myself happy’.16 To Kautsky, she exaggerated the medical diagnosis: ‘There is just a possibility (remote) of the abscess healing. If – as is likely – it does not, it will mean doing nothing and just waiting, or the terrible operation of removing one kidney.’17 The day after, Edward’s surgeon, Dr Heath, told Eleanor that Edward’s procedure had been merely exploratory.

  Echoes of conversations between women suggest a different version of events. Edward had several visitors while in hospital. Some of his students and theatre friends came to see him; possibly Mrs Eva Nelson slipped herself in amongst them. Eleanor asked Matilda Hyndman to come for a cup of tea and, as they walked the ward corridor, confided in her. Matilda shared Eleanor’s confidence with her husband:

  The story Mrs Aveling told was most depressing . . . she evidently had to open her heart to somebody, and the tale she told of the misery and humiliation she had to undergo induced my wife to implore her to leave the man directly he was out of danger, and to come for a time to stay with us. She said she would gladly do so.18

  Clearly, Eleanor no longer kept Edward’s behaviour a secret from her friends. She brought Edward home to the Den a week later, Thursday 17 February, by carriage – the most expensive conveyance possible. The doctors, keen for him to avoid further infection, thought Aveling would have a better chance of recovery at home. Better still, if they could afford it, Eleanor should take him to Margate to convalesce.

  Eleanor booked rooms at a hotel recommended by the Hyndmans and the day after his release from hospital they went to Margate. All of this involved further expense, but Tussy was throwing everything she had at the problem. She clearly believed Edward, like so many other people she loved, was going to die. As she put it to Freddy, ‘It is all so surely going to the one thing that I am giving up all the little I have left. You will understand – I can get on anyway, and I must now see to him. Dear Freddy, do not blame me. But I think you will not. You are so good and so true.’19

  Eleanor felt the financial pressures were now overwhelming. She confessed to Library that her current expenses were enormous: ‘Doctors, chemists’ bills, “bath chairs” for going out, and so forth, added to the home that must be kept up – all this means a very great deal. I speak so frankly because I know you will understand.’20 For the first time, Eleanor was counting the financial cost of having Edward in her life. There could be no surer sign that she had, finally, reached the end of the line with him.

  Tussy was ready to leave Margate, and Edward. ‘It is a bad time for me,’ she wrote to Freddy. ‘I fear there is little hope, and there is much pain and suffering. Why we go on is the mystery to me. I am ready to go, and would gladly. But while he wants help I am bound to stay.’21 She was duty-bound to care for him whilst he was sick – that was all. The tone of Eleanor’s correspondence changes during these weeks. Her letters express her growing conviction that Edward would probably die and she survive. ‘I can get on anyway, and I must now see to him.’ Tussy never doubted that she was the stronger party. If she could just do her duty, she might be free. ‘I fear there is very little hope of ultimate recovery,’ she told Kautsky, whose heart might have lifted a little at the news. ‘Today he did – leaning on my arm & a stick – walk a little.’22 She sent Hyndman a series of letters from Margate detailing the work she had programmed for the SDF for the forthcoming year. Aveling continued to shuffle, determined to break her. Edward didn’t want Eleanor to survive; that would hurt his ego. He needed her money for his new marriage, and Eva Nelson, understandably, was impatient.

  They returned to the Den on Sunday 27 March. Aveling’s illness had forced Tussy to cancel her recent speaking engagements, but now she was keen to get back fully to work. She’d promised Library an in-depth account of the end of the engineers’ lockout, and, as soon as she got back, made the final arrangements with Sonnenschein for the publication of Value, Price and Profit, promising that her preface, which she was currently writing, would follow within the next few weeks. She sorted through her correspondence with Edith and accepted a number of invitations, including a request to attend a gala dinner in Hyndman’s honour in May. Significantly, Tussy was back to business as usual.

  Tussy was delighted that Library had been released from prison and looked forward to seeing him as soon as possible. She caught up on a raft of correspondence and work, and enjoyed using her new stylographic pen, sent to her by the Miners’ Federation and the Miners’
Union with a matching writing case. She’d refused to accept wages for her translation work at the International Miners’ Congress in June 1897, so the miners clubbed together to raise the money for the handsome gift, appropriately marking their recognition of the value of her writing and language skills. Eleanor glowed with pleasure: ‘(it was work!),’ she preened to Freddy. ‘I am ashamed to accept such a gift, but I can’t help doing so. And it does please me!’23 There’s a sense of brisk optimism on Tussy’s return to London at the beginning of March, pleasure at returning to work and the company of Gerty, Edith, her friends and her cats, and making plans for the future.

  The days became a little warmer but, in the last week of March 1898, spring still just held off. Sometime between their return to the Den on Sunday 27 March and the morning of Thursday 31 March, Eleanor discovered that Edward had married another woman. No record survives of how she found out. Perhaps Eva Nelson had had enough of waiting and made Eleanor aware of what Edward couldn’t square himself to tell her. Maybe Edward made the revelation, hoping it would break her. Or she found out by accident.

  However the news came to her, Eleanor reacted by immediately changing her will and wrote a long covering letter to Crosse.

  On the morning of Thursday 31 March Gertrude Gentry heard Eleanor and Edward arguing. Aveling said he was going to London, but he was still under doctor’s orders to convalesce, and Eleanor objected. The previous afternoon he had to be wheeled in his bath chair just a few yards from the house into the garden, so she appeared to have a point. A row ensued, then silence.