Eleanor Marx

by Rachel Holmes

  Shortly before 10 a.m., Tussy called Gerty to her study and asked her to run an errand. She gave her an envelope to take to Mr Dale at the pharmacy nearby on Kirkdale Street. Gerty was a familiar face to George Dale – she’d been running prescriptions for Dr Aveling to the end of the street and back again regularly. Sealed inside the envelope Gerty presented to Dale was a script reading, ‘Please give bearer chloroform and small quantity of prussic acid for dog.’24 The prescription was initialled ‘E.A.’, and Edward Aveling’s card was clipped to the corner of the note. Gerty returned to the Den with a packet and the poison book for signature. She was unaware of the lethal contents of the parcel she carried: two ounces of chloroform and an eighth of an ounce of prussic acid. Needing a signature for the poison book was not unusual; Dr Aveling often needed strong medicines.

  Aveling was still in the house when Gerty left once again for the pharmacy to return the poison book to Mr Dale. When she returned to the Den the only sound in the house came from Tussy’s cats, mewing in her bedroom. Her mistress was normally always in her study during the day. Gerty sensed something was terribly wrong.

  Gerty found Tussy in bed, motionless. Her long, dark hair was loose, her eyes fixed open. Her face and body had changed colour, to a lurid mottled indigo. Gerty saw that Eleanor was wearing her favourite white muslin summer dress. It was unseasonal. Gerty had washed, ironed and starched it herself, then laid it away in lavender and tissue paper for the winter.

  As there was no telephone in the house Gerty ran, shouting, out on to the street and to their next-door neighbour Mrs Kell, who called for the nearest doctor, a friend of her husband, who lived at the top end of Jew’s Walk. His name was Dr Henry Shackleton, and he had a twenty-four-year-old son called Ernest who wanted to explore the Antarctic. By the time Dr Shackleton arrived, Tussy had been dead for two hours. Her face, hands and feet bloomed the purplish-blue associated with poisoning by prussic acid. The scent of bitter almonds lingered around her corpse.

  Eleanor Marx was dead. And where was Edward Aveling?

  Until the inquest, no one would know. Aveling, apparently, returned home from London around 5 p. m., to find a police con­stable stationed outside their front door. On being told the news, hearsay claimed, he was either distraught with tears and hysterical grief, or utterly removed and indifferent. As Aveling was known to be an accomplished actor, which was true is irrelevant.

  Gerty washed and laid Tussy out, shrouding her in her white muslin dress. Her body was removed to the morgue and the inquest took place two days later, on the evening of Saturday 2 April, at Park Hall in Sydenham. The presiding coroner was Edward Wood, Deputy Coroner for West Kent and South East London.

  Aveling was the first witness, introduced to the court as ‘an author residing at The Den’:

  Coroner: Was the deceased your wife?

  Aveling: Legally or not do you mean?

  Coroner: You are a most difficult man to deal with. Were you married to the deceased?

  Aveling: Not legally.

  Coroner: She lived with you as your wife do you mean?

  Aveling: Yes.

  Coroner: What was her age?

  Aveling: I believe about 40, but I am not quite sure.

  Coroner: Was her health usually good?

  Aveling: Very.25

  The inquest inquired into Aveling’s movements on the day of Eleanor’s death. His statements contradicted those of all the other witnesses. Gertrude Gentry was clear that Aveling was in the house when she returned from her errand to the pharmacy with the package and poison book. Aveling said Gerty was mistaken; he was adamant that he’d already left for London before Tussy sent Gerty to the pharmacy. Aveling’s family, convinced from the moment they heard the news that Edward had murdered Eleanor by engineering her suicide, claimed that he walked up and down Jew’s Walk until he knew the poison would have done its work, re-entered the Den to sort through the letters Tussy had left, and then quickly went up to London.

  The crucial letter Aveling had to find and destroy was Tussy’s new signed codicil to Crosse, just written, making Jenny’s children and her sister Laura beneficiaries of her estate. Edward knew that under Tussy’s previous will of 16 October 1895 he was sole executor and chief beneficiary. Under that will, the Nachlass manuscripts and royalties were to be divided equally between the children of her late sister Jenny. Everything else came to him. ‘I give and bequeath the residue of my estate and effects to my said husband but in the event of my said husband dying in my lifetime then I give and bequeath the same . . . unto and equally between the children of my said sister.’26 In the event of the death of her ‘husband’, her will named Eduard Bernstein her executor. In this will, she bequeathed Bernstein all her books, and £25 for the trouble of implementing her wishes.

  A year later, on 28 November 1896, Gertrude Gentry and John Smith, the gardener and general handyman, had witnessed a new codicil to Eleanor’s will of 1895 that substantively increased Aveling’s share of the estate. Not only would he now get the house, all the capital and her effects, but in his lifetime he would receive the royalties and any other income due from the Nachlass. Anyone interested in the financial benefits due to Edward on Eleanor’s death, up until she changed her will in the last days of her life, needed to look closely at the date of this amendment as it was co­incident with Aveling starting his affair with Eva Frye. At that time, Aveling told Eleanor that the work he was doing on editing and translating Marx’s works earned him the right to a share of the literary estate. Tussy amended her 1895 will accordingly: ‘all my interests of whatever nature the same may be in the works of my late father Karl Marx and all the sums payable as royalties or otherwise . . . unto my husband the said Edward Aveling during his life and upon his death the said sums to be paid to the children of my said sister.’27

  From November 1896 to the last week of March 1898, therefore, Aveling stood to inherit everything if he outlived Eleanor. ‘Was her health usually good?’ the Coroner asked. ‘Very,’ Edward replied. As strong as a horse.

  It is certain that on the morning of Eleanor’s death Aveling caught the train from Sydenham to London Bridge and arrived at the offices of the SDF in Maiden Lane about 11 a.m. As he sat down to his meeting with Henry William Lee, secretary of the SDF, Aveling called particular attention to the exact time: 11.15 a.m. He returned to the Den around five in the afternoon, to find the policeman stationed outside.

  Coroner: Had you any idea that she would destroy herself ?

  Aveling: She has threatened to do it several times.

  Coroner: Did you consider that the threats used were ­intentional?

  Aveling: I regarded them as idle, because they were so frequently repeated.

  Coroner: Had you any quarrel before you left in the morning?

  Aveling: None whatever.

  Gerty wondered at Aveling’s barefaced lies. On behalf of the jury, the foreman asked further questions about the state of Eleanor and Edward’s relationship. The summary of Aveling’s statements under cross-questioning was that ‘they had slight differences, but had never had any serious quarrel. The deceased was of a morbid disposition and several times suggested that they commit suicide together. When they had difficulties it was not infrequent for her to say, “Let us end all these difficulties together.” ’

  Coroner: Do you mean pecuniary difficulties?

  Aveling: Yes, pecuniary, not, however recently as in the past.

  Another lie, as all Eleanor’s correspondence with Laura, Library and Freddy of the past year demonstrated. Edward’s clandestine marriage to Eva Frye in July 1897, a material fact he did not disclose to the court, might fairly have been regarded as constituting more than a ‘slight difference’ between them. At this stage no one knew about ‘Alec Nelson’s’ marriage to Eva Frye; this only emerged later, after Eleanor’s inheritance had been paid out to him. Asked about his legal marital status, Aveling said that he was not married to the deceased because he had been married before.

 
The coroner’s court returned a verdict of ‘Suicide by swallowing prussic acid at the time labouring under mental derangement.’ Eleanor’s death was registered in Sydenham, sub-district of Lewisham, on 4 April 1898: ‘Eleanor Marx, aged 40, a single woman.’ Her age was forty-three. Whether she was single was debatable.

  The court returned Eleanor’s letter to Crosse and the codicil enclosure to Aveling without further investigation. Of the letters she wrote in the last hours of her life, only three survived. The letter to Crosse was returned to Aveling. Another to Aveling himself, reiterating, pathetically, that her last word to him was the same she had said during all the long, sad years – ‘love’. The third, to her nephew Johnny Longuet, instructed him: ‘Try to be worthy of your grand­father.’28 None of her other letters written shortly before her death were accounted for.

  George Dale, the pharmacist, came off the worst at the inquest. He was reprimanded for selling deadly poison to a man who was not even a doctor. Dale explained that he had always thought ‘Dr Aveling’ a physician, as he presented himself as a medical man, though not in practice. The coroner ruled Dale in breach of the Pharmacy Act of 1869. Noting the discrepancy between the initials on the prescription and in the poison book, the coroner asked whether or not Eleanor was ever known to sign herself by the initials ‘EMA’. Aveling said yes. The other witnesses said they didn’t know. The correct answer was that Eleanor signed herself EMA in her print journalism, such as for Justice, did not use this signature in personal or administrative correspondence.

  Laura collapsed on hearing the news and was sedated; Paul Lafargue and Johnny Longuet had to go to London for Tussy’s funeral without her. Library, Hyndman and Bernstein felt respon­sible and desperately guilty for not trying much harder to persuade Tussy to separate from Edward. All three wrote about it for the rest of their lives. Olive would have told them that she’d tried, and failed.

  On Tuesday 5 April 1898 a large crowd of mourners gathered at the Necropolis Station in Waterloo, the same place where Eleanor had stood by the side of Engels’s casket three years earlier. Tussy’s coffin and train hearse-carriage to Woking Crematorium were heaped with wreaths. Flower tributes came from all over Britain, Germany, France, Holland, America, Australia, Russia, Austria, Italy, India, South Africa and further afield. There were many wreaths of red roses. Those like Lafargue and the Hyndmans, who knew Tussy’s favourite colour, brought garlands of white flowers. There were floral tributes and specially stitched banners from the Union of Gas Workers and General Labourers, the SDF, the Hammersmith Socialist Society, the French Workers’ Party, the German Social Democratic Party and several American socialist organisations. The staffs of Justice, the Hamburger Echo, Vorwärts and Twentieth Century Press also sent homages, amongst many others.

  According to several mourners present, Aveling tried to make conversation by talking about the football match he had been to on the Saturday afternoon before her inquest. Those present who knew of his recent, apparently near-fatal illness commented on his miraculous recovery.

  Freddy Demuth came alone and shunned Aveling. Bernstein spoke for the German party. Peter Curran, the trade union leader who later became the first Labour MP for north-east England, was one of several who spoke for the gas workers, and Henry Hyndman for the SDF. Will Thorne, one of socialism’s strongest speakers, broke down during his speech and completed it in a tearful whisper. He spoke of his friendship with Tussy, and how she had quietly tutored him and other working-class men and women who were now leaders.

  Eleanor’s body was taken to Woking Crematorium on the cemetery railway line from Waterloo station, platform number 1. It seems strange that no record could be found of Eleanor’s wishes for her remains. Especially as so much about her life suggests that on her death she might have wished for her ashes to be interred in the family grave containing her parents, Helen Demuth and her nephew in Highgate Cemetery.

  Aveling never claimed her ashes, but he moved swiftly to secure probate of Eleanor’s will, granted on 16 April. The net estate after death duties, disbursements and funeral expenses was £1,467 7s 8d, excluding 7 Jew’s Walk and contents, which also went to Aveling. Crosse told Bernstein that less than a quarter of the money bequeathed by Engels was left by the time of Eleanor’s death. ‘I do not know how much of it was spent on hush-money to cloak his infamies with women or children, but it must have been very much,’29 Bernstein wrote to Adler on the day of Tussy’s funeral.

  Crosse’s involvement started to look suspicious when it was revealed shortly after Eleanor’s death that he was now the key beneficiary from Aveling’s will after his new wife, Eva Nelson. Bernstein pointed out that Crosse knew of the letter and signed codicil Eleanor had written to him during the last days of her life, retained by the coroner’s court and then returned to Aveling after the verdict of suicide. Why did Crosse not make Edward hand over the letter addressed to him?

  Aveling’s new will bequeathed the bulk of his estate to Mrs Alec Nelson, with whom he moved in at 2 Stafford Mansions, Albert Bridge Road in May, after Gertrude Gentry had packed up the Den, with the assistance of John Smith. Aveling and Eva went on a spending spree, redecorating the apartment and enjoying going to shows and eating out. There was nothing Aveling could do about his interest in Marx’s literary remains, which would revert to the Longuet children on his death. However, he worked fast to push out any edited work, as yet unpublished, from which he could get the royalties. He got a nice return from Value, Price and Profit, for which he composed a quick preface. In Bernstein’s opinion, ‘After her death one thing of hers only was of value to him: her property, her money.’30

  Hearing that Aveling had failed to collect Eleanor’s ashes from Woking Crematorium, Frederick Lessner interceded and took responsibility. Lessner put a signed and dated card inside the urn identifying them as ‘the ashes of Eleanor Marx’, and took them to the SDF offices on Maiden Lane. The same offices Aveling had come to for his 11.15 a.m. meeting on the morning of her death, as Tussy burned up from prussic acid.

  The general secretary of the SDF, Albert Inkpin, placed the urn in a glass-fronted cupboard and here it remained for twenty-three years. In 1912 these premises became the offices of the new British Socialist Party and in 1920, of the British Communist Party. A year later the Communist Party moved offices to 16 King Street in Covent Garden and Albert Inkpin, now general secretary of the British Communist Party, took the urn with him and put it back in the glass-fronted cabinet, now in his office.

  Shortly after the move, on 7 May 1921, there was a police raid on the Communist Party headquarters. Filing cabinets were looted, cupboards pulled over and, as reported by the Communist on 21 May, ‘The Editorial office was sacked. The scene . . . was one of complete devastation.’ Inkpin was arrested, as were the other leaders of the Communist Party and most of the central committee around England and in Scotland in parallel operations. None were granted bail.

  A tragic note was sounded when the detectives were begged not to disturb the ashes of Eleanor Marx Aveling, reposing in an urn ready to be conveyed to Moscow. They were left in peace.31

  The claim that Tussy’s ashes awaited transport to Moscow was pure journalistic embellishment – but one that Tussy might quite have liked, as she was fond of Russia and Russians.

  The Marx Memorial Library in Clerkenwell Green was opened in 1933, fifty years after Karl Marx’s death. Eleanor’s ashes were placed prominently on a bookshelf in the Lenin Room. During the Second World War they were stored temporarily in the basement of 16 King Street and then went back on display upstairs in the same old glass-fronted cupboard, adorned with a new red ribbon.

  In 1956 the family grave of Karl and Jenny Marx, their grandson and Helen Demuth in Highgate Cemetery was exhumed. Their remains were re-interred in a monumental new tomb and the urn containing Eleanor’s ashes finally buried with them. Her name was added to those of her family carved on the tomb, recording, in error, her birthdate as 16 January 1856 and, correctly, her death as 31 March 189
8.

  Poor Eva didn’t really have the best of it. She discovered that she had a sick man on her hands. By the end of April, three weeks after her death, Eleanor’s friends, family, political allies and the press were alleging that Aveling was a murderer, thief and fraud, and that he should be brought to criminal trial. If he hadn’t died four months after Eleanor, on Wednesday 2 August, of his old kidney disease, Bernstein, Library, Hyndman and the Lafargues would have brought a civil case against him. He was cremated on 5 August, in the presence of his new wife and five other friends. Not a single member of his family or representative of the socialist movement or literary world attended. Mrs Eva Nelson, ‘a young lady attired in deep mourning’, was seen collapsing, unable to send the body off. It was such a sad outcome for twenty-three-year-old Eva, she could hardly be begrudged for the £852 of Eleanor’s remaining estate that she inherited after probate of Aveling’s will was granted. He had burned through over a thousand pounds of his inheritance from Tussy in just under four months.

  For years afterwards letters of lamentation flew around the world between Eleanor’s friends about her sudden and tragic death. The volume of this correspondence and the broad range of people who wrote it illustrate how much Eleanor was admired and how far-reaching was her influence. The obituaries published in almost every country of the world would run to several bound volumes, in languages so innumerable that even multilingual Tussy might not have heard of some of them. Obituaries flowed from printing presses in England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, the Americas, Canada, Germany, France, Holland, Poland, Spain, Italy, Russia and Australia – to name just a few. The gas workers’ unions, SDF, ILP, May Day Committee, German SPD and French socialists were amongst the many organisations that issued formal resolutions mourning her departure.