Eleanor Marx

by Rachel Holmes

  Such was the context of the years immediately preceding Tussy’s birth and narrated in fable form through the tales of Hans Röckle. ‘It was a terrible time,’ Library – Wilhelm Liebknecht – told Eleanor many years later, ‘but it was grand nevertheless.’14 Revolutionary socialist, member of the Reichstag and constantly migrating jailbird, Library was a loyal friend and political ally, a sometimes exasperatingly optimistic idealist, and a very important figure in Tussy’s life. He arrived in London in 1850 and lived with his first wife at Model Lodging House in Old Compton Street. He applied to be vetted for membership of the Communist League, and Marx and Engels gave him a thoroughly hard time in checking his credentials.15

  Liebknecht was dubbed Library by the Marx children, and all the adults accepted the title, though no one – including Library himself – was ever sure why he earned this nickname from the youngsters.16 Having met her on the day of her birth, Library was fond of Tussy from the beginning. He loved her alertness, inquisitiveness and argumentativeness as a child, ‘restless, curious, wanting to know everything, and constantly widening the horizon of her mind’.17 Marx was fond of observing that children should educate their parents. However, he gave Tussy a decisive education through the process of writing Capital during her formative childhood.

  ‘What’, Engels asked Marx in 1851, ‘will happen to all the gibble-gabble which the whole émigré gang can make at your cost if you answer them with a work on economics?’18 Engels urged him to write down his economic analyses and explain his theory of historical materialism. Marx responded by finally settling down seriously to his great work on political economy that became Capital, the most influential piece of writing since the Bible, Quran, Talmud and the works of Shakespeare.

  To say that Eleanor Marx grew up living and breathing historical materialism and socialism is therefore a literal description and not a metaphor. Capital was Marx’s attempt to produce a coherent study of social, political and economic history from classical times to his present day. His quest was to discover the laws that govern history. Tussy couldn’t understand the subject of her father’s big project from an adult perspective, but as he amassed the evidence from which he formed his theory, he extracted examples and narratives that could be turned into enjoyable stories and useful instruction for his little girl.

  When Mohr was studying the legislation against the poor and expropriated from the end of the fifteenth century that forced down wages by Acts of Parliament,19 he explained this aspect of British history to the attentive Tussy. He shared with her the factual contexts for Shakespeare’s history plays and tragedies that she loved. Tussy’s childhood intimacy with Mohr whilst he wrote the first volume of Capital provided her with a thorough grounding in British economic, political and social history. Tussy and Capital grew up together.

  4

  Book-worming

  In November 1860 Möhme erupted with smallpox. Sixty years after Jenner pioneered his vaccine, this contagious disease was still potentially life-threatening. Parliament had introduced compulsory smallpox vaccination in 1853, so Tussy was vaccinated. She and her sisters were packed up and delivered to the Liebknechts, now living nearby in Kentish Town, where they stayed until Christmas.

  Five-year-old Tussy made herself at home with Library and Ernestine, but missed her parents. Seeing her father in the street one day from Library’s windows Tussy yelled a raucous hunting call; ‘Halloo old boy!’ Clearly the Victorian dictum that children should be seen and not heard was not her style.

  Living with the Liebknechts meant Tussy could play day and night with her best friend Alice. Tussy and Alice’s friendship lasted into adulthood, mirroring the intimacy between their mothers.

  When the sisters returned home at Christmas the atmosphere was subdued. Möhme was depressed by her illness, believing the smallpox scars had profoundly altered her looks and destroyed her previously youthful beauty. Outwardly she quipped about it, writing to Louise Weydemeyer that her face was still ‘disfigured by pockmarks and of a red which is just the “magenta” that is now in fashion’.1

  To brighten Tussy’s sixth birthday amidst the general dejection her father gave her a special present. Mohr always said that ‘book-worming’2 was his favourite occupation. He now passed this gift on to Eleanor. On Wednesday 16 January she eagerly unwrapped the complete volumes of Peter Simple by Captain Marryat. It was her very first novel. Seized immediately by the adventure, Tussy sailed away from a gloomy north London winter with Midshipman Simple to fight in the Napoleonic Wars. Her imagination voyaged with ships of the line, square-rigged brigs, salty vernacular, cannons and broadsides, weevils, ship’s biscuits, cutlasses and tots of grog. Immersed in this Victorian bestseller, Tussy was frequently heard bursting into laughter at the preposterous, compulsive exaggerations of Captain Kearney, Peter Simple’s Munchausen-afflicted naval master.

  Marryat, the father of the seafaring adventure novel from which all others followed, from C. S. Forester’s Horatio Hornblower to Patrick O’Brian’s Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin, was the writer from whom Tussy discovered not only her sea legs, but her inner cross-dressed sailor:

  And when that little girl, fired by Marryat’s tales of the sea, declared she would become a Post-Captain (whatever that may be) and consulted her father as to whether it would not be possible for her to ‘dress up as a boy’ and ‘run away to join a man-of-war’ he assured her he thought it might very well be done, only they must say nothing about it to anyone until all plans were well matured.3

  Marryat held out the allure of life at sea fighting the French fleet and profiteers. Tussy’s next literary adventures transported her to the new frontier of the American West. Responding to her enthusiasm for Marryat, Marx introduced his daughter to James Fenimore Cooper, whom she called the American Scott. Now Tussy plunged into life under the wigwam, riding astride beside Natty Bumppo and Chingachgook, following his incarnations through the serial editions of his life – as Leatherstocking, Pathfinder and Deerslayer. Here were Red Indians, hand-to-hand combat, scalping, luciferous Magua, the exemplary Chingachgook, loquacious Creoles and quadroons.

  And to her sharp, instinctive childhood observation, was there something in the immortal friendship of Chingachgook and Natty Bumppo reminiscent of her Dada and Engels? This unison of two men, as D. H. Lawrence put it, was imagined as the nucleus of a new society, their relationship ‘deeper than property, deeper than fatherhood, deeper than marriage, deeper than love’.4 The rapport between Marx and Engels was as important to Tussy’s childhood development as that which existed between her parents.

  With the few exceptions of American ‘Amazonians’, Cooper’s women are mostly saintly, shrinking, beige-blonde lilies or faintly smouldering, brunette would-be seductresses cut from stock patterns of young ladyhood, satirised memorably by James Lowell in his Fable for Critics:

  And the women he draws from one model don’t vary,

  All sappy as maples and flat as a prairie.5

  The sappy maples were of no interest to Tussy; focusing on the trouser roles, she barely noticed them.6 As Lawrence dryly observed, of course it never rains in Cooper’s Wild West: it’s never cold, muddy or dreary; no one has wet feet or toothache and no one ever feels filthy, even when they can’t wash for a week. ‘God knows,’ Lawrence speculates, ‘what the women would really have looked like, for they fled through the wilds without soap, comb, or towel. They breakfasted off a chunk of meat, or nothing, lunched the same and supped the same.’7

  This was a mode of existence that seemed very agreeable to Tussy, fiercely resistant as she was to brushing her hair or taking heed of Lenchen’s instructions to sit down to lunch. Lenchen complained that Tussy could only be persuaded to gulp down a mug of milk and accept a piece of bread, clutched in her hand as she ran out into the street to play with her friends, all of whom she afterwards cordially invited back to her home to spread further misrule.

  Neither Mohr nor Möhme were concerned about enforcing conventional formalities. Co
ntrary to the received historical opinion that has misrepresented her as socially and sexually conservative, Jenny Marx was a liberal mother who had no patience for mannered affectation. She wrote to Ernestine about her disapproval of the constraints placed on some of their friends’ offspring: ‘the children are constantly watched and called to order: they must eat correctly, they must speak correctly; the only thing that is not done according to rule is drinking; to my great astonishment there was neither beer nor wine on the table . . . The children have never yet tasted spirits.’8 She felt compassion for a little boy who just wanted to enjoy his dinner, but ‘was in a fearful state over an unmanageable duck’s leg. He very much wanted to get the little bit of meat off it, but he did not dare lay a finger on the bone (the governesses eye never leaves the children).’9

  Not a single day’s schooling had yet interfered with Tussy’s busy childhood. From her sisters she picked up French and some musical notation, and from her mother knowledge of contemporary theatre. Books and her father’s study became her classroom, Marx her personal tutor. After consuming Marryat and Cooper,10 Tussy’s plans to run away to sea or to America were diverted by the advent of her Scott mania, bringing plots for rousing the Highlands and reviving the Jacobite ‘Forty-Five’. She was, however, horrified when Marx teased her with the suggestion that she might partly belong to the detested clan of Campbell.11

  Marx passed on his love and admiration of Scott, Balzac and Fielding to Eleanor. It was an intense home-schooling of the most entertaining form, with her father a subtle educator:

  And while he talked about these and many other books he would, all unconscious though she was of it, show his little girl where to look for all that was finest and best in the works, teach her – though she never thought she was being taught, to that she would have objected – to try and think, to try and understand for herself.12

  In later life Tussy would complain that very little was spent on her formal education. In fact her home-schooling with her father was much better than that of her two older sisters, who attended a variety of unlicensed teaching establishments for girls. Whilst Laura and Jenny spent a disproportionate amount of their schooling learning to sing, sew, paint, play the piano and be ladylike, Tussy read widely and deeply, debating everything, in detail, with one of the greatest minds of the age.

  After Laura and Jenny left South Hampstead College they continued to take classes in French, Italian, drawing and music. The academic shortcomings of the Misses Boynell and Rentsch’s school were typical of the mid-nineteenth-century British education system. The best on offer were private establishments, accessible only to the fee-paying middle classes, run by dedicated semi-professionals who did their best to provide some kind of structured education to young women in a context where there were no required teaching qualifications or defined curriculum. The first reforms making education for women possible were still a decade away. Tussy would be fifteen when the Education Act (Forster’s Act) was passed in 1870. This was the first legal reform attempting to provide elementary education for all children, including girls. Fees of a few pennies per week were charged, with exemption for poorer parents. In the same year the London School Board was established to provide elementary schools in London. In 1869 suffragist Emily Davies and educationalist and human rights campaigner Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon established Girton College at Cambridge, the first residential women’s college in England. Oxford University allowed the first graduation of a woman a decade later in 1879. Cambridge was founded in 1223 and Oxford in 1187: thus it took both establishments nearly seven centuries to grasp the startling concept that women were also human beings, entitled to education.

  Like so many of the great artists, writers, intellectuals and politicians who followed her into the next century, such as Virginia Woolf, Tussy had no access to formal schooling. However, by contrast with Woolf, whose wealthy scholarly historian father Sir Leslie Stephen did not believe in investing in the education of his daughters, Tussy’s impoverished historian philosopher father was committed to the education of women. Where the rich and entitled Leslie Stephen – with his successful sons – lost no sleep over his daughter’s struggle for an education, penurious intellectual immigrant Marx recognised the material constraints on educational development experienced by the daughters of all classes. Part bluestocking, part leatherstocking, part hoyden, wholly bohemian-in-the-making, Tussy had an unconventional, rigorous intellectual education in freedom of thought critical to her later attitude to life.

  Tussy started writing as well as reading novels at the age of six. She wrote her first letters to her sisters, filching their stationery and pens and leaving elaborately addressed envelopes to ‘Miss L Marx from E Marx’ on their writing desks.13 Beyond the circle of her immediate family, Tussy had august correspondents. Few six-year-old children had the opportunity to write with such verve and ease to some of the most formidable men of their century. One of her first letters was a neighbourly note to Library, signed teasingly ‘Niemand’ (nobody).

  Her first international letter was posted to her Uncle Lion Philips in 1861, thanking him for the gift of a Dutch doll sent from the Netherlands, and enclosing a missive in elaborate and unintelligible ideograms that she claimed were Chinese characters. Uncle Lion was married to Marx’s Aunt Sophie, sister to his mother Henriette. Uncle Lion administered widowed Henriette’s estate on her behalf. He was a hugely successful tobacco merchant and trader, primogenitor of what became the Royal Philips Electronics commercial empire – and very fond of Tussy.

  Eleanor’s invented ideograms were part of her craze for all things Chinese, brought about in 1861 by the coalescence of a bout of jaundice with her father and Engels’s writing continually about the Celestial Empire. ‘I remember well, that seeing myself quite yellow I declared I had become a Chinaman and insisted on my curls being made into a little pigtail.’14 From 1853 Marx and Engels had covered the politics, economics and society of the great empire and its role in the world, mostly for the Tribune. All matters Chinese were the focus of discussion in the Marx home. Tussy’s curls captured and smoothed into a queue, her little arms draped in improvised Chinese box sleeves, she succeeded her sister Jenny to the imperial throne as Successor to the Empress of China. Writing to his wife, Marx paid tribute to Tussy’s supreme power as ruler of the household: ‘Above all and in particular, please give the Chinese Successor a thousand kisses on my behalf.’15

  Her Sinophilia lasted. Eight years after her jaundice had led to her ascendance to Empress, Tussy asked Engels for a big ball of Chinese thread from Manchester, as ‘the little humbug loves all Chinese formalities’.16

  Aside from her invented ideograms, Tussy’s first letters were written primarily in English. Uniquely in her family, English was her first language. She could speak and read German well, and write it rather badly. She could speak, read and write French, learned from her Paris- and Belgium-born and raised older sisters. She was interested in learning Dutch, so she could better get to know her family in Holland. As a teenager, due to Engels’ influence, she was to develop a literary interest in Old Icelandic, Old Norse, Danish and classical Arabic.

  Tussy’s early writing carries the acoustics and vibrations of her childhood voice and the realms of her imagination. An early example of this is audible in a letter to her Uncle Lion Philips written sometime during the winter of 1863:

  My dear uncle,

  Although I have never seen you I have heard so much about you that I almost fancy I know you, and as there is no chance of my seeing you I just write these lines to ask you how you are. Are you enjoying yourself? I am, and always do at Christmas time which I think is the jolliest in the year. I wish you a very happy new year, and daresay you are as glad to get rid of the old one as I am. I heard from papa that you are a great politician so we are sure to agree. How do you think Poland is getting on? I always hold up a finger for the Poles those brave little fellows. Do you like A.B. [Auguste Blanqui]? He is a great friend of mine.

 
; But I must say goodbye now, but dare say you will hear from me again.

  Give my love to my cousin Nettchen and to Dada.

  Goodbye, dear uncle

  I am

  Your affectionate

  Eleanor Marx17

  The letter is written in a free-flowing, forward-sloping hand, with stylish capital letters. Tussy’s reference to holding up a finger for the Poles is a reminder that from 1863 a general insurrection in Poland had been violently repressed by the Russians. At the time the uprising had not been definitively crushed. Tussy firmly took the side of Poland in its resistance against the Russian occupation. During November 1863 the London Trades Council campaigned on behalf of Polish emancipation, calling on the governments of England and France to support Poland’s fight for freedom. Marx’s Inaugural Address to the International Working Men’s Association of October 1864 condemned ‘the shameless approval, mock sympathy, or idiotic indifference with which the upper classes of Europe have witnessed heroic Poland being assassinated by Russia’.18 Marx’s writings on the subject of Poland remained in unpublished manuscript form for nearly a hundred years; Tussy was already writing about them at the age of eight.