Eleanor Marx

by Rachel Holmes

  The day Morozov and Lev Hartmann first visited, London was enveloped in its notorious yellow fog. Lamps were lit in all the houses. Exiles under extradition orders, the men were potential terrorists against the British state. The constable tasked with tailing them had to loiter outside in the smoggy street whilst the subjects of his surveillance were pulled up cosily to the fire in Marx’s study with coffee and Lenchen’s home-made biscuits. Tussy welcomed and entertained them until Mohr returned from the British Museum. She switched to French when she noticed Morozov’s hesitation with English. He noted her facility. Her much-improved French demonstrated the linguistic benefits of her liaison with Lissa.

  Morozov remembered a detail: Marx’s study lamp had a green shade that cast Tussy in soft light as she talked with them, sitting in her father’s armchair, framed by the book-lined walls.5 The effect of that green lampshade evoked Morozov’s admiring comparisons of Eleanor with Goethe’s Gretchen.

  ‘The conversation,’ Morozov recalls, ‘was mainly on Narodnaya Volya matters, in which Karl and Eleanor showed a great interest. Marx said that he, like all other Europeans, imagined our struggle with autocracy as something fabulous, like a fantastic novel.’6 It was a double-edged remark. Marx and Engels remained implacably opposed to terrorism and emphasised the necessity for a broad-based, representative, popular movement in Russia rather than Narodnaya Volya’s clandestine, minority clique militia. Tussy, undecided on the question of armed struggle, was absorbed in the debate.

  Morozov’s comparison of Tussy with Goethe’s famous heroine captures her aura: pan-European émigré citizen of the world. But Tussy did not share Gretchen’s preoccupation with counting petals on daisies or being hoodwinked into premarital pregnancies. Tussy turned her thoughts to the state of her nation and by extension her place within it: ‘Who would think that in quiet respectable happy England millions of people are on the verge of starvation!’7

  First-generation child of immigrant parents, British citizen, product of many cultures, by upbringing and temperament an internationalist, much travelled for her age, Tussy had grown into a metropolitan Londoner who batted for Britain in all its social and political struggles. During her twenties she became actively involved in the sharp edge of developing London education policy, the debate over Irish Home Rule, the evolution of the SPD (German Social Democratic Party), and the amnesty campaign for Communards. She wrote to Nathalie Liebknecht on New Year’s Day of 1875, a fortnight before her twentieth birthday:

  A kind of internal movement (strikes etc) never entirely ceased in England but John Bull has been accustomed for so long a while to behave himself that he goes the way he should go to an alarming extent . . . Not a day passed in which ‘death from want’ of some ‘pauper’ is not recorded. It passes all understanding how the thousands of men and women starving in the East End of London – and starving by the side of the greatest wealth and luxury – do not break forth into some wild struggle. Surely nothing could make their lot worse than it is now.8

  International, national and local – given her background, father and predisposition, this was to be expected. When they moved to Maitland Park Road, Tussy, essence of radical Englishwoman alchemised with broad European cultural influences, became an equal draw to the Marx hearth with her father. Marian Comyn described the atmosphere:

  I suppose it was Bohemian in its open-handed hospitality, its gracious welcome to strangers within its gates. And the strangers were numerous and shared the classic charm of great variety. There was one point of resemblance between them – for the most part they were impecunious. Shabby as to clothes, furtive in movement, but interesting, always interesting . . . Dr Marx’s manners to his family were altogether delightful. A goodly number had no doubt found their native land too hot to hold them – clever conspirators to whom London was a chosen centre, political prisoners who had contrived to shake the shackles from their limbs, young adventurers whose creed was of ‘if-there’s-a-government-I’m-agen-it’ order.9

  Like many others Comyn was warmly invited to join the regular Sunday open house at 41 Maitland Park Road. Tussy was at the helm of these weekly ‘At Homes’. An attempt to regularise the perpetual flow of visitors whilst Mohr worked on his Critique of the Gotha Programme and edited Lissagaray’s History of the Commune, the Sunday salons in effect just added to the house’s bustling sociability.

  Tussy wheedled Lenchen into preparing enough food for an indeterminate number of guests and Lenchen obliged with roasts, stews, soups, dumplings and her renowned baking. ‘Helen was an excellent cook,’ Comyn noted; as well as her German biscuits, ‘her jam tarts are a sweet and abiding memory to this day.’10 Helen served the meal in ‘the semi-basement dining-room’ and it ‘seemed to be going on more or less all the Sabbath day’.11 All who joined the Marx At Homes knew Lenchen, in her signature gold earrings and chenille hairnet. Her kitchen was adjacent to the dining room – and her opinions were shared equally in dining room and kitchen. There was no upstairs downstairs in the Marx family home. Lenchen ‘reserved to herself the right of speaking her mind, even to the august doctor. Her mind was respectfully, even meekly, received by all the family, except Eleanor, who frequently challenged it.’12

  Eleanor stayed in London during the summer of 1875 whilst Mohr once again took the sulphurous waters of Karlsbad and Möhme an extended break in Lausanne until September. Whilst they were away Lissa visited daily, or more to the point, nearly every evening, under Lenchen’s benevolent eye. She had facilitated the secret engagement between Marx and Jenny in their youth and now obliged Tussy and Lissa the same way.

  Tussy’s sexual relationship with Lissagaray raises the question of her use of contraception. By the 1870s numerous birth control devices were available for over-the-counter purchase in English pharmacies, including rubber condoms, diaphragms, chemical suppositories, vaginal sponges and medicated tampons. Contraception was advertised widely, in allusive language and images the implications of which were quite clear to the general public. Literate and urban, Eleanor had ample opportunity to take necessary measures; she also had an older, experienced partner who did not want children until he’d published his history of the Paris Commune.

  Throughout the summer of 1875 Lissa toiled on his book. Tussy was his principal researcher, writing to Karl Hirsch with requests for facts from Paris on the final playing-out of the Commune. Frustrated about indefinite exile, Lissa’s levity and brio slipped away into an overly solemn moodiness. ‘Youth must be earnest and austere rather than light-hearted, for we have no time left to be young.’13 This new fogeyishness unsettled and upset Tussy but she shoved her anxieties to the back of her mind, put Lissa’s stress down to his book deadline and chivvied him along.

  Karl Hirsch scrupulously supplied all the information Tussy requested on the Commune. Overscrupulously. As his correspondence with her demonstrates, Hirsch had fallen for Tussy at his first meeting with her in London in October 1875, shortly after his release from prison in Germany. Journalist and career politician, editor of a number of Social Democratic newspapers, Hirsch was a patient pragmatist, and not about to declare himself to Tussy and confront Lissagaray head on. Wisely, given the latter’s willingness for armed combat. Hirsch committed himself to the longer game, setting about so formal and insinuating a courtship that Tussy was the last to recognise it. To her, Hirsch was a generous friend and charming correspondent with whom she loved discussing art and politics. Jennychen, more astute about the ulterior motives of ‘the unamoured Hirsch’,14 dropped heavy hints to her little sister, who missed them all. Knowing herself to be any man’s equal, Tussy’s behaviour – regardless of age or station – was airily unencumbered by the social inhibitions of ladylikeness. Drawn to her flame, many men and women pined for Tussy at this stage of her life. Focused on Lissa, she let most of this attention pass her by completely.

  Tussy’s correspondence with Hirsch after he returned to Paris was concerned chiefly with French politics and the campaign for amnesty for the Communard
s, a subject close to her heart. She was sure that resolution on this issue would restore Lissa to his former self. Tussy and Hirsch wrote to each other in French. Writing in May 1876, Tussy supposes that Hirsch is very much occupied with the amnesty in Paris: ‘At any rate the newspapers start talking about it. At last we shall know shortly who will be able to return to France. For I think the Assembly will be forced to give fairly numerous pardons.’15 Her over-optimism was raised by the regime change in France over the winter of 1875–6, replacing the Conservative National Assembly with a Republican Chamber of Deputies that introduced the bill for full amnesty for the Communards. Kicked out of both chambers soon after Eleanor wrote this letter, the introduction of the bill nevertheless served to put the debate about peace and reconciliation with the former Communard rebels on the agenda.

  Meanwhile Hirsch reflected on how he might secure an advantage in his attempt to win Tussy. Her twenty-first birthday offered the perfect opportunity.

  He sent her a carton of cigarettes, mailed with a warm note congratulating her on her majority. Thanks to the police dutifully intercepting all their correspondence, we know that it was Hirsch who first introduced and supplied Tussy with the luxurious modern convenience of ready-made cigarettes to which she became as pestiferously addicted as her father to his cheap cigars. Up until now Tussy, like most people, had bought loose tobacco and papers and rolled her own. She was delighted, and thanked Hirsch fulsomely, who followed up just a few months later with another, even more successful present: a fashionable pair of pince-nez in the latest design.

  A style of spectacles supported without earpieces, by pinching (pincer) the bridge of the nose (nez), pince-nez had been around since the 1500s. Developments in the engineering of lightweight steel and the manufacture of thinner glass during industrialisation made possible lighter, far more comfortable pince-nez that reached their height of popularity in the late 1800s. The styles were unisex and were carried in a snap-case or, for women, clipped to a muff-chain worn around the neck or attached to a customised hairpin. For Tussy’s unruly hair, a hairpin was too fussy. She attached her pince-nez to a long, flat-link, pinchbeck chain, which can be seen in photographs taken from this period and ever after.

  The pince-nez from Hirsch had a hard bridge that fitted her Marxian nose perfectly. The lenses weren’t right, but she had them changed by a Soho optometrist and wrote to Hirsch, wearing his gift, expressing her gratitude and delight. Hirsch was quietly pleased to know he was providing her with practical comforts that Lissa had not thought about. The shortsightedness that she had developed in recent years was now much relieved by this superior German eyewear. Tussy, despite the dramatic improvement in the quality of her vision thanks to her new pince-nez, still failed to notice that Hirsch’s attentiveness signified anything other than comradely friendship.

  Ready-made cigarettes and the very latest pince-nez were amongst a host of new innovations and time-saving devices Tussy embraced with unhesitating enthusiasm. She was an early adopter of any practical technology that reduced or removed labour from domestic work and leisure. She ticked off her friend Marian Comyn when she dropped by unexpectedly to reclaim a book she had loaned her and discovered her, needle in hand, with the book on the table beside her – unfinished:

  This lapse was to her an indication of mental, if not moral, ineptitude, and she expressed her opinion with dramatic vigour. Upon the ladylike accomplishments of Victorian days she poured vials of contemptuous wrath. ‘Fancy work’ she scorned; plain sewing she looked upon as superfluous in view of the permanence of sewing machines.16

  For Tussy was now an ardent enthusiast for theatre work not fancy work, and it was literary circles, not sewing circles, that were uppermost in her attentions.

  ‘Since August 1877 the Dogberry Club has been established,’17 Clara Collet recorded in her diary. Clara and Tussy were childhood friends. Their families became acquainted during the 1850s when Marx started contributing to The Free Press: A Diplomatic Review, edited from 1856 by Clara’s father Collet Dobson Collet.18 Tussy and Clara met at the Collet home in Hornsey Lane, Crouch End, and liked each other immediately. Clara remembered vividly this first meeting, where she was dazzled by Tussy’s energy and ‘frock of blue merino trimmed with white swan’s down’.19 The parents had a play-reading in the downstairs parlour whilst the girls roamed ‘throughout the entire upper rooms of the house’.20 Tussy made Clara’s own home an adventure for her.

  Seven years later, the two of them co-founded the Dogberry Club, dedicated to play-reading and all other thespian and cultural activities relating to Shakespeare. Named after Mr Dogberry, the self-important, egotistical constable in Much Ado About Nothing who fabulously misuses the English language, it was a cheekily apt title for a group of young British radicals who disapproved of the undemocratic monarchist state of England whose claim to authority they held in little regard. Like much else that happened at Maitland Park Road, the Dogberry meetings were under surveillance by Scotland Yard. There’s nice wit in naming a Shakespeare reading club in honour of the hapless constable detectives who had to waste their time monitoring its membership and activities.

  The original Dogberry-ites consisted of family and friends – including dramatists Edward Rose and Israel Zangwill, and actresses Theodora Wright and Virginia Bateman. Engels, Sir Henry Juta, and Eleanor and Clara’s parents made up the regular adult cohort, augmented by passing visitors.21

  As we know already, Tussy’s love of Shakespeare took root in childhood. Now the family passion for ‘the bible of our house, seldom out of our hands or mouths’,22 came in for a revival. Tussy was the leading spirit of the Dogberry-ites. She organised fortnightly play readings at Maitland Park Road, and outings to Henry Irving’s premieres at the Lyceum Theatre.

  Henry Irving was the stagename of John Brodribb, born in Somerset to a travelling salesman and a fire-and-brimstone Methodist mother who never forgave him a minute of the immoral damnation of his life on the stage.23 Irving studied at commercial college and had no background in theatre but he went on to make himself the most successful celebrity actor-manager of the nineteenth-century English stage. Self-made, Irving demonstrated that the theatre was a professional world in which people could succeed regardless of where they came from.

  Until Irving’s sensationally successful Hamlet in October 1874, Shakespeare productions had long been box office poison.24 Irving reinvented the idiom of Shakespearean performance. His new interpretations made the bard popular again with mid-Victorian audiences. Critics panned Irving’s version of Hamlet for breaking with the traditional declamatory tradition of Shakespearean performance. Tussy and her parents pitched in vociferously on Irving’s side in the press controversy over his modern, radical interpretation that followed the new psychological, humanising approach introduced by American actor Edwin Booth. Alfred Tennyson praised Irving for portraying the Prince of Denmark’s ‘method in his madness as well as the madness in his method’.25 Irving’s groundbreaking Hamlet in 1874 and Macbeth the following September rekindled Tussy’s childhood Shakespeare mania and set her on the path towards a life in theatre. Or so she began to dream.

  On opening nights the front row of the Dress Circle at the Lyceum was reserved for the Dogberries – a notable concession, given that it was London’s leading theatre under Irving’s management. Tussy probably secured the favour through Virginia Bateman, a Dogberry whose parents had managed the Lyceum prior to Irving. Virginia, stage name Virginia Francis, was the youngest of the four Bateman sisters, who were all actresses. Tussy, she recalled, was most anxious to make her take Shakespeare seriously.26

  On one of these first club outings Tussy presented Irving with a laurel wreath on behalf of the Dogberries. He stagily kissed her hand in thanks. As Mr Dogberry might have remarked on seeing the rebel daughter of socialism introduced to the rags-to-riches superstar actor from humble origins in the achingly fashionable Lyceum, ‘Our watch, sir, have indeed comprehended two auspicious persons.’

 
Following the move to Maitland Park Road, Möhme began to feel tired and beset by continuous niggling ailments. To try and cheer her, Eleanor encouraged her mother to go to the theatre often and to write reviews on Shakespeare that Hirsch published in the Frankfurter Zeitung at her request:

  Mr Irving . . . interests us very much (although we do not know him personally) firstly because he is a man of rare talent and secondly because all the English press, in consequence of the most miserable intrigues, set itself furiously against him and has got up a cabal.27

  Reinvigorated by her new ‘writing mania’, Möhme wrote several other reviews as well as a round-up report on the London theatre season of 1876, all of which were placed by Tussy and published by the Frankfurter Zeitung.28 Mohr was content to take a supporting role in the Marx family Shakespeare revival. He encouraged Tussy’s enthusiasm, sensing that it gave her a platform of her own to build on and a means of integrating with the culture of her birth. He rarely went out at night these days, and the Dogberries provided home entertainment. ‘He never read a part’, Marian Comyn observed,

  . . . which, for the sake of the play, was perhaps quite as well, for he had a guttural voice and a decided German accent. He was interested in talking of Shakespeare’s popularity in Germany and of how it had come about; Eleanor always maintained that the German dramatic ideal approximated much more closely to the English than the French, and waxed eloquent over Lessing and Wieland, who had done so much to make Shakespeare known in their own country.29

  It wasn’t all so highbrow. When the Dogberry-ites had finished their serious reading they played games and pastimes such as charades and the traditional English rhyming game of dumb-crambo – to the delight of Marx and Engels, who always entered into the spirit of any fun that was going on and laughed until the tears ran down their cheeks at anything comic, ‘the oldest in years, but in spirit as young as any of us’.30