During this period Eleanor also got involved in more academic Shakespeare studies. She joined the New Shakespeare Society, established in 1874 by the philologist and early-English text scholar Frederick James Furnivall.
Furnivall was an interesting character who made an enormous contribution to founding the discipline of studying English literature. A free-thinking agnostic of strong Christian Socialist leanings, Furnivall had taught grammar and literature at the Working Men’s College. He headed up the preliminary work on the New Oxford English Dictionary, a project of which he was editor. The Concise Oxford Dictionary was his idea, formulated when he realised that the New OED was going to be a lifetime labour. Furnivall was committed to both worker education and higher education for women. He also hugely enjoyed messing about in boats. One of his most charming projects was to organise a Ladies Rowing Club on the Thames for Harrods ‘shop girls’.
The New Shakespeare Society gathered weekly at University College. Eleanor attended her first meeting in May 1876. Furnivall was unapologetic about the cultural nationalist intentions of his Shakespeare society. His opening speech reminded those present that it was ‘the duty of Englishmen to study Shakespere [sic]’ and that in his opinion it was both ‘humiliating and lamentable’ that ‘not one in 20 – or shall we say 20,000’ Englishmen had a ‘real notion of the greatest author in the world’.31 In joining Furnivall’s society, Tussy was getting involved in emerging definitions of Englishness and the forging of ‘English literature’ as a subject of scholarly study.
When Marx arrived in England, he taught himself English by making systematic classifications of Shakespeare’s original phrases that he then learnt by heart; in turn, he passed them on to Tussy, who absorbed them as part of her immigrant cultural inheritance. Now Tussy, in her turn, pitched herself into debate and textual investigation in a society dedicated to promoting the primacy of Shakespeare as purveyor of English, the greatest theatrical and poetic language in the world.
Eleanor volunteered to translate a hefty German essay by German philosopher Nikolaus Delius, a professor from Bonn University, on the epic element in Shakespeare’s dramas, and was commended in the society minutes for her work. The society records of Eleanor’s contributions demonstrate her particular interest in Shakespeare’s representation of women characters and the relations between the sexes. She objects to John Ruskin’s suggestion that Cordelia could not have been beautiful, for if she had been she would ‘never have been so wilfully misunderstood’. Tussy, demonstrating a much firmer grip on female psychology, retorts that ‘Cordelia must have been beautiful, or else her sisters would not have hated her so.’32 Furnivall recognised that it was an advantage to have women in the society, because they identified fresh aspects of Shakespeare’s work, particularly interpretations of his female characters, ‘many points of which were new to him’.33
Furnivall had a gift for the light touch required to bring people excluded from higher education into learning contexts where they could feel comfortable with ‘high culture’ and ideas. His informal tea-and-buns gatherings in the ABC teashop in Bloomsbury, regularly attended by Eleanor, were a magnet for a diversity of people barred by class, gender, faith or atheism from the universities.
Even if they had been able to enter higher education, young women like Tussy could not study English literature and its illustrious history as a subject – because it did not yet exist. Furnivall and his followers, of whom Eleanor was amongst the most active, played the leading role in establishing the vernacular English literature as a subject worthy of scholarship and study, making a humanities education accessible.
Furnivall began by launching the Early English Text Society in 1864, followed by the Chaucer Society in 1868, the New Shakespeare Society in 1873 and the Sunday Shakespeare Society in 1874. The Browning and Shelley societies followed in 1881 and 1886 respectively. He was dedicated to promoting the production of reliable Shakespeare texts, drawing on his specialism in philology. In an age where there was as yet no concept of the study of English literature as a discipline in universities, Furnivall was a pioneer.
After 1876 Eleanor was active in all of these societies and started to do scholarly research directly for Furnivall, with whom she became friends. Disbarred by her sex from taking a degree from an English university, research work was, as for her female contemporaries, the only route to literary scholarship available to her. In this way Tussy effectively made up a university degree for herself, earning money along the way. She was, thanks to cutting her teeth with her father, a dedicated and tireless researcher of steamrolling efficiency who could gut and précis even the most mellifluous arguments on paper with clarity and economy.
Though she worked hard at them, these autodidactic studies were a subplot to the main theme: Tussy’s key interest, to which her academic work was an adjunct, was in the craft and performance of theatre. Acting seemed to offer the possibility of exploring and defining her life beyond the narrow options of teaching, governessing or acting as handmaiden to Lissagaray’s increasingly self-absorbed intellectual endeavours. The stage beckoned.
9
The Only Lady Candidate
In September 1878, Eleanor stood at Engels’s side in Kensal Green Cemetery at the funeral of her ‘Auntie’ Lizzy Burns. The General was now bereft of both beloved Burns sisters and Eleanor had lost one of her most important mentors and friends. Lizzy and the General had lived together happily in unmarried amity since the death of Lizzy’s sister Mary in 1863. Engels married Lizzy the night before she died, ‘to please her . . . on her death bed’, as Tussy put it. For her, ‘Auntie’s’1 departure was loss of kin. Lizzy’s great legacies to Tussy were inculcating her understanding of Irish politics and history and the urgency of the need to free women – economically, socially and sexually.
Lizzy and Möhme had become particularly close during recent years, drawn together by illness, menopause and a shared understanding of the oppression of women. Möhme reflected frankly on the difference between her and Lizzy’s lives and those of their much-loved men:
In all these battles we women have to bear the hardest, i.e. pettiest, part. In the battle with the world the man gets stronger, stronger too in the face of enemies, even if their number is legion; we sit at home and darn socks. That does not banish the worries, and little daily cares slowly gnaw away the courage to face life. I am talking from more than 30 years experience. I can say that I did not give up courage easily. But I have grown too old to have much hope, and the last unfortunate events have shocked me greatly. I am afraid that we, we older ones, won’t live to see many good things.2
Tussy was determined to escape this pettiest part. The start of her struggle to escape the predestination of playing the woman’s part had already caused her desperation, frustrated rage, eating disorders and near breakdown, experiences she shared with many women of her generation.
Lizzy’s death brought home to Tussy how the people she grew up with worked tirelessly for goals and values unlikely to be realised during their lifetimes. Her parents and Engels and Lizzy had come of age in the more revolutionary, optimistic era of the 1840s. Tussy’s radical stance on Ireland owed much to what she had learned first-hand from Lizzy Burns. She followed closely the escalation in tension in the struggle for Irish Home Rule in the late 1870s, intensified by the effects of the slump in trade and agriculture. In 1879 the Irish National Land League was founded, with the aims of abolishing landlordism and improving conditions for impoverished tenant farmers. The government responded to the formation of the Land League with draconian repression, arresting leaders and gagging freedom of speech. Tussy wrote to Jennychen:
Never . . . even in ’67 during the Fenian rising – has the government tried so hard to drive the people into a revolt. Therein lies the great danger – for an open rising would be crushed and the movement thrown back years. Notice the conduct of the police in Dublin, Limerick etc. It is simply outrageous. If only the people will keep firm but quiet the government wi
ll find its hands full.3
She’s one to talk about keeping quiet. Earlier in the year Tussy joined a demonstration outside Bow Street Magistrates Court, where the arrested Land League leader Michael Davitt – the League’s Irish republican founder – was detained in a holding cell. Showing no sign of ‘keeping firm but quiet’, she asked a policeman ‘with a very hibernian countenance’ if Davitt was still inside:
‘No,’ said he, ‘it’s meself put him in the van.’ From his brogue I of course knew the man was Irish, so, as our American cousins say, I ‘went for him.’ I asked him if there weren’t enough Englishmen to do such dirty work that an Irishman must help ‘put in the van’ a man who like Davitt had done so much for his country etc etc. Some other policemen present scowled at me, but said nothing.4
The prerogative at stake was the freedom of the British subject. In 1881 Gladstone’s new cabinet implemented the Coercion Act, suspending habeas corpus in Ireland. Tussy deplored this restraint on freedom of expression, as she expressed to Library:
After all, Library, we English people are thorough. Let Bismarck do what he will, even in his own field of despotism we beat him! . . . In utter meanness too I think we can – to say the least of it – hold our own. As an act of cowardly retaliation and petty spite the arrest of Michael Davitt is unparalleled. The House of Commons too is now most effectively gagged, and liberty of speech is a thing of the past . . . The English workmen – than whom (between you and me) a worse crew does not exist – even are beginning to think that Gladstone is ‘coming it strong’ – as a Yankee would say – and they are beginning to hold meetings all over London and the provinces to protest against the Irish Bill.5
Resistance to the Irish Coercion Act by working-class people intensified the mobilisation of radical British forces for democratic electoral representation – of working men. From the early 1880s a wide range of efforts were made to set up a social democratic party in England. Two workers from the London Trades Council launched a paper, the Labour Standard, to support the call for an independent working men’s party, to which Engels contributed leading articles. Youthful Edinburgh socialist Robert Banner, acquainted with Marx and Engels, and disillusioned by the see-saw policy of reformist trade unions, became convinced the union route would never settle the labour question and turned his energies to founding the Scottish Labour Party.
In 1880 Tussy was invited, along with Marx, to dinner at the plush house of wealthy financier Henry Hyndman in Devonshire Street, Portland Place. Hyndman wanted to establish a new party for the direct representation of labour and, in March 1881, held a conference in London aimed at setting up this ‘New Party’. Hyndman’s stated intention was to launch ‘a really democratic party in opposition to the monstrous tyranny of Mr Gladstone and his Whigs in Ireland and their equally abominable policy in Egypt, with the object of bringing about democratic changes in England’.6 Hyndman and his wife Miranda, who Marx liked except for her adulatory attitude to her husband, became frequent though uninvited visitors to Maitland Park Road, and Marx complained of being ‘invaded’ by them.7
Tussy shared her father and Engels’s scepticism about Hyndman. His Eton and Cambridge background and soft liberalism were not the cause of their objections; rather it was his determination to try and expunge the class struggle from the socialist movement. ‘When the International was founded,’ Marx and Engels wrote:
we explicitly formulated the battle cry: The emancipation of the working classes must be brought about by the working classes themselves. We cannot therefore associate ourselves with people who openly state that the workers are too uneducated to emancipate themselves and must be freed from above by philanthropic big bourgeois and petty bourgeois . . . for which purpose the working-class must place itself under the leadership of the ‘educated and propertied bourgeois’ who alone possess the time and opportunity to acquaint themselves with what is good for the workers.8
Paternalistic down to his handmade Jermyn Street silk socks, Hyndman paid lip service to the essential need for grass-roots organisation, but in reality propagated what he saw as the necessity for a bourgeois elite:
. . . that the emancipation of the workers must be brought about by the workers themselves is true in the sense that we cannot have Socialism without Socialists . . . But a slave cannot be freed by the slaves themselves. The leadership, the initiative, the teaching, the organisation must come from those who are born into a different position and are trained to use their faculties in early life.9
There were several dinner discussions at Portland Place and repeated invasions of Maitland Park Road by the Hyndmans. Tussy reported to Jennychen a few months later, ‘we’ve not heard much more about the newest “New Party”, but I don’t think it will come to much.’10
She was wrong. Two months later Hyndman launched the party of Democratic Federation, regarded to this day as one of the foundation stones of the late-nineteenth-century English socialist revival. His manifesto, ‘England for All’, bowdlerised two chapters of Capital without attribution or permission of its author and added numerous mistakes, but this was much in the way of things for political philosophers and was to be expected. The cause of the rift was Hyndman’s betrayal of Marx and Engels’s principle that democracy could only be brought about by broad-based grass-roots organisation from the ground up: the slaves must freed by the slaves themselves.
The Hyndmans were banned from Maitland Park Road and further dinner invitations to Portland Place declined. Tussy, still acting as her father’s correspondence secretary, had to run the crossfire of these skirmishes between Marx and those allied to the Democratic Federation who tried to sidestep the central argument of Capital about the need for ground-up struggle. She dutifully composed calm letters summarising concisely the grounds of Marx’s objections,11 such as to the Scottish barrister, ethnographer and historian John Stuart Glennie, another person who wholly missed the point of Capital. Glennie wrote complainingly to Tussy, ‘You say, “His only objection to your book rests on your treatment of his scientific theories.” But, the special theories of Dr Marx’s great work on Capital I have not treated at all.’12 Precisely: ‘not treated at all’.13
Hyndman and Glennie shared with many other well-educated liberal British men the bizarre view that democracy would be created if only working men were enfranchised and directly represented. Eleanor saw this for the nonsense it was. From her mid-twenties she started to question and challenge the exclusionary focus and insistence only on the rights of working men, not women, as the first step of socialist organisation in England.
This is the juncture at which Tussy’s artistic and cultural pursuits forge the metal of her own worldview, which already included the more than half of the world that are women. Socialism for one sex didn’t add up. It was as absurd as the notion of socialism in one country. Tussy had learned this from the example of the Commune. For all its other failings, the Commune maintained the centrality of women’s emancipation as a necessary precondition of democracy.
Eleanor had before her the examples of the role of women in the Irish struggle, the International, the Commune and the early Russian revolutionary movement. Lizzy, Eleanor and Jennychen were the strongest Fenians in the family. Marx and Engels supported the Irish republican cause, but not the tactics. Lizzy and Eleanor were more ambivalent. Tussy wrote two articles about the Russian revolutionary movement for Progress in 1883, which illustrate that she was thinking about the uses of armed violence.14 This analysis applied equally to her attitude to the emancipation of women as a class and to the Fenians and Russian revolutionaries.
Her father and the General were unbending in their opposition to the resort to terrorism under any circumstances; Tussy was not so sure. Was this just the impatience of hot-headed youth or did being a disenfranchised, second-class citizen give her, like Lizzy, a different perspective that eluded Mohr and the General’s born entitlement as men?
Closer to home, she had also the local, familial examples of her mother, her sist
ers, Lenchen and Lizzy – all of whom, as they matured, became more self-critical and angry about how they’d allowed themselves to be short-changed by their political, intellectual men; and all of whom in their different ways expressed feelings of unfulfilment and disappointment.
Her sisters, the next generation, were now treading the same path as their mother. Jenny and Laura were clever, capable and talented women enchanted by charming, likeable, liberal Bluebeards who lassoed their desire with babies, domestic drudgery and censorious in-laws. Laura and Paul had three children, who, despite their tremendous care and effort, all died tragically in childhood. As a consequence Paul lost his faith in medicine, his chosen profession, and tried to earn his living as an engraver and photo-lithographer.15 To empathise with Laura and Paul as they grew older, Tussy always had to remember that they had made and lost a family in the early years of their marriage.
Laura was bright and gregarious but could settle for pragmatic self-preservation. But Jennychen possessed a truly brilliant and original mind and, under different historical circumstances, would have made a distinguished businesswoman, politician, newspaper editor, publisher or economist. As it was, rose-tinted romance cost her her liberty and career. In the early days of her marriage to Longuet Jennychen believed, like her mother before her, that she could have both marriage and a career. Once children and the responsibility of running the household arrived, she discovered that, like her mother before her, she could not.
In the breathless early days of their falling in love, Jennychen threw down her bluestocking cap and lovingly invited the charming Longuet to tame her shrew. Teaching in Oxford, Longuet was depressed and ‘ill at ease’ in the ‘small world of . . . hopelessly dull . . . English university men and professorial shopkeepers’.16 Bolstering his self-confidence and gently stroking his ego, Jennychen foolishly assured him that ‘you deserve the title of man of letters more than I do bluestocking.’17 Marriage, babies and ten years later, Jennychen’s letters to her sisters tell a different story. She now rues her mistake in succumbing to romance and marrying an indigent charmer, full of fascination with himself to the exclusion of all others. Where once Jennychen was happy to send Longuet her own money and tell him how wonderful he was, she now longed for the independence of her single life. She’d given birth to two more babies in prompt succession, Harry (Harra) in July 1878 and Edgar Marcel (Wolf) in April 1879. ‘Those blessed babies,’ Jennychen confides to Laura from rural France:
Eleanor Marx Page 17