Eleanor Marx

by Rachel Holmes

  . . . though really charming good-tempered little fellows, put such a strain on my nervous system by day and night that I often long for no matter what release from this ceaseless round of nursing, and think with a pang of the dark underground, to Farringdon Street, where when I was not stifling with asthma, I could at least indulge in my morning daily, and on alighting could run down the muddy Strand and stare at the advertisements, which I miss more than I can say in this Argenteuil waste, where I hear and see nothing but the baker and butcher and cheesemonger and greengrocer. I do believe that even the dull routine of factory work is not more killing than are the endless duties of the ménage. To me at least, this is and always has been so. Some women I know, such as Mrs Lormier for instance, glory in this home drudgery – but we are not all made of the same stuff. You have always accused me of being somewhat of a misanthropist – now I have lost all my animal spirits – man delights not me nor woman either.18

  With no immediate positive examples on which to model herself, Tussy nevertheless refused to contemplate a future of, in her mother’s words, bearing the pettiest part, sitting at home and darning socks. She wanted to get stronger and be free. Men delighted her, and women too.

  In 1876, the year before she formally joined the New Shakespeare Society, Tussy fought the first round in her lifelong battle for women’s and worker education, representation and participation. For the London School Board election in November 1876 she joined the campaign for Alice Westlake, standing for the Marylebone division. Marylebone was Elizabeth Garrett Anderson’s former seat, and she introduced Tussy to Alice Westlake as her chosen successor. Westlake, an artist whose work was exhibited at the Royal Academy and the Paris Salon, signed John Stuart Mill’s women’s suffrage petition in 1866 and was closely involved in Garrett Anderson’s hospital for women. Garrett Anderson persuaded Westlake to stand for her seat, as did her husband John Westlake QC, founder of the Working Men’s College, where Furnivall taught.

  Marylebone was London’s largest metropolitan division and, as was widely reported in the press, Westlake ‘The Only Lady Candidate’. ‘The Only Radical Candidate’ in the entire London School Board elections, also standing in the Marylebone constituency, was Maltman Barry, a close family friend of the Marxes whom Tussy knew well from her father’s early International days. Barry was a good journalist but a poor politician, little suited to leadership.

  Tussy made an unhesitating choice to support the only woman candidate over the only male radical, disappointing Barry, who also approached her to help with his campaign. Tussy explains to Hirsch that Alice Westlake, ‘though bourgeois at heart like almost all Englishwomen is at least very much of a freethinker and is in any case worthier than the men who offer themselves as candidates’.19 ‘Our aim,’ she tells Hirsch, ‘is above all to work against the self-styled Church Party who want absolutely to abolish compulsory instruction.’20 This is tendentious: Westlake’s stated policy was not, in fact, freethinking on religious instruction in compulsory education; but it’s true she was very clearly the best of the seven constituency candidates and a woman to boot. The tone of Tussy’s instinctive meritocracy and feminism ring clear: she ignores class, disregards family allegiance and pitches for the best candidate. The slaves will be freed by the slaves themselves.

  She signed up at the Westlake campaign headquarters at 157 Camden Road and quickly proved herself a champion door-to-door canvasser. Her first real grass-roots activism, it was a terrific blooding in London politics and an eye-opener. ‘You cannot imagine,’ she marvels to the admiring Hirsch, ‘the strange things which I see and hear’:

  In one house they ask that religion above all other things should be taught – in another house I am told ‘education is the curse of the country’ and ‘education will be our ruin’ etc. Finally it is amusing but also sad now and then when you go to the house of a working man who tells you that he wants to ‘consult his boss’ first.21

  Westlake carried the day, polling 20,231 votes, and Tussy came out clearly on the side of women’s entry into public office. Westlake held the seat until 1888 and did a very good job. By 1882 she was on the Central Committee of the National Society for Women’s Suffrage, and remained an active suffragette for the rest of her life.

  Tussy’s uncompromising act of feminist independence in striking out from men-only radicalism and the silliness of the notion of socialism in one gender impressed the General, the only member of the extended family who practised free love as well as preaching it. He knew very well that the struggles for political change so far fell woefully short of his own theorisations in Origins of Private Property, Family and the State. Now Tussy, as steeped in this great attempt to analyse the gendered basis of history and economics as she was in her father’s Capital, was putting the theories to practical test. ‘When we take power,’ Engels remarked to a friend about Tussy’s participation in the campaign, ‘not only will women vote, but they will be voted for and make speeches, which last has already come to pass on the London School Boards . . . the ladies on these School Boards distinguish themselves by talking very little and working very hard, each of them doing on average as much as three men.’22

  Tussy, Engels would acknowledge, worked very hard and now did the work of three or more men – although she also talked a great deal. On 22 October 1877 she registered for her first Reader’s Ticket at the Reading Room of the British Museum. ‘My whole day is taken up with work at the Museum,’ she told Hirsch.23 Eduard Bernstein met her at this time and recalled her combination of vivacity and labour, ‘a lively young girl of slender build with beautiful black hair and fine dark eyes . . . At that time she was already working hard at the British Museum partly for her father, partly “devilling” that is, taking excerpts or doing research for a pittance to save well-to-do people who wanted to write books the trouble of looking things up for themselves.’24 Bernstein was to play a pivotal role in Tussy’s adult life. Born in 1850, the son of a Jewish railway engineer, Bernstein famously formulated evolutionary socialism and became a key founder and leader of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD).

  Eleanor refused to take an allowance or any money from Engels, whereas Jennychen and Laura depended on him to support their husbands and families. His support was willingly and freely given – he had no children and regarded Marx’s as his own – and Tussy was always welcome to her portion. But she didn’t want money she hadn’t earned.

  Socialist feminist activist, intellectual, budding woman of letters, secretly aspiring actress, Tussy also shouldered the concurrent responsibilities of a parental carer, secretary, unpaid nanny to her nephews and Lissa’s dutiful, unpaid researcher. She also encouraged and supported him through his trauma of surviving the Commune, which became more pronounced as time went on. She knew exactly the female feat of acting in a supporting role in family and personal life.

  Tussy’s sprint away from the dangers of imprisonment as a Victorian angel in the house drove her towards the composite, contested lifestyle of the New Woman. Unmarried and childless, Tussy was exposed to the dependency of her ageing parents and to being nanny to her sister’s children. It was the dilemma of every woman of her ilk. To fulfil her aspirations for a life as an artist and activist, intellectual and community leader, she needed to learn how to murder the self-sacrificing, eternally good, dutiful, boiling with resentment, angelic youngest daughter. This is not to praise Tussy for some kind of multi-tasking heroism for her capacity to cope with competing responsibilities, but rather to raise the alert on the multiple pressures bearing down on her: pressures that brought stress, neurosis and nervous breakdown.

  More important for Tussy than the drama of her personal struggle between duty and independence was the knowledge this brought of the pinched narrowness of the majority of middle-class women’s lives, confined solely within the suffocating walls of domesticity. And so within her own family Tussy found herself at the crossroads of the opposition between the two socialisms that shaped the history of the British lef
t: one prioritising the liberation of women from the get-go, the other seeking first the freedom of the people, from which definition women were, apparently, excluded. To Tussy’s way of thinking, this was an illogical dichotomy and against natural justice. Either men and women both are free, or no one is.

  However, she didn’t only sit in the British Museum Reading Room analysing this dilemma. She lived it. Her working life and self-education progressed at a brisk rate, but her relationship with her family revolved in a continuous loop of companionship, care, duty and conscientious obligation. Being nice to children, nice to her parents, supporting the intellectual work of both her father and fiancé: the repetitive cycle of the one impeded the development of the full potential of the other. Tussy wanted, always, to ‘Go ahead!’ But in order to do this she had to take unthinkable action and abandon her family. This was not in her nature. She wouldn’t be free unless they abandoned her. And that was not in their nature.

  She knew now that it was only life outside her family that could lead to the opportunities for her to play unlived parts and explore her unimagined selves. Making a new family with Lissa would simply replace one form of captivity with another. Duty, genuine love and bewilderment at how to break free tethered her to the monotonous calls of domestic life. Loving others better than she loved herself was emerging as one of Tussy’s key failings; by contradiction, it is also one of the characteristics that made her so human and likeable.

  Throughout her twenties she continued to accompany her parents on their annual rest and recuperation cures and mini-holidays, together and separately. There was a return with her father to Karlsbad in August 1876, their twenty-eight-hour journey dogged by unanticipated adventures caused by the world premiere of Richard Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung from 13 to 17 August at his Bayreuth Festspielhaus, which drew audiences from around the world. Miss and Dr Marx must have been the only travellers to the region not clamouring for tickets to this fest of what Möhme described as ‘Siegfrieds, Valkyries and Götterdämmerung heroes’,25 hogging every bed in the town and surroundings, and making it impossible for them to find accommodation en route to Karlsbad. Once they were there, the daily routine of water-drinking was the repetitious order of the day.

  ‘Before continuing,’ Tussy wrote to her mother from the Hotel Germania,

  I must however remind you how proverbially stupid one gets at Karlsbad – so don’t be surprised if I seem rather incoherent. We go through exactly the same routine that you have heard me speak of so often . . . You cannot imagine how the time goes doing nothing. What with drinking and eating, and walking, it is bedtime before one has well managed even to commence a letter.26

  Tussy spiced the stupefying leisure with idle anthropological observation and gossiping about the state of other visitors’ marriages and financial affairs, remarking, ‘There are as many Jews as ever, and more anxious than ever to get as much water as possible. Still, an American has outdone them. He came to Karlsbad but being unable to stay more than two days took forty-two glasses a day! It’s a marvel he didn’t die of it.’27

  The ‘very witty’ and hardworking young Dr Ferdinand Fleckles supplied much of this gossip. Tussy took a great shine to Fleckles and he, enraptured, endeavoured to spend as much time as he could in her company. Marx liked Fleckles, and encouraged Tussy’s dalliance with this bright, light-hearted, youthful (German) doctor, a tonic after the now existentially tortured and world-weary (French) Lissagaray.

  Tussy and Ferdinand must have been pleased when she conveniently came down with a sudden fever and became his primary patient, allowing him legitimately into her bedroom and to demonstrate his best bedside manner. Marx overdramatised this episode, praising Fleckles for his expert intervention that saved her from what he claimed would otherwise have been a long and dangerous illness. Fortuitously, Tussy’s illness was potentially long and dangerous enough for Dr Fleckles to instantly prescribe a period of convalescence that required them to extend their stay in Karlsbad by a full fortnight, under his daily supervision.

  On their way home Mohr took Tussy to Kreuznach to see the church where he’d married her mother thirty-three years earlier. After that they didn’t go to Karlsbad any more. As Tussy later explained, the German and Austrian governments intended to deport her father and it was too far and expensive to travel there and risk expulsion on arrival. Their precaution was well founded. Tussy’s Uncle Edgar von Westphalen wrote to tell them that ‘the police visited our hotel – just one hour after we had left it’.28

  The following year they tried the thermal springs at Bad Neuenahr on the Rhine. Unusually Möhme accompanied them and, after the rest cure, they went for a three-week holiday together in the Black Forest. Tussy remarked that her father missed Karlsbad, ‘for he always felt like one born anew after his treatment there’.29 But she mistook the source of her father’s anxiety. As Marx finally forced himself to acknowledge, something was seriously wrong with the health of the woman he had known since infancy and loved his whole life. Naturally it was to Engels that he admitted his concern about Jenny’s intense suffering ‘from impaired digestion’.30 At Neuenahr a reputable doctor assured her husband that Mrs Marx had arrived just in time for him to prevent her from becoming seriously ill. By November Möhme let go of this over-optimistic diagnosis and went to Manchester for a consultation and frank chat with their old friend Dr Gumpert. She wrote to Tussy, ‘The head and feet are all-right, but the centre of the machine, where the brewing goes on, is not yet in working order.’31 Gumpert diagnosed cancer of the liver, confirmed by a London consultant the following March. The large doses of belladonna prescribed as treatment were ineffective.

  Jennychen and Laura had households, husbands, new babies and illnesses of their own to deal with; the chief responsibility for looking after her parents and assisting her sisters with childcare fell on Tussy. Whilst the Longuets lived in London, Jennychen was often forced to call on Tussy to look after the children or cover her teaching work: ‘with great reluctance and regret . . . I send you these lines to ask you to replace me at Clement Danes tomorrow and Tuesday. I know you have already too much work on hand . . . it pains me . . . to burthen you with work of mine.’32 Whilst Tussy’s whole day was taken up with research work at the museum for Furnivall and the Philological, Chaucer and Shakespeare societies, she was also burning the midnight oil on her translation into English of Lissa’s History of the Commune, ‘at the express wish of the author’.33 An unpaid labour of love, it was an ambitious project to undertake for her first major translation; the result, literal and unwieldy in style, nevertheless brought English readers the first authentic, personal memoir of the Paris Commune and, to this day, the starting point for all subsequent historians of this period of French history.

  Jennychen and Möhme went on several holidays together to seaside and resort towns, leaving the little boys to stay with favourite Aunt Tussy, Nym or Nymmy, as they called Lenchen, and Opi Karl, for whom the grandchildren were an inexhaustible source of joy. Tussy was on hand to nurse her nephews and nieces. Aged fourteen, she had tended Laura and Paul’s first child, ‘that little Turk of a Fouchtra’ who, she wrote to her mother from Paris:

  . . . won’t let one do anything but nurse him, or if he be asleep in his cradle admire his good looks . . . his forehead is immense! Just like Papa’s . . . if he begins to cry, one need only let him suck your finger, or thump his little belly, and he quits in a minute. As to his teeth he really is cutting them; for you can see them quite plainly. I took him into bed with me for two hours this morning and he behaved beautifully.34

  Following the birth of Wolf (Edgar Marcel) in August 1879 Tussy worried about the burden on Jennychen. ‘Jenny expects another baby in March! This last expectation is not altogether a blessing . . . it is difficult to attend to three – one might almost say four babies, for of course Johnny is still only a baby.’35 She loved the second boy best of all, Harry, ‘my boy’. Not pretty but the sweetest natured of the three, in need of extra love, she thou
ght, because he had about him the air of a child ‘who seemed destined to suffer’.36 Competent at caring for infants from a young age Aunt Tussy was, according to her father, also ‘an excellent disciplinarian’.37

  After one of her trips away with Möhme, Jennychen thanked Tussy for having completely transformed Harry’s behaviour and giving him good routine habits at night. In 1882 Tussy brought Johnny back to London after a visit to Argenteuil to relieve the burden on eight-months-pregnant Jennychen. Johnny had become an out-of-control hoyden. Longuet, who now didn’t get out of bed until lunchtime and headed off to Paris every evening, let him run wild. Back in London Aunt Tussy put Johnny on a schedule of daily attendance at school, cold-water scrub-downs morning and evening, and compulsory early bedtimes. She kept his mother up to date: ‘I have just put my boy (I am getting so used to and so fond of Jack I forget he is your boy) to bed.’38 He is anxious, Tussy tells Jennychen, for news about his little sister, whilst Tussy is concerned about his terrible English: ‘The way he speaks is awful, but I suppose in time he will grow out of it.’39