Eleanor Marx

by Rachel Holmes

  She couldn’t hear this voice from the future but Tussy, too, sought her unacted part. As yet, she did not realise that she would not find the part to suit her amongst Shakespeare’s women.

  She missed her father and fretted over their separation – ‘How I do long for a sight of your face.’55 Marx concealed his ill health from all but the General. Dissatisfied with her father’s accounts of himself, Tussy wanted to go to him in Algiers but the General deterred her. Meanwhile, the news that Eleanor had broken off her engagement with Lissa reached the delighted Karl Hirsch, who wasted no time and immediately deputed his sister, ‘the uncanny Frau Kaub’, to visit Jennychen – repeatedly – and make his suit for Tussy’s hand in marriage.

  Jennychen had to sit through endless minutiae about Hirsch’s solid financial position and comprehensive accounts of his prospects in a manner that any Marx sister would find comical. Brother and sister resisted Jennychen’s polite but conclusive rebuttals that Tussy had no current interest in marriage. ‘I have done all I could to explain to the enamoured Hirsch that his aspirations are doomed to remain unfulfilled, he insists upon hearing his doom from your own lips.’56 Tussy wrote Hirsch a gentle and courteous refusal in settlement of the matter. It never even occurred to either sister that it might be judicious for Eleanor to marry for financial security.

  Jennychen totally supported Tussy’s rejection of Hirsch but was puzzled by why she was so angry with him for proposing marriage in the first place. She never expressed her anger to him, but Tussy was deeply offended. From her perspective Hirsch had betrayed a longtime political and intellectual friendship and misled her by not being open about his intentions. This was hardly fair, given that Hirsch honourably did not declare his hand until after her betrothal to Lissagaray ended conclusively.

  Jennychen supported her little sister’s pursuit of an independent career rather than marriage, confident that her ‘ambition to live an artist’s life’ would succeed, ‘and at the very worst should you never tread the boards, the fact of acquiring perfectly the art of elocution . . . will be a great gain to you through life and will repay any outlay your lessons now will cost you.’57 Through Tussy, Jennychen revived her own long-dead daydream, the ‘prospect of living the only free life a woman can live – the artistic one’.58

  Tussy was often alone at Maitland Park Road. Lenchen spent much time in France helping Jennychen with the children. Marx travelled from Algiers to Monte Carlo, Nice and Cannes, heading straight back to Argenteuil for the summer. Tussy wrote him letters filled with enthusiastic news of her many activities and chat about current events. She was scandalised by the fuss made by ‘British Philistines’ who were moved to tears and pity by the removal of an elephant from Regent’s Park Zoo to a circus whilst they gazed dry-eyed on starvation and abject poverty amongst their fellow human beings in East London. ‘Shakespeare’, Tussy reminded her father, ‘already declared that your Englishman would not “give a doit to relieve a lame beggar, but lay out ten to see a dead Indian.” ’59

  She took in all the London entertainment she could cram in between her work at the British Museum for the New Shakespeare Society, lessons with Vezin and disciplined practice. She saw Polish actor Helen Modjeska in Odette and the Italian Adelaide Ristori as Lady Macbeth, the first time the actress performed in English. There was a picnic down the river with the Furnivalls, dinners with zoologist Edwin Ray Lankester and his family, and inspiring new friendships with South African writer Olive Schreiner and Alexandra Leighton (Mrs Sutherland Orr).

  On 30 June Tussy shared top billing at the annual celebrations of the Browning Society held at University College London. She performed the chivalric adventure Count Gismond and, by popular demand, her Pied Piper. Exhilarated, first thing the next morning she wrote to Jennychen with her morning coffee:

  The place was crowded – and as all sorts of ‘literary’ and other ‘swells’ were there I felt ridiculously nervous – but got on capitally. Mrs Sutherland Orr (the sister of Sir Frederick Leighton, the President of the Royal Academy) wants to take me to see Browning and recite his own poems to him! I have been asked to go this afternoon to a ‘crush’ at Lady Wilde’s. She is the mother of that very limp and very nasty young man, Oscar Wilde, who has been making such a d.d. ass of himself in America. As the son has not yet returned and the mother is nice I may go – that is if I have time . . . 60

  Tussy’s snide comments about Wilde are prompted by pure envy at the scale of his theatrical and literary success. Far from making an ass of himself, Wilde was, in fact, becoming a ‘d.d.’ star on his lecture tour of America and creating enormous publicity for Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience. Tussy was jealous to her back teeth at the greater success of a male peer. When Wilde was tried later amidst rumour and revelation about his homosexuality, Tussy’s envy turned to allegiance. She was publicly critical of the disgraceful hypocrisy of the press and public who, formerly fêting him, turned against him because of his alleged sexual preferences and the conduct of his personal life. She singled out for particular opprobrium the venality of the managers of the Haymarket and St James’s theatres who continued hugely profitable runs of Wilde’s plays to packed houses but erased Wilde’s name from the bill, programme and entire production. When no British paper would publish her defence of Wilde, she got it published in Russia.61

  Another highlight of her summer of 1882 was the benefit for famous Dickens actor John Toole at the Charing Cross Theatre, now under his management and renamed Toole’s Theatre in his own honour. The ‘beloved Henry’ recited, as did Madge Kemble and Ellen Terry, who did Thomas Hood’s Bridge of Sighs which, Tussy joked, ‘I look upon as a personal injury, that being one of my stock pieces.’62 Unable to get tickets, Tussy, Lenchen and the Black sisters watched from the pit – the show started at 1.30 p. m. and they had to be at the theatre doors at 11 a.m., drinking tea from a street vendor and chatting for two hours whilst they waited to get in. ‘What a fine thing enthusiasm is!’63

  These outings were welcome punctuation to long working days. ‘I’m rather hard at it just now,’64 she told Jennychen. As Lenchen was with her sister in France, there were puzzling chores on the domestic front for the aspiring actress. Neither of Lenchen’s sitting hens had stirred from their nests since her departure and Tussy had no idea what to do with them – apart from hand-feeding them all kinds of treats and consoling the amiable, pining cockerel that Lenchen would soon return. ‘I positively dread next Monday – when some of the chicks are supposed to come out. What I’m to do with them goodness knows.’65

  In Mohr’s absence, the General kept a watchful paternal eye on her, expecting Tussy to spend Sundays with him when a feast was served up with generous quantities of claret. If her hectic schedule forced her to miss this weekly ritual, Tussy made it up and had dinner with the General during the week at a theatre or club, introducing him to her new friends.

  At the end of July she was forced to interrupt her work and intensive coaching and go to Argenteuil at her father’s urgent request, to look after ‘poor Jennychen’. Her careworn sister had another baby on the way and was suffering excruciating pain from a persistent bladder infection. ‘I am dead beaten,’ she flatly confessed to Tussy.66 Tussy returned to London in mid-August, bringing little Johnny (Jean) back with her. After a carefree seaside holiday with Engels at Great Yarmouth, she put Johnny back into day school in London and looked after him like any working London mother with a day job.

  At the end of August ‘the old man of the mountain’,67 as Marx now called himself, went on from France to Switzerland, accompanied at his express and confidential request by Laura. He appreciated the great improvement in Tussy and did not want to go back on his resolve not to make her the nurse of an ailing old man. Jennychen’s only daughter, also named Jenny – Mémé – was born on 16 September. Marx met his new granddaughter briefly at the end of the month, but Jennychen hid the seriousness of her illness from him, passing it off as post-natal exhaustion. Marx went directly to Ventnor for fu
rther treatment for his persistent pleurisy and bronchitis. His bad health compounded his reasons for not returning to London. He knew he could not recover from losing his wife but must learn to carry her loss with him. Without Möhme, he found the family home and London life unbearable.

  With Lenchen back from France and running the household again, there was more support for looking after little Johnny at Maitland Park Road. Whilst he was at school during the day Tussy spent as much time as she could catching up on her work. In the evenings after the child was put to bed with Tussy’s own version of Hans Röckle, she cracked on with her night work on the glossary and Lenchen visited the General to play chess or went with Pumps to the theatre.

  The first week of October was the annual Closed Week at the Reading Room, when it was shut to readers, books dusted and repaired, and archives checked. Tussy was extremely anxious about her deadline for the Early English Text Society. ‘Now I am, as you know,’ she told Jennychen, ‘very hard pressed for time, so I asked Mr Bond, the Principal Librarian, to allow me to go all the same to work.’68 George Bullen, Keeper of Printed Books, his assistant Richard Garnett69 ‘and some half dozen of the head men very kindly went to Mr Bond and also asked him to let me come’. Bond gave permission. ‘It is an immense favour, which I was told today had been extended to no one since some years ago Gladstone was allowed to go and finish his pamphlet on the “Atrocities” there’ – his essay ‘Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East’ (1876). She couldn’t work ‘in the turmoil of the cleaning in the Reading Room’, so she worked with both Garnett and Bullen in their own offices. ‘It’s a great boon to me, as I was desperate at losing so many days.’70 The favour extended to her by the men who ran the British Museum demonstrated that Eleanor Marx had now taken her father’s seat in the British Museum Reading Room.

  Needing money, Tussy took on another job teaching at a school for girls in Kensington. ‘I am too hard at work to go anywhere or see anyone,’ she wrote to Jennychen. After work she mostly stayed at home reading newspapers and periodicals and writing letters in her father’s study, such as her reflections to Jennychen on the factional split of the Saint-Etienne congress into Possibilists and Marxists – the latter led by their brother-in-law Lafargue. ‘What do you think of the rival Congresses? They are more suggestive to me of the Kilkenny Cats than of anything else.’71 According to folklore, Tussy’s Kilkenny cats fought until nothing was left of them but their tails. On 11 October she was able to go with the Dogberries to see the preview of the Lyceum’s first production of Much Ado About Nothing starring Terry and Irving, which she thoroughly enjoyed. Ernest, Clementina and Dollie were pleased to see her out and about; they were missing greatly the formerly regular soirées at Tussy’s home.

  Tussy took Johnny to visit Marx in Ventnor for a weekend. He was anxious for news of Jennychen and believed she would not recover unless more children were taken off her hands. He asked Tussy to drop everything to go back to France to help out for a little and bring back Harra in order to give Jennychen relief to nurse Mémé. Jennychen put her foot down. Tussy was not to leave her work.

  The only bit of good news that I have had these many days is . . . of your literary enterprises. I congratulate you with all my heart and rejoice to think that one of us at least will not pass her life in watching over a pot au feu.72

  Jennychen’s own news was not good. The bladder inflammation she believed to be linked to her last pregnancy had not gone away but worsened after the birth: ‘To no one in the world would I wish the tortures I have undergone now since eight months, they are indescribable and the nursing added thereto makes life a hell to me.’73 There is a valuable raw eloquence in Jennychen’s frankness about the realities of her maternal experience, and great love in her resistance to Tussy being constrained to help her.

  Tussy, Marx, Lenchen and the General did all they could to make a bright Christmas for Johnny in London. Laura was unable to join them. In September, the Saint-Etienne congress had split. Paul Lafargue and Jules Guesde formed the Marxist Parti Ouvrier Français (French Workers’ Party) and were immediately arrested for subversion and sedition. In this instance, Marx highly approved of his son-in-law’s actions.

  Whilst Johnny provided a reason for the return of the traditional family Christmas tree, Marx’s gift was to be free finally from pleurisy and bronchitis. ‘This, then, is very encouraging,’ he crowed, ‘considering that most of my contemporaries, I mean fellows of the same age, just now kick the bucket in gratifying numbers. There are enough young asses to keep the old ones alive.’74 He returned to Ventnor in a better mood.

  During the first week of January Marx received awful news from the Lafargues that Jennychen’s condition was now hopeless. She was bedridden, haemorrhaging and sunk in a torpor broken only by nightmares and fantastic dreams. Marx woke the next day with a spasmodic coughing fit so acute that he thought he was suffocating. Tussy need look no further for the source of her genetic inheritance of nervous illness. Marx was convinced that mental anguish was biologically inseparable from bodily health and well-being.

  The week before Tussy’s twenty-eighth birthday a telegram arrived at Maitland Park Road. Jennychen had died suddenly on the afternoon of 11 January. She was thirty-eight. ‘I immediately left for Ventnor,’ Tussy recalled:

  I have lived many a sad hour, but none so sad as that. I felt that I was bringing my father his death sentence. I racked my brain all the long anxious way to find how I could break the news to him. But I did not need to, my face gave me away. Mohr said at once: ‘Our Jennychen is dead.’75

  Within half an hour of Tussy’s arrival Marx put her on the next train back to London, commanding her to proceed directly to Argenteuil and look after the now-motherless children. Tussy found it unbearable to leave him alone in this darkest hour, but he ‘brooked no resistance’.76 Everything, he said, must be arranged for the sake of the children.

  Marx left so hurriedly for London that he had to request his doctor to forward his bill to Maitland Park Road. Enclosing a note of gratitude with the onward address, he explained to Dr Williamson the cause of his sudden departure and remarked, ‘Indeed, I find some relief in a grim headache. Physical pain is the only “stunner” of mental pain.’77 This is believed to be the last letter he wrote.

  Lenchen’s attempts to cheer up Marx with new recipes failed. Milk – which he had never liked drinking before – and rum or brandy became his preferred diet. His ‘reading’ was limited to flicking through publishers’ catalogues or interpreting the flames in the hearth in his study into which he gazed for long hours. In February he developed an abscess on the lung and was confined to his bed.

  When Tussy returned from France she understood immediately that her father had come home to London to die. She brought Harra back with her but he was seriously ill; very upset, Tussy had to commit him to the children’s hospital in Shadwell.

  On Wednesday 14 March Engels arrived as usual at 2.30 p. m. for his daily visit. Lenchen came downstairs and told him that Mohr had left his bedroom and gone into his study, where he was dozing in his favourite armchair. By the time they got upstairs, he was gone. ‘The General had that armchair until he died,’ Tussy later wrote. ‘Now I have got it.’78

  Tussy signed the registration of death and she and Lenchen washed and laid Mohr out in his coffin for the many mourners who came to Maitland Park Road to say their last goodbyes. ‘Mankind is shorter by a head, and by the most remarkable head of our time,’ said his best friend.79

  Tussy had lost her first love.

  Eleven mourners gathered at Marx’s funeral in Highgate Cemetery on 17 March 1883. Tussy, flanked by Engels and Lenchen, watched her father’s coffin committed to the same plot as her mother’s. The small company included the recently widowed Longuet, Library, Lessner, Schorleemer, Edwin Ray Lankester and Paul Lafargue. Though her husband was present, Laura was not. Tussy missed her sister. They had been estranged by her marriage to Lafargue, the old feud over Lissagaray, and Laura’s sens
e of not being the most favoured child. But they were now each other’s closest surviving blood relatives.

  Engels delivered the eulogy, concluding that Marx’s ‘name and work will endure though the ages’.80 The following week, Karl and Jenny Marx’s grave was reopened, in Tussy’s presence, for the interment of the little body of Harry Longuet, who died on 21 March aged four and a half in Shadwell children’s hospital.

  Karl Marx made it clear before he died that he regarded Eleanor and Engels as his natural heirs. ‘Our natures were so exactly alike,’ Tussy wrote after her father’s death:

  I remember his once saying a thing that at the time I did not understand and that even sounded rather paradoxical. But I know now what he meant . . . My father was talking of my eldest sister and of me and said: ‘Jenny is most like me, but Tussy (my dear old home name) is me.’ It was true – except that I shall never be good and unselfish as he was.81

  With this legacy, she now had to strike out a line of her own.

  11

  The Reading Room

  After the death of her parents and eldest sister, Eleanor’s life changed tense. From living in the subjunctive she shifted to living in the present. The transition was stark and prompted by grief and her new understanding of mortality. No more did she say ‘I want to be’ or ‘I would were it possible’. Instead, Eleanor inhabited ‘I am’, ‘I will’ and ‘I do’.

  Condolences flowed from every tributary of the globe as news of Marx’s death spread around the world. Tussy and Engels replied personally to thousands of letters and telegrams. Many offers of support were extended – sometimes from unlikely quarters. Matilda Hyndman, wife of Henry, offered Eleanor a retreat under her roof and assured her that if she preferred, she would keep her husband out of her way.1 Furnivall asked if Marx had made adequate provision for her. Knowing Eleanor’s impulsive generosity, he urged her not to give up any legacy she received to others who she might mistakenly consider had need greater than her own.2