Eleanor Marx

by Rachel Holmes

  Tussy and GBS shared a love of both socialism and the stage. A year younger than her, Shaw came to England in 1876 at the age of twenty. His Irishness, of course, was a point of great recommendation to Tussy, as presumably was his admiration of her father’s work. Undoubtedly he was correct in his claim to be the only member of Hyndman’s Democratic Federation who had actually read Capital. They ‘chatted about this [Capital], death, sex, and a lot of things’.48 They went to shows together and Shaw urged her to pursue her theatrical ambitions – as he did most of the women he fell for.

  In September Tussy went to Eastbourne on holiday with the General, Lenchen and Pumps. Helen was in a funk of grief and exhausted from the labour of sorting out the family home. Deeply concerned, Tussy wrote to Laura asking if Lenchen might visit Paris for a few weeks’ holiday and change of scene, and perhaps see the Longuet children. Laura didn’t reply. It was a devastating time for Lenchen. She’d shared her life with Jenny and Karl since childhood. She’d delivered all their children, and buried with them the many that died. They were family. Lenchen shared all their secrets and would take them with her to their communal grave. Engels was the only other survivor who shared the same intimacies.

  Eastbourne provided a welcome rest. As always, Tussy and the General went for long and rambling talking walks, and on dry days sat on the seafront reading together. Eleanor showed the General a review of Ralph Iron’s startling new novel, The Story of an African Farm, in the latest edition of Progress, written by Edward Aveling and headlined, approvingly, ‘A Notable Book’. First published by Chapman & Hall at the end of January in two volumes, each with an ostrich on the spine evoking the story’s Karoo setting, this extraordinary debut went to a second larger edition in July. Tussy told the General that the remarkable South African author of this groundbreaking new novel, ‘Ralph Iron’, was in fact a new friend of hers, Olive Schreiner.

  The General was aware that, since writing her memorial articles on Marx for its May and June editions, Tussy had been doing a great deal of work for Progress, and was now co-editing the journal with Aveling. Eleanor spoke about ‘Edward’ frequently and he came to visit her in Eastbourne, causing amused exchanges of meaningful looks between the General and Lenchen.

  After the holiday in Eastbourne, Maitland Park Road was broken up and Tussy went to live on her own for the first time at 122 Great Coram Street in the heart of Bloomsbury, with a lot of books, a box of crockery and a few bits of furniture from the family home. Lenchen went to live at Regent’s Park Road as the General’s housekeeper, where the ebullient Pumps had to learn quickly to defer to Lenchen’s undisputed authority. Mohr’s armchair went to Regent’s Park Road for the General.

  The General and Lenchen started sorting Marx’s letters together and enjoyed a regular mid-morning tipple, gossiping about politics and Marx’s daughters and grandchildren.

  After she moved into Regent’s Park Road, Lenchen’s son Freddy and her grandson Harry began to visit her regularly for the first time. Henry Frederick Demuth, born in Dean Street on 3 June 1851, grew up in foster care with minimal education. He firmly grasped the limited opportunities available to him for learning numeracy and literacy, and his letters have a clear and fluent though painfully humble voice.

  Freddy served an engineering apprenticeship and became a skilled fitter and turner by profession, later joining the King’s Cross branch of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers and the Hackney Labour Party. By the early 1880s he lived in Hackney with his wife and son, Harry. Adult Harry later recalled using the tradesman’s entrance on his visits to Regent’s Park Road with his father, and remembered his grandmother Lenchen as ‘a motherly sort of person’.49

  Though it’s unclear when and how they first met, Tussy and Freddy had known each other for some time. Correspondence dated May 1882 between Jennychen and Laura makes it clear both of Tussy’s elder sisters were involved in Freddy’s life. ‘You cannot imagine what it is to me to think that I still owe poor Freddy his money, and that it is probably my insolvency which prevents our dear Lenchen from carrying out her projects of going to Germany,’50 Jennychen wrote to Laura. Engels looked after them; in turn, they believed they were supporting Engels’s undeclared son, conceived with Lenchen in the old Soho days.

  Eleanor was shocked but not puzzled by the General’s indifferent, aloof attitude towards Freddy. Usually warm and genial to all extended family and friends, the General avoided close interaction with Freddy and usually went out or hid in his study when he and little Harry visited. This behaviour confirmed Tussy’s long-held surmise that the General was the father of Lenchen’s only child, and named for him. ‘Freddy has behaved admirably in all respects and Engels’ irritation against him is as unfair as it is comprehen­sible. We should none of us like to meet our pasts, I guess, in flesh and blood.’51

  Eleanor began to think about the different impact of reproduction on women and men. She reflected on the lives of her mother and sisters, her friends and the women she met through her activism, both in England through the worker movement and abroad through the International. Reading extensively, Tussy began to compile research notes reflecting broadly on the position of women in human societies. She explored how political and economic philosophies approached sexual inequality – if at all – and began to systematically order her thoughts and inquiry into the woman question.

  She returned to the founding texts of socialism to review what they had to say about sexual oppression and the equality of women, including the pioneering work of Charles Fourier, who argued that ‘the extention of the privileges of women is the fundamental cause of all social progress’.52 Gradually and thoroughly Eleanor was building the foundations of a work of feminist political philosophy.

  Tussy and her sisters had learned from their mother not to ask Lenchen questions about Freddy. Tussy, warned off the subject, wouldn’t dream of raising the question with Lenchen, though she longed to. As the General wouldn’t talk to her about it either, Tussy had nowhere to take her questions except into thinking, writing and discussion with her close friends. ‘Only when men and women pure-minded, or, at least, striving after purity, discuss the sexual question in all its bearings as free human beings, looking frankly into each other’s faces, will there be any hope of its solution.’53

  Whilst Tussy worried about the unspoken secret of Freddy’s paternity, the tensions within the emerging socialist political family came out into the open. In 1884 a factional rift divided British socialists who had associated themselves with the Democratic Federation. Those who leaned to militant internationalism were in one division, represented by philosopher and journalist Ernest Belfort Bax; in another, the nationalistic democrats, led by Henry Hyndman. A third group, including designer, writer and libertarian socialist William Morris, was undecided between the two and so for the meantime supported both. Engels deeply opposed Hyndman and refused to work with him. But he did contribute to the journal Today, the monthly ‘magazine of scientific socialism’ that Bax co-edited and to which Eleanor and Edward were also regular contributors. Eleanor initially liked Bax, though she disagreed with him ideologically.

  The gloves came off in March 1884 over a demonstration scheduled at Highgate Cemetery for the commemoration of Marx’s death and the proclamation of the Paris Commune. Hyndman was invited to speak at Marx’s graveside but declined, saying that an English working-man was the proper person to speak. Aveling was chosen instead.

  Challenged head on by Eleanor to declare in favour of the demonstration, Hyndman supported it and endorsed Aveling as the preferred speaker. The event was a great success. A crowd of nearly 5,000 bearing red flags and singing the Marseillaise gathered outside the gates of the cemetery. The Highgate Cemetery Company would not allow them entrance. The 500 policemen deployed to ‘defend’ the gate seemed a little excessive. Eleanor and a group of women requested permission to enter the cemetery and place flowers on her father’s grave. They were refused. So the demonstrators marched to the top of the hill at D
artmouth Park, where Aveling delivered a ‘splendid speech’ that, according to Eleanor, touched the hearts of all who heard it. He was a good speaker so we’ve no reason to doubt her, but some of the marchers had rather hoped to hear her speak.

  Hyndman soon got his revenge. Four months later in July he drove Bax out of Today and replaced him with socialist activist and journalist Henry Hyde Champion. Eleanor declared Champion ‘just a tool of Hyndman’s, albeit a talented, and I think honest young fellow . . . I shall, of course, not go on writing for Today under these circumstances’,54 and made Aveling and Lafargue withdraw their labour too. Her conclusion on Hyndman was uncompromising:

  So far he has things here much his own way, but he is playing his cards very badly – irritating everyone, and his little game will soon be played out. The sooner the better for our movement. It has every chance here at this present time if only we had better leaders than Hyndman and his henchmen.55

  Tussy mobilised assiduously to encourage new leaders. She had a great facility for getting people in position, what she called ‘working’ them.56

  In the same month she was involved in a spat over the new International, and drawn into the centre of the dispute between the two leading socialist factions in France: the reformist Possibilists, led by Paul Brousse, and the revolutionary Marxists led by Jules Guesde and Lafargue. The issue at the top of the agenda between the Possibilists and Marxists was the growing demand amongst European workers for an international eight-hour movement. Eleanor became one of the first socialist activists to take up the lead of the International’s worker movement for the eight-hour working day.

  Interwoven with Tussy’s move into a prominent position in socialist organisation was her growing engagement with political feminism. Crucial to radicalising Eleanor’s developing thought on the woman question was her new friendship with the South African writer Olive Schreiner. Tussy’s new lodgings at Great Coram Street were a few minutes’ walk from the British Museum Reading Room. This Bloomsbury neighbourhood was a heterodox place, ‘in the midst of eager pulsing life . . . streets . . . crowded with artists, adventurers, Bohemians of many lands . . . people who lived an anxious, eager and perilous life’.57 Pleasingly for both women, Olive Schreiner was one of these bohemian Bloomsbury artists and adventurers.

  It was Tussy, of course, who had passed her copy of Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm to Aveling, urging him to review it for Progress. Aveling admired the book for being ‘cosmopolitan and human’,58 qualities that equally describe its author. ‘With all life-relationships this writer deals in the same bluntly honest, far-seeing, outspoken way,’59 is an equally efficient summary of the twenty-eight-year-old Schreiner’s character. Born two months later than Tussy in 1855, Olive was an immediate, like-minded contemporary, from 6,000 miles away on the other side of the world, with a heavy South African accent and – like Tussy – a German father.

  A Wesleyan Wittebergen mission station on the edge of colonial Basutoland was the birthplace of Olive Emilie Albertina Schreiner on 24 March 1855. She was the ninth child of the Reverend Gottlob Schreiner and his wife Rebecca Lyndall. In 1865 her father resigned his ministry and turned his hand, unsuccessfully, to trading. The older Schreiner children, who were mostly a tough bunch, brought up little Olive. Inquisitive, a bookworm and ferocious autodidact, Olive became dissatisfied with answers to her questions about the ways of God to man at a very young age. She wandered alone in the bush, sometimes sleeping out under the stars all night. She scrutinised the natural environment and considered the heavens. Like Darwin, Olive found that what she observed did not equate satisfactorily with the account of creation in the Bible. So she asked difficult questions that no one in her family would answer. Olive lost her faith between the ages of eight and ten. Her mother was furious and reacted punitively. Her siblings resented and feared her. Despite mental and physical punishment for her rational unbelief, Olive held fast to her scepticism.

  She started work at the age of fifteen as a governess to children on remote Karoo farms. For a time she lived with her brother, Theo, in the harsh cowboy environment of a prospectors’ camp at the newly proclaimed New Rush (Kimberley) diamond fields where, in a damp muddy tent surrounded by dust, digging and drunks, she first started writing seriously. After a short period trying to live with her sister, Alice, at the remote outpost of Fraserburg, Olive earned her living through a succession of jobs in the small Cape towns of Dordrecht and Colesberg and a number of isolated Great Karoo farms in the Cradock district.

  It was here that Olive conceived The Story of an African Farm, the novel that established her reputation. She wrote by candle- and moon-light after her day’s teaching, at a small wooden table in her quarters, a lean-to with a stamped earth floor and no ceiling. During the heavy winter rains when the roof leaked, she dug a trench in the floor to make an outflow and held an umbrella over her head with one hand whilst writing with the other.

  In March 1881 Olive sailed for England with the intention of fulfilling her long-cherished ambition to study medicine and become a doctor. She also hoped to get her novel published. Bad health and lack of genuine vocation quickly put paid to her medical career. She spent the winter in Ventnor in the Isle of Wight, redrafting her manuscript as she had done many times before. Tussy also was in Ventnor with Mohr during the winter of 1881, but the two women did not meet.

  Olive walked her book around most of the major London publishers, the handwritten manuscript bulging underneath her thin coat as she tried to protect it from rain and mud. The novel was repeatedly rejected and Olive was giving up hope of its publication when it was finally accepted and published by Chapman & Hall in early 1883 under the male pseudonym Ralph Iron. The immediate success of The Story of an African Farm shot the unknown South African to the heart of the proto-socialist circle that congregated in and around the Reading Room.

  Aveling commended the novel’s outspoken eloquence on atheism and feminism:

  The relations between men and women are discussed in a fearless, open, righteous fashion, altogether different from the hanging upon the outskirts of the question and pecking at it that are characteristic of your average person. The word of society today is to men ‘work,’ to women ‘seem.’ How different is the position of men and of women, how irrational is the difference is her constant theme.60

  Eleanor and Olive were like magnets. They spent time together every day that they were in the Reading Room and within a year of meeting were intimate friends and political allies. Henry Havelock Ellis said that when he first met Olive in May 1884, Eleanor Marx was her ‘chief friend’ in England.61 In the same month Olive moved to Fitzroy Street, in large part to be nearer to Eleanor.

  From childhood Schreiner suffered from chronic asthma and Eleanor recommended the surgeon Bryan Donkin, her mother’s doctor. Lovestruck Donkin wanted to marry Schreiner and when she refused, continued to yearn for her. Olive was at this time fascinated with Henry Havelock Ellis, who had written an admiring and critical appreciation of The Story of an African Farm shortly after its publication, leading to an enthusiastic correspondence between them. They fell in love by post. By the time they met in person, each had great expectations of the other. Ellis was not disappointed; Olive was, initially. The admiring young man was good-looking, erudite and eager to please but his physical presence was very different to the impression created by his strong, forcefully argued letters and determined opinions. Ellis was shy and awkward with a weedy high voice and he avoided eye contact.

  However, the crisis had passed by the end of their first evening together, at a lecture on Swinburne at the Progressive Association. As Ellis puts it, there was ‘an instinctive movement of approach on both sides’62 and the two embarked on a serious love affair.63 Olive and Henry were like-minded opposites who attracted.

  Ellis remembered clearly first meeting Tussy at a meeting of the Progressive Association, a group of freethinkers, co-operative pioneers and ethical socialists who met on Sunday nights at Islington Ha
ll, a favoured venue for radical organisations. Ellis became secretary of the Progressive Association, and recalled that he would ‘every Sunday faithfully make the dreary journey from my home in the south of London’,64 with all the resignation of a supplicant wishing he didn’t have to leave home to go to church. During the meeting his place was at a table near the door to answer enquiries and enrol new members. ‘It was here that, one Sunday evening . . . early in 1884, I first met Eleanor Marx. She had dropped in for a short time but could not stay. I can still see her, with the radiant face and the expansive figure, seated on the edge of my secretarial table, though I recall nothing that was said.’65 It’s a perfect snapshot of Tussy and her political style. Informally perched on the table, no doubt smoking, taking time to engage with the pivotal organiser and administrator without whom the meeting wouldn’t happen. And from this encounter, an acquaintance carried over into the sociability of the Reading Room.

  Henry Havelock Ellis, born in Croydon in 1859, was the son of a merchant seaman and a strict evangelical Christian who, like Olive’s mother, was the dominant parent in the household. Henry missed his father but had a relatively stable childhood. He was a shy, dreamy, frail boy who read obsessively. At seven he went on his first sea voyage with his father and was delighted by the books he discovered in the ship’s library. He developed the persistent habit of collecting data that he tabulated and annotated in exercise books. Like Olive, Ellis experienced a loss of religious faith early in life, which left him feeling alienated in an ‘empty and mechanical world’.66

  Henry left school at sixteen, puzzled as to what to do with his future. His father took him on what was supposed to be a voyage around the world but he remained in Australia, worked as an assistant schoolmaster and matriculated at Sydney University. During this time he took two jobs tutoring with families in the bush, where he experienced what he described as a conversion.67 These extended periods of rural solitude, teaching in isolation in tough farmland, resonated with Olive Schreiner’s teaching experiences in the South African outback. Like her, he read voraciously, kept a journal and thought and walked extensively.