Eleanor Marx

by Rachel Holmes

  Eleanor was the only woman amongst the ten founding signatories of the Socialist League. And of those ten, she was the most committed and forceful internationalist. Eleanor entered her thirtieth year at the vanguard of the emerging British socialist movement. Political from top to bottom, had been her mother’s descriptive refrain. Had Jenny Marx lived to see this moment in Tussy’s life, she would not have been surprised.

  However, the published manifesto of the Socialist League substantially diverged from the draft constitution drawn up earlier in the year by Eleanor, William Morris and Edward in consultation with Engels. The draft incorporated key aspects of socialist policy, such as support of trade unions, co-operatives and other forms of representative working-class organisation. It also adopted the policy of entering into political power by elective means through administrative, civil, state and parliamentary bodies. Eleanor blamed the disjuncture between the draft constitution and the published manifesto on the anarchist members of the provisional council. Eleanor expressed this view to Paul Lafargue:

  The Anarchists here will be our chief difficulty. We have many on our Council, and by and by it will be the devil to pay. Neither Morris, nor Bax, nor any of our people know really what these Anarchists are: till they do find out it is a hard struggle to make head against them – the more that many of our Englishmen taken in by the foreign Anarchists (half of whom I suspect to be police agents) are unquestionably the best men we have.16

  The Socialist League started its monthly newspaper Commonweal at the end of January 1885, with William Morris as editor and Aveling as sub-editor. Commonweal declared its support for revolutionary international socialism, working for education, organisation and party democracy through the parliamentary process in order to achieve the aims of the Socialist League. Editorially, it strongly opposed national-level politicking and rejected outright ‘incomplete schemes of social reform’ like co-operation, nationalisation of land and state-imposed social and political restructuring.

  Groups of revolutionary socialists set up branches of the Socialist League around the country and in February Eleanor, Aveling and Morris went to Oxford to address undergraduate students at a hall in Holywell Street. Filled with vocal opponents, the meeting began in a disorderly fashion. The students heckled Morris into silence but Aveling swiftly stepped in and won the audience over with a dramatic opening, after which they listened fairly attentively to him until the meeting was cut short by a student letting off a stink-bomb. Eleanor, Edward and William escaped the rumpus to New College, where they were hosted by a group of socialist-sympathising students who, as a result of this encounter, launched the Oxford Socialist Association as a branch of the Socialist League, and later also established a Marx Club. The opponents of the socialist students were so furious with the failure of their stink-bombing ringleader to effectively disrupt the success of the evening that they smashed the windows of his rooms that night for not making a better job of it.

  From the cloisters of Oxford University Eleanor went to address the Mile End and other London branches of the Socialist League. Her speech at Mile End in the second week of February was her first of this sort, as she told Peter Lavrov: ‘Next Sunday I shall be giving a public lecture for the first time in my life (and perhaps the last?). The subject is “The Factory Acts in England”.’17 She also gave this lecture at her own local Bloomsbury branch in a meeting room above the Eagle and Child Coffee-House on Old Compton Street, and in March delivered it to the Southwark branch of the Socialist League.

  Eleanor’s deep knowledge of British factory conditions, history and legislation was grounded in her knowledge of her father and Engels’s work. Engels asked her to start archival research for the English translation of Capital. For this she spent long hours in the Reading Room of the British Museum and London law libraries tracing back the sources Marx used to write Capital. Marx had used English sources, translating them himself into German. Tussy therefore had to translate her father’s German translations back into English as the first step to locating the originals.

  With painstaking attention to detail, she found these in the reports of factory inspectors, medical officers on public health, government select committees and commissions enquiring into children’s employment, the housing of the poor, mines, railways, bakeries and the adulteration of food. This research was probably a better grounding in social and economic policy than that received by many of her university-educated male contemporaries. It’s hard to identify anyone else of her epoch so well equipped to speak on the dangers to industrial workers, the shortfalls of existing legislation and the unimaginably appalling labour conditions in English factory workshops up and down the country.

  Tussy’s research into factory conditions and legislation was detailed, empirical and specific. From this bedrock of fact she drew clear, decisive analyses. Eleanor developed her public lectures on the Factory Acts in England with Edward into a one-penny pamphlet entitled The Factory Hell. Published in April 1885 by the Socialist League, the pamphlet appeared for the first time in the joint names of ‘Edward Aveling & Eleanor Marx Aveling’.18

  Reading a factory report of 1884, Eleanor pointed out, it might as well ‘be that of 1864. The same disease, accidents, prosecutions . . . Our factory-chimnies that Radical politicians call “the glory of England” are in truth, the curse of England.’19 Meanwhile, Edward’s philandering and neediness due to ill health became the curse of Eleanor.

  In March 1884 Edward was diagnosed with kidney stones and by April was seriously ill. Dr Donkin prescribed a break from work and Edward went to Ventnor to recuperate. Paul Lafargue offered to cover some of Edward’s work on translating Capital, to Eleanor’s immense gratitude, ‘for help means the rest for Edward that Donkin declares “absolutely necessary” (Doctors are such “absolute” knaves!).’ 20 As they couldn’t both afford to go, Edward went alone. Eleanor stayed in London and anyway, as she told her sister, ‘I am up to my neck in work of all kinds (not alas! very remunerative)’:21

  Apart from the necessary work for getting a living – tant bien que mal [somehow or other] – there is the constant worry from the Socialist League. From childhood we have known what it is to devote oneself to the proletaire. It is superfluous to explain this to you.22

  Olive Schreiner was concerned. ‘If he gets dangerously ill I must go,’ she wrote to Havelock Ellis. ‘If the Avelings are very hard-up I must try to send them something.’23 Olive of course did not give a fig for Edward – Tussy was her concern.

  Tussy took advantage of Edward’s absence to try and spring clean their apartment, re-blacking the grates, rinsing out the curtains and whitewashing the walls. The process infuriated her. ‘How I wish people didn’t live in houses and didn’t cook, and bake, and wash and clean! I fear I shall never, despite efforts, develop into a decent Hausfrau! I am horribly Bohemian in my tastes!’24

  Aveling was under a considerable amount of public scrutiny so, painfully real as his kidney stones were, his retreat into illness and to the Isle of Wight was timely. There was an accumulating trail of complaints about the financial management of any project he touched. His personal finances also seemed questionable. Henry Lee, secretary of the Westminster branch of the SDF, who worked closely with Aveling during this period, described him as ‘utterly unscrupulous about the way in which he satisfied his desires . . . The best was good enough for him – at no matter whose expense.’25 A Soho tailor, who was a member of the Communist Workers’ Educational Association, couldn’t get Aveling to pay his account for clothes he made for him, and was further infuriated when he saw Edward in the stalls of the Lyceum Theatre ‘attired in the unpaid for velvet jacket and waistcoat, and accompanied by a lady’.26 A lady who was not Eleanor.

  Eleanor confided to Olive that although it made her emotionally lonely, she now accepted Edward’s dalliances. They were both, after all, proponents of free love. Problematically, the freedom was all on his side. The net result was that Tussy took the aspect of conventional stoical wif
e and Edward of conventional philandering husband. His little affairs were usually with young actresses or his female students and he usually came home afterwards. As far as Tussy knew, he didn’t set up mistresses. She’d grown up within the ambit of the highly successful open ménage common-law marriage between Engels and the Burns sisters. The General played away but Mary and Lizzy were keepers of his home, hearth, heart and head. The difference being that where the General paid for his peccadilloes out of his own pocket, Edward used Eleanor’s income as well as his own to subsidise his wining, dining and gift-giving to students and actresses.

  Like Helen Alving in Ibsen’s Ghosts, Eleanor kept up appearances. To family and friends she emphasised Edward’s ill health, whilst working furiously to try and pay off as many of his outstanding debts as she knew about – if Engels hadn’t got there first. ‘Edward is very seriously ill and has not yet recovered,’ she wrote to the activist writer and thinker Sergei Stepniak (Sergey Mikhaylovich Stepnyak-Kravchinksy), for whom she had recently translated a two-part article on conditions in Russian political prisons from Russian into French, ‘the very devil to do, being the translation of a translation’.27 She told Stepniak that Edward had gone away, ‘but will return tomorrow, and I fear no better. I need not tell you how worried I am. You will understand this.’28

  Eleanor’s translations for Stepniak were published in Today, for which she wrote a regular feature as international correspondent. From February 1885 she transferred this column to the pages of Commonweal, gathering international news items under the unwieldy title of ‘Record of the Revolutionary International Movement’.

  Aveling’s unconscious had a psychosomatic knack of developing physical ailments at moments of acute emotional distress. Only in retrospect would it become clear that his sexual infidelities and financial mismanagement coincided with illness or sudden collapses in his health. Too afraid to tell Eleanor the truth, too invested in his own self-delusion, he retreated behind the screen of sudden, dramatic afflictions to throw her off the scent of his relationship juggling. It was much easier to position himself as a victim of either ill health or other people – or her.

  Tussy fell for it repeatedly; she should have known better. Love made her stupid, distracting her into anxiety and pity. Eleanor’s ‘chronic state of hard-up-ness’, as she described it, was due almost entirely to Edward’s extravagance. Anything that came in was already spoken for. Unfortunately, her childhood experience had lulled her into the illusion that this was a normal state of domestic affairs. The clear difference, of course, was that where her parents had borrowed at interest and pawned in order to clear their constant debts, as poor people do, Edward had no intention of honouring his obligations to others. His financial exploitation, of Eleanor and anyone else he could take advantage of, is revealing, not for what it indicates about his attitude to money but for what it tells us about his pronounced egotism. Where Tussy was a natural egalitarian, Edward lacked any ability to see others as his natural equals. He profoundly believed in his own exceptional abilities but was insecure and oversensitive.

  Amidst all these domestic pressures, Eleanor managed to organise a public meeting to protest against the war in Sudan. She called the assembly for 23 April, ‘but of course this Russian business rather complicates matters’ – a reference to the dispute between Britain and Russia over the north-west frontier of Afghanistan. British troops had been in the Sudan since 1883, when Gladstone’s government sent a convoy of warships to suppress a national uprising. British forces occupied Khartoum under the command of General Gordon and expeditionary troops arrived to relieve them by August. Further large army battalions and the naval fleet, meanwhile, congregated in Egypt, with an eye to the interests of the Russians in Afghanistan.

  Gordon was killed at Khartoum on 26 January, prompting an outpouring of furious nationalistic sentiment and anti-Arab vitriol from grieving imperialists. The Socialist League, as an internationalist organisation, fundamentally opposed British imperialism and thus the war in Sudan. The Leaguers made common cause with the peace movement and other opponents of the war but were critical of the unwillingness of other organisations to understand the shared interests of government and the ‘market-hunters . . . capitalists and stock-jobbers’29 who together drove colonial imperialism. This position is illustrated in the Socialist League’s amendment to the general peace solution proposed at a stop-the-war gathering in February:

  That this meeting, consisting mainly of working men, is convinced that the war in the Sudan was prompted by the capitalist class, with a view to the extension of their fields of exploitation. And we admit that the victory gained by the Sudanese was a triumph of right over wrong by a people struggling for their freedom.30

  No nationalistic sentiment here for the death of General Gordon. Eleanor drafted a policy leaflet tracing the origins of the war and explaining the position of the Socialist League in opposing this and other imperialist wars. William Morris commissioned artist Walter Crane to illustrate the pamphlet and design its cover. Crane, a committed socialist, later became principal of the Royal College of Art. This publication, signed by Eleanor and all of the other twenty members of the provisional council, was distributed at and after the meeting on 23 April. It made clear the perspectives of the Socialist Leaguers towards imperialism. The language used to describe Arab civilisations – ‘the children of the desert’ – was paternalistic and orientalist but the critique of economic imperialism was nevertheless sound.

  Fellow Citizens.

  Tens of millions wrung from the labour of workmen of this country are being squandered on Arab slaughtering; and for what:

  1) that Eastern Africa may be ‘opened up’ to the purveyor of ‘shoddy’ wares, bad spirits, venereal disease, cheap bibles and missionaries;

  2) that a fresh supply of sinecure Government posts may be obtained for the occupation of the younger sons of the official classes;

  3) as a minor consideration may be added that a new and happy hunting ground be provided for military sportsmen, who find life boring at home and are always ready for a little Arab shooting when the occasion arises.

  Citizens, you are the dupes of a plot.

  The leaflet then documents the history of the war in the Sudan, explaining its relationship to Egypt, and ends by asking ‘you to consider who it is that have to do the fighting on this and similar occasions’:

  Is it the market-hunting classes themselves? Is it they who form the rank and file of the army? NO! But the sons and brothers of the working classes at home. They it is who for a miserable pittance are compelled to serve in these commercial wars. They it is who conquer, for the wealthy middle and upper classes, new lands for exploitation, fresh populations for pillage, as these classes require them, and who have, as their reward, the assurance of their masters that they are nobly fighting for their Queen and country.31

  Tussy seemed tireless. It is impossible to find her slacking or napping, let alone holidaying. Her correspondence from 1885 onwards is like an administrative and organisational machine, each missive fuelling her steam engine of activism. ‘Please check there are plenty of papers up at the Athenaeum tonight; also all the pamphlets,’32 she writes to Mahon. She collects addresses for distributing manifestos and leaflets, and writes postcards for mailshots (‘I told Edward to copy them for me yesterday, but he forgot . . . ’)33 She finds, negotiates and books venues and organises for the windows to be cleaned with the Window Cleaning Association of Oxford Street. She chairs, she minutes meetings and writes up reports. She collects subscriptions and delivers them to the Socialist League offices. She arranges for the distribution of manifestos, letters and leaflets all over the UK and beyond, to Holland, France, Germany, Belgium. Meanwhile, Tussy asks, can someone else go to a big restaurant and ask how much it will cost to hire one hundred plates, knives, forks, glasses, cups and saucers? ‘I’m asking too,’ she says, ‘but want to compare prices.’ Oh, and can a colleague please send her half a dozen tickets for an entertainment t
o distribute amongst potential funders?34

  ‘Go ahead!’ urges Tussy’s favourite motto. And she does. She hopes heartily that the fiend who invented housekeeping may be plagued by his invention in another world, but when it comes to political organisation, no task is too menial or laborious for Tussy to undertake willingly and execute with superb efficiency.

  As if there wasn’t enough drama in the rough and tumble of her daily political life, Tussy threw herself into a busy schedule of amateur dramatics from the winter of 1884 to the summer of 1886. As her fellow performers made up more than half of the leadership of the new Socialist League, it’s clear that the Leaguers thought of art and entertainment as integral to their political project.

  Eleanor’s precepts on art were clear. Everybody was entitled to enjoy good quality, challenging culture and entertainment. This is demonstrated in her debates with her fellow members of the Socialist League over art and education. ‘Surely education to a Socialist means also Art Education?’ she wrote to the Secretary of the Socialist League in March 1886.

  This was a letter of complaint about the programme for a free variety concert recently put on by the Leaguers, organised by musician Theodore Reuss, who was a member of the executive council. Eleanor took exception to the choice of some of the content programmed for the evening: