Edward and Tussy’s trip to America coincided with the General’s own plans to take a holiday in the United States with his old friend Karl Schorlemmer, known to Tussy since childhood as Jollymeier. The General had rheumatism in his legs and acute eye trouble, mostly thanks to his labours transcribing Marx’s manuscripts, and wanted a break. Though he and Marx had thought and written about it extensively, Engels had never been to America and he wanted to see it for himself. Especially, he said, as the American working classes were evolving towards class-consciousness62 and organisation with greater ‘vigour’ than their British brothers and sisters:
The last Bourgeois Paradise on earth is fast changing into a Purgatory, and can only be prevented from becoming like Europe, an Inferno, by the go-ahead pace at which the development of the newly fledged proletariat of America will take place. I only wish Marx could have lived to see it!63
Engels and Schorlemmer kept their travel plans secret in order to avoid ‘the delicate attention of the German Socialist Executive, etc. of New York’.64 Engels said he wanted ‘to see not to preach’.65
The foursome set sail from Queenstown on 9 August, once again on the Inman liner SS City of Berlin. ‘We’ve such a lot of priests, and clergymen on board, and some babies and no end of Amurcen [sic] twang,’ Tussy told Laura. ‘Both our old men seem to be enjoying themselves and eat, drink and are as merry as possible.’66 The General called Tussy in any weather to go for a walk on deck with him and have a glass of beer. ‘It seemed to be one of his unshakeable principles never to go round an obstacle but always to jump or climb over it.’67 She could have said the same of herself.
Their month-long trip to ‘Yankee-land’ was scheduled to take in New York, Boston, Niagara and Pittsburgh, then go on up to Canada. The General and Jollymeier would then return to Europe whilst Edward and Tussy stayed on to visit Chicago for the production of one of ‘Alec Nelson’s’ plays. From the outset the trip took years off Engels, but didn’t seem to cheer up Jollymeier: ‘He is only Sad-meyer now,’ wrote Tussy. ‘He is terribly broken down, and I doubt if he will be the same again.’68
The Marx-Avelings, or rather Marx-Nelsons, had booked into a cheap boarding-house in New York whilst the General and the erstwhile Jollymeier stayed with friends. But Edward didn’t think cheap digs suited his image and insisted they move to a better hotel near Broadway, more fitting for an up-and-coming dramaturge. He told Eleanor that his theatrical backers would pay the hotel costs. Whilst Edward disappeared all day to see to his rehearsals, Eleanor walked the city:
The city of iniquities strikes me as more hideous than ever – and yet it might be so beautiful. I don’t believe there is any large town in the world so exquisitely situated as New York – and commerce has made of it a very hell.69
These typical views of New York as the grandest site for the capital of Capitalist Production, as Engels put it,70 sat alongside Eleanor’s enthusiasm and admiration for American people in general and their use of the English language in particular.
‘Alec Nelson’, as he was known in New York, made much of bustling off ‘to see to his rehearsals’, and kept his family party waiting in the city some extra days in the cause of his theatrical work before they set off by steamer up the Hudson River to Albany, Lake George, and thence to Boston and Niagara Falls. Tussy and Engels were surprised that he was able to join them at all, given his hectic rehearsal schedule.
From ‘that most wonderful of places Niagara’, the foursome went by boat along the river into Lake Ontario and through the very rough Great Lakes to Toronto, ‘a queer place, where all the people look English.’71 Eleanor enjoyed the voyage along the St Lawrence River, ‘of a size we in Europe have no conception of’.72 She described how the lake was studded everywhere with islands, large and tiny: ‘In the so-called thousand-island part rich Californians chiefly but millionaires from all over the States have summer houses, and at night these were all lit up by hundreds of lights and Chinese lamps, and the effect was very strange and very beautiful.’73
She was fascinated by the Frenchness of Montreal, and its unexpected roughness. ‘It is the muddiest, most tumble-down town I ever saw . . . And the streets! Such holes and such mud, that one is struck by them even after American towns which are all of them unpaved and would be considered disgraceful in a European village.’74 But she liked the setting of the town with the mountainous Adirondacks beyond, which she hiked to the top of the hills around Montreal to admire.
Something odd happened. Edward came along on this sightseeing trip and then stayed with them for the entire remainder of the holiday. No further reference was made to his rehearsals, plays or productions. The whole projected scheme, by which Tussy and the General had been for months so impressed in anticipation of Edward’s rising success, simply evaporated. Before they came to America, in one of his many missives telling people how well Tussy’s husband was doing and boasting about Edward’s imminent American theatre tour, Engels remarked, ‘If his dramatic success goes on at this rate, maybe he will have to go next year to Australia, at the expense of some theatrical impresario.’75 Or on a convict ship when he was revealed to be a self-delusional conman? Is there a note of knowing irony twinkling in the General’s ink here? Did Engels time his impromptu holiday to coincide with Edward’s theatrical tour of America, making sure Tussy wasn’t once more left alone and exposed by Edward’s opportunism?
In the event, Edward tagged along with the others for the whole holiday and never set foot in Chicago. Contrary to his stated plans to remain in America for the run of his plays, he joined the others on the voyage home when they returned to England, leaving on 19 September on the new liner City of New York. Eleanor went totally silent on the subject of Edward’s much-vaunted conquest of the American stage.
Engels and Eleanor might have asked themselves why a theatrical community about which Edward had only recently been so thoroughly contemptuous would suddenly do a volte-face and invite him with open arms. On his return from their first trip to the US, Edward had given an interview to the Dramatic Review in which he expressed his ‘intense disgust for the American stage . . . He says dramatic work in the States is all imported, and that when the Yankees are left alone with their own plays, the result is too painful for contemplation.’76 Evidently the Yankee stage preferred to be left to its own pain rather than import the work of Alec Nelson.
Tussy was refreshed and lighter-hearted after a month’s proper holiday in the General’s company. The trip drove away her depressive nightmares and hauntings and the General had put her back on her marching mettle. But a shadow clung to her on the voyage back to England. Edward had promised that when his plays did well in the United States they could have Johnny with them ‘for good’ if Longuet, as was now likely, would agree. Like all Edward’s promises this failed to materialise. He promised to marry her eventually when his legal wife died; he promised that they would have children when the time was right; he constantly assured her that he would provide his full half-share of their joint income when he made it in the theatre or one of his academic textbooks hit the big time. Eleanor should have applied the same principles to her personal life as she did to her politics: actions not words; first-hand evidence; material proof; lack of sentimentality.
Edward was, as the General diagnosed, a charming feckless dreamer. Tussy made things work. The rent on Dodwell was £5 a year. In 1888 she sold £3-worth of potatoes and made up the £2 balance from her ‘hacking’. Tussy recommended to Laura that she sell her French garden produce to pull in family income. Like their mother before them, both sisters were bridled by impecunious men. But whether by selling her potato crop or ghostwriting, Tussy supported both Edward and herself and got by. ‘It’s jolly hard though! I often think I’d rather be a kitten and cry mew than a woman trying to earn a living.’77
At Christmas 1890, just before her thirty-fifth birthday, Tussy told Laura:
I am doing hack translations (very bad) for a new magazine . . . Edward writes all sorts of
things – good, bad & indifferent. We both have meetings and work of that sort in every spare hour. There’s really no time to consider whether life is worth living or is a most unmitigated nuisance.78
Work, as Olive Schreiner and Havelock Ellis had hoped, pulled Tussy back from depression’s abyss. Poetry also helped. Percy Bysshe Shelley in particular was on Eleanor’s mind and her close reading of his work at this critical time contributed to sorting out her head. Eleanor had joined the Shelley Society when it was founded by Furnivall in 1885 and Edward applied for membership shortly after. Henry Salt recalled the trouble Aveling’s application caused, ‘for the majority decided to refuse it – his marriage relations being similar to Shelley’s – and it was only by the determination action of the Chairman, Mr W. M. Rossetti, who threatened to resign . . . that the difficulty was surmounted.’79 Salt wondered if the name ought to be changed to the ‘Respectable Society’.
As Salt and Rossetti argued, Aveling seemed unfairly judged in this matter. Their support seemed well placed when three years later Eleanor and Edward co-presented two talks at the society on ‘Shelley’s Socialism’. Commonly referred to as ‘Two Lectures’, they revised and self-published these lectures in a tiny single-volume edition of twenty-five copies in 1888. Eleanor and Edward’s work on Shelley has subsequently been described as a ‘Marxist evaluation’ of Shelley’s poetry. However, the Marx who gave it her name called it no such thing. Edward and Eleanor described the essay as a literary investigation into ‘whether Shelley was or was not a socialist’,80 and the question of the revolutionary intent of his poetry.
Eleanor and Edward looked at Shelley’s personality, his influences, his concept of tyranny and liberty in the abstract, and tyranny in the concrete. One of the most engaging parts of the essay is their discussion of Shelley’s understanding of the real meaning of words, where they look at, for example, his use of ‘anarchy’, ‘freedom’, ‘custom’, ‘crime’ and ‘property’.81 Within the range of poems they explore there is particular focus on Queen Mab and Laon and Cythna. The latter is particularly indicative of Eleanor and Edward’s feminist intent in this essay. They argue that whilst a great deal had been made of Godwin’s influence on Shelley, ‘Not enough has been made of the influence upon him of the two Marys; Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley.’82
Reminding their audience that it was one of Shelley’s ‘delusions that are not delusions’83 that man and woman should be equal and united, they explore how much Shelley saw through the eyes of these two women and his relative recognition of the position of women in society: ‘In a word, the world in general has treated the relative influences of Godwin on the one hand and of the two women on the other, pretty much as might have been expected with men for historians.’ In ‘Shelley’s Socialism’ Eleanor and Edward continue their experiments in collaborative work begun with ‘The Woman Question’ and continued, at least in spirit if not in action, in The Working Class Movement in America. ‘Shelley’s Socialism’ opens with an intriguing description of their plan to co-write and present the paper:
That plan is based upon the co-operation of a man and woman, whose sympathies are kindred, but whose points of view and methods of looking at facts are as different as are the positions of the two sexes today, even in the most favourable conditions, under the compulsion of our artificial and unhealthy society.84
These valuable and apparently well-intentioned shared experiments in working together across openly acknowledged ‘points of view and methods of looking at the facts’ are a keen insight into one of the reasons why Tussy persisted in a relationship so few from the outside could understand. By mutual agreement,85 Aveling read out the papers when they presented them at the Shelley Society, ‘and although I am the reader, it must be understood that I am reading the work of my wife as well as, nay more than, of myself.’86 When it came to these precious moments when their public and private lives meshed on the treatment of important subjects, the idea that Eleanor and Edward should be equal and united glimmered hopefully, looking and sounding very much like one of Shelley’s ‘delusions that are not delusions’.
18
Our Old Stoker!
The mighty Independent Labour Party emerged out of the battle-scarred terrain of the British left in the late 1880s and early 1890s. The formation of Britain’s first democratic socialist parliamentary party is a story that, like many great founding narratives, begins with the birth and coming-of-age of non-identical twins: in this case the new trade unionism and the Second International. Other siblings, such as the Fabians, initially hung back with nervous trepidation and joined the party later.
Eleanor was midwife to the twins of trade unionism and socialist internationalism. She was far more influential, and thus more dangerous, than she appeared superficially. Records of the time reveal her always at the absolute seeing eye of the storm, the epicentre of strategy and organisation. She understood the power of the secretariat. Innumerable significant meetings with key political figures of the period took place in her smoky, gas-lit garret up the rickety staircase at Chancery Lane. Keir Hardie, Ben Tillett and Will Thorne were regular visitors to her home before anyone else had ever heard of them. Tussy convened, she caucused, she networked. She wrote policy and think pieces, budgeted, kept accounts, drafted reports and typed them up herself, and then quietly left the room, moving on to the next point of organisation – be it factory gates, East London rookery, pub, bourgeois club, or literary or artistic society.
Tussy is the feminist shade of socialism. Surviving photographs represent this graphically. Occasionally she is caught in full view, head and shoulders above an attentive gathering listening to her speak from a platform, dray wagon or industrial packing case – the focal point in a mass gathering. She’s there, arms folded, leaning in the doorframe behind a crowd of men assembled outside for the group conference picture. Her image appears shoulder to shoulder in the crowd, then partially revealed in a scrum of assembled delegates: the flash of a smile in a throng, or a swing of that old brown cloak amongst demonstrators and protesters. Grainy reproductions of perished originals retain the unmistakeable combination of pince-nez and loosely piled-up hair atop squared shoulders.
From the start of 1889 to the end of 1893 Eleanor was immersed in strategy and mobilisation. At home and abroad she worked primarily in trade unions and transnationally led the design and building of a new international, soon known as the Second International. The new trade unionism and the Second International were the essential infrastructure that enabled British Socialists to coordinate the formation of a mass labour party. The Independent Labour Party (ILP) recruited its representatives and membership from the expanded and strengthened unions, supported and reinforced by the Second International.
The momentum for the establishment of an independent British labour party was set in motion by the force and open aggression of the counter-attack on trade unions by capitalist employers. The name of Eleanor Marx is ubiquitous in the story of how the people’s party was forged. Her voice was in everyone’s ear and her name on everybody’s lips. In the 1890s, Tussy was given two new names by British socialists: ‘Our Mother’ and – when she took leadership of the gasworkers – ‘Our Old Stoker!’ By the final decade of the nineteenth century Eleanor had become a national figure – mother of the radical British nation to her friends and followers; fire-eating, rabble-rousing, class-warmongering, a dubious Jewish immigrant, witch, strident bluestocking and harridan to her enemies. As Eleanor observed, ‘Those who denounce Socialists as mere firebrands and dynamitards used fire and sword to crush the people into submission.’1 Loved or hated – and people rarely felt anything in between for her – by 1893 Tussy was one of Britain’s leading orators and activists, at home and abroad.
Will Thorne, the Birmingham-born leader of the gas workers who became one of Britain’s great labour leaders, remarked that, ‘Strange to say, the historians hardly notice the revolution we created.’2
Socialism had gained strength thro
ughout Western Europe during the 1880s. By country, the German Social Democrats were the largest socialist body. France was looked to as the path-breaker of revolutionary tradition, but was smaller in numbers than Germany. Italy, Holland, Switzerland and Belgium were the other nation states with broad enough bases to play an international role. Industrialisation was now so far developed in Western European countries that most governments were already considering the need for international labour legislation. In this context international meant Europe and its imperial colonies.
July 1889 was the centenary of the storming of the Bastille and the year of the famous Paris Exhibition to commemorate the revolution. Two rival congresses were held in Paris which ultimately led to the emergence of the Second International. Eleanor’s role was to negotiate a compromise between the two and undo the schism. On the one hand were the French trade unionists, allied to the Marx-Engels-Liebknecht faction and supported by Paul Lafargue and Jules Guesde. On the other were the International trade unionists, allied with Hyndman, the SDF, some British trade unions, and supported by Paul Brousse and the Possibilists. Wrote Eleanor:
To play off the French Possibilists against the English Marxists . . . was a very clever dodge on the part of that most artful dodger, Hyndman. That the whole (practically) of the French provinces were Marxist didn’t count. To the Englishman Paris is still France, and Paris in the hands of the Possibilists meant to them a Possibilist France.3
Eleanor Marx Page 36