Eleanor Marx

by Rachel Holmes

  Eleanor didn’t see the General until they were reunited in Zurich at the 1893 International Congress. She represented the British gas workers at the congress, translating, organising and chairing. She numbered one of five women amongst the sixty-five-strong British delegation, which also included her old friend May Morris who was there on behalf of the Hammersmith Socialist Society. There was a grand extended family reunion for Engels with Eleanor, Edward, the Liebknechts, Louise Kautsky, Freyberger, Bernstein, Adler and Karl Kautsky, who brought the second Luise.5

  Eleanor’s friend Anna Kulishov, who represented the Milan Working Girls’ Union, chaired the closing session. The congress voted for its next assembly to be held in London in 1896, then Kulishov announced the surprise appearance of Friedrich Engels, ‘the intellectual pioneer of International Social Democracy’.6 From the front row, Tussy watched the General take the platform as the hall and public galleries rose to their feet and greeted him with tumultuous and continued applause. Standing underneath the giant portrait of her father, painted by Margaret Greulich, bordered by red flags, Engels thanked the congress for their ‘unexpectedly magnificent welcome’, 7

  which I receive with deep emotion. I accept not in my personal capacity but as the collaborator of the great man whose portrait you have here. It is just 50 years ago that Marx and I came into the movement . . . From the small sects of that time, Socialism has since developed into a powerful Party making the officials of the whole world tremble. Marx has died, but were he still alive there would be no one in Europe and America who could look back upon his life’s work with such justifiable pride.8

  What were Tussy’s thoughts as the General continued in this grandly rhetorical vein? She was generally sceptical of the presentation of her father as an ideologue. The end of the General’s speech was met with cheering, an ovation and a rousing rendition of the Marseillaise. For the excellence of her English, French and German translation Eleanor was presented with a gold watch by the British delegation. Whatever her thoughts on the lionisation of her father by Engels, no one knew this would be his last public address in mainland Europe.

  Johnny Longuet came to stay for September – now ‘a great laughing lad of 17!’9 – entertaining her with his natty views on Clemenceau and reading aloud to her from all the French newspapers he went out to buy daily. Tussy loved her eldest nephew’s visits and never felt lonely when Johnny was staying. His departure, combined with a depressing defeat at a suffragette meeting in November, lowered Tussy’s mood. Asked to speak at this meeting in St James’s Hall, Eleanor eloquently seconded an amendment to enfranchise all adult women, regardless of class or education. The motion was resoundingly defeated. Tussy left feeling weary and frustrated at once again encountering the opposition from the socially elite factions of the suffragette movement to the enfranchisement of their working-class, activist suffragette sisters.

  The long shadows of the melancholy to which she’d been intermittently prey since her twenties cast a deeper darkness on the shortening winter days in November. Edward’s frequent absence exacerbated Eleanor’s depression. His only constant source of income was from coaching, a now fashionable occupation, and from writing introductory science textbooks, a form for which he had a true talent. Edward’s introductions to natural philosophy, mechanics and experimental science, botany and geology were solidly successful, and gave him plenty of happy hours dallying with his young student researchers in the Reading Room at the British Museum. Eleanor felt Edward’s disappointments as her own, and tried to compensate by indulging his spendthrift, pleasure-loving predispositions, however lonely – and broke – they left her. Her friend Max Beer was driven to distraction by Eleanor’s unshakeable loyalty to Aveling:

  He was a fine speaker, an impressive elocutionist, and a man of considerable scientific attainments, but struck with moral blindness, utterly failing to perceive the difference between right and wrong. How she could go on living with this man for over fourteen years is a riddle which puzzled us all.10

  Beer, like so many of her friends, wanted to visit and spend more time with Tussy, who extended many invitations, ‘but my unconquerable dislike of Dr Aveling made me decline it’.11

  By the end of the year, Tussy wished she could run away to Laura for Christmas and make the festivities a real holiday. But she hadn’t the cash and felt unwell. ‘I’m fearfully dull and stupid, and I would not write except that I hope by doing so to get a line from you,’ she confesses to her sister. ‘I’ve been very seedy the last few days. Indeed, I feel so thoroughly ill without being ill – if you can understand that bull, that I fancy I must be enjoying a little bout of influenza.’12

  Tussy signs off her pre-Christmas letter to her sister remarking that Edward is ‘out supping with some theatrical friends . . . as it is nearly 1 and my fire is out, I shall say goodnight.’13 She’s long given up waiting for him to come home. It’s a dismal image of unwanted aloneness in a vital, naturally gregarious spirit, but Tussy’s dynamism and spark was precisely the problem. Aveling knew very well that if Tussy joined him supping with theatrical friends, she would light up and fill the room – all attention would be on her and deflected from him.

  Early in 1894 Tussy headed off to Lancashire to deliver an intense series of eight lectures in seven days to as many SDF branches. To her astonishment, she received a delightedly scandalised note from Edward reporting the sudden marriage of Louise Kautsky and Ludwig Freyberger. The wedding took place in secret, with Engels as witness, and the new Dr and Mrs Freyberger sent out cards notifying friends of their marriage after they returned from their fortnight’s honeymoon spent in Eastbourne, Engels’s favourite resort, at his expense. ‘But it does seem queer to take the General a-Honeymooning with them,’ Tussy wrote to Laura. ‘You can imagine the delicacy of his jokes on such an occasion.’14

  Tussy, like everyone else, was surprised at the abrupt manner of the marriage. ‘It’s all very well to say that all tastes are in nature. This taste seems to me a very abnormal one,’15 she said to Laura, expressing a view identical to so many made by others about her own choice of Aveling. But Tussy knew something else: Louise had confided in her the previous year that she was having an ongoing affair with August Bebel.

  Tussy received a self-justifiying missive from Louise, constructing an elaborate digressional tale about how she and Ludwig had, coincidentally and completely unexpectedly, decided to get married ‘that Monday, you went to the North’. On and on the letter ran, Louise claiming that no one was more surprised by their unplanned marriage than herself and Ludwig – and that nothing at all had happened between them prior to this sudden event. She also said she’d told Ludwig about her clandestine relationship with Bebel. ‘That dear girl is the simple story.’16 Nothing simple in so convoluted a story.

  ‘The whole affair has been “wrop in mistry”,’ said Tussy, admitting that she could with the benefit of hindsight now see the Freyberger match being a foregone conclusion.17 Added to Louise’s embarrassment that she knew the inconvenient truth about Bebel was also Tussy’s characteristic frankness in telling Louise upfront that she thought Freyberger an opportunist and fraud:

  I fancy I’ve rather put my foot into it because I’m such a poor hand at pretending, & I never could pretend to admire the profound sagacity & wit of the new bridegroom. Well, on the whole I’m glad Louise is married. She was too young for the rather dreary life at the General’s, & no doubt Karl [Kautsky] will be delighted.18

  ‘Poor Louise’, she felt, had dropped from the overused cliché of the frying pan into the fire. ‘But then with us women it is generally a question of the frying pan or the fire & it is hard to say wh. is the worse. At the best our state is parlous.’19

  The formerly revered Pumps was dethroned and Louise raised in her place as the new queen who could do no wrong in the General’s view. This much was to be expected from inveterately glad-eyed Engels. Pragmatically, Tussy was anxious to know what the household arrangements were to be, ‘for frankly it will
be intolerable if Freyberger permanently installs himself at Regent’s Park Road. It was unpleasant enough to constantly meet him there, but to know him always there!’20

  Tussy returned home from her Lancashire tour to unwelcome confirmation of this disagreeable premonition. Now genuinely alarmed, she sat down and quickly scribbled to Laura ‘the latest news from the ménage of Regent’s Park Road’:

  (Oh! for a Balzac to paint it!) . . . She [Louise] informed me that she – & he – were to remain with the General!!! . . . That Freyberger shd hold ‘at homes’ at the General’s is certainly coming it strong . . . personally I confess that invitations to the General’s from a man like Freyberger are a little queer, &, in my opinion, bode no good for the future . . . I question much if the Freyberger influence is likely to be a good one for the party. Anyone who has the slightest knowledge of human nature must know this gentleman is playing his own game alone.21

  Engels attempted to make light of the matter by joking about this entirely matriarchal new marriage in which the husband had become his wife’s boarder. He claimed initially to be delighted that the newlyweds had decided to remain under his roof. But Louise’s all-too-soon evident pregnancy quickly caused the General great anxiety when he had to start making arrangements for them all to move into a bigger house on the other side of the street.

  In August Engels and the Freebooters – as Eleanor now aptly called them – went to Eastbourne for a holiday, during which the General suffered a mild stroke. Eleanor’s distrust of Ludwig now proved conclusive. ‘I wd not trust a fly to his tender mercies,’ she wrote to Laura. ‘He is an adventurer pure and simple, & I am heartily sorry for Louise.’22

  Tussy was now convinced that the security of all the papers and manuscripts at the General’s was in jeopardy. The impending move from 122 to 41 Regent’s Park Road, with Engels semi-invalided, made her suspicious that a deliberate plan was under way to steal the Marx cultural capital. ‘Freyberger is quite capable of getting hold of anything he can & selling it!’23 The Bernsteins visited London and, after observing the situation, confirmed they shared Eleanor’s apprehensions. Sam Moore also seemed alarmed and doubtful, which made Tussy all the more anxious as she knew Moore to be one of the General’s executors.

  She was still unaware that Engels had revised his will the previous year, making Louise an executor, as witnessed by Dr Freebooter. The likelihood of Freyberger stealing and selling the manuscripts now obsessed her. Feeling vulnerable and exposed, she appealed to Laura and Paul to come to London and help her intercede with Engels:

  For you must remember Freyberger is simply an anti-Semite (tho’ I wd wager my Jewish head that he’s a Jew) & has nothing to do with the movement. It is no joking matter I can assure you, for you know very well that anyone living with the General can manipulate him to any extent . . . Mohr’s MSS etc are things we can’t be too careful about.24

  Sam Moore said he would try and discuss the matter with Engels, probably with the added intention of quietly urging him to inform Tussy about his revised will, in order to allay her fears and remind Engels of his legal obligations.

  It took another adept pretender to unmask Louise. Aveling’s present and future economic security depended upon Eleanor’s inheritance. Edward found an unexpected opportunity to cause mischief for Louise when Tussy carelessly shared with him Louise’s confidence about her affair with Bebel. Edward set to work spreading the news. Louise knew that Aveling was the source of this awkward gossip. Knowing Tussy responsible for this betrayal of feminine confidence, she wrote her a furious letter challenging her with a breach of faith in their friendship.

  ‘All this klatsch (gossip) showed me that I have to step in,’25 Louise whined. Tussy was not fooled by all this hand-wringing. She began to suspect that the intimate web of relationships between all the players might indicate that Louise, in league with Bebel and Freyberger, had ulterior motives to divert possession of the Nachlass for the German party, and their own ends.

  The breakpoint came later in 1894, when Louise clumsily tried to persuade Eleanor to sign a document that made her, the new Mrs Freebooter, responsible owner of all the papers and manuscripts for fear, Louise claimed, that Pumps should get hold of them. This was a step too far. Pumps had no shortage of flaws and failings but Tussy knew she was not a thief, nor had she ever attempted to supplant the Marx sisters in the General’s affections.

  Tussy’s fury at Louise’s deception was implacable. She now saw that she’d been duped. She pleaded with her sister and Paul to come to London and intercede with the General. The game was up. ‘Pumps is got rid of,’ she wrote to Laura in a tone of shocked disbelief, ‘& it is a positive pain to go to the General’s. When he sees me alone – which is only for a moment, he seems glad enough – & then when the two others appear, he becomes like them, & in all but words I am told de trop. ’26 No longer maintaining any pretence of alliance with Tussy, the Freebooters set about sticking their combined boots in everywhere they could. She was made to feel unwelcome at 41 Regent’s Park Road, and Louise and Ludwig hovered at her elbow, refusing to leave her alone with the General when she visited. Her sense that the now vulnerable Engels was being bullied by his erstwhile protégé turtle doves seemed accurate.

  The General had a miserable winter, hinting in his correspondence with Laura at the mistakes he’d made. He wanted to celebrate his approaching seventy-fourth birthday in peace but the coal cellar was flooded, the condensation in the wine cellar threatening to ruin his best vintages, the kitchen renovation still incomplete, and most of his books still packed in crates, slowing down his work. There was no point in turning to Louise for assistance, as she’d just given birth to a daughter. For once, Engels expressed no enthusiasm about the arrival of a new baby. Instead, he locked himself in his new study, trying to sort out his library, although ‘more than once I felt inclined to throw all my books into the fire, and house and all, such a bother it was.’27 Dr Freebooter screwed his brass nameplate on the front door and a nursemaid and two further additional servants were employed to look after the Freybergers, not Engels. The takeover was complete.

  Tussy needed Laura’s solidarity: ‘Alone I can do nothing. Together we might do something.’28 The poor General, she told Laura, has come to the condition where he is a mere child in the hands of this ‘monstrous pair’. ‘If you knew all the wire-pulling of the F.s you wd understand’:

  If you don’t want to see the F’s as sole literary executors you must act, & that promptly. You will remember that Bebel wrote the papers wd be in the right hands. I think you & I shd know whose hands. If outsiders know we shd, for when all is said & done this is our business & no one else’s. The papers – especially all the private papers – are our concern; they belong to us – not even to Engels.29

  Laura failed to respond to this and subsequent, increasingly frantic, appeals from her sister. This was a terrible time for Tussy. Estranged from the General, unsupported by Laura, furious at herself for finding Louise credible, she didn’t know how best to act alone, or who to turn to. Edward was no use. Having lobbed in the incendiary about Louise’s affair with Bebel, he ducked to the Scilly Isles for seven weeks, with the plausible justification that he needed to convalesce from another bout of kidney disease. Fortunately his need to recuperate was not so acute that it prevented him from researching and writing a series of travel articles for Clarion about the pleasures of the islands, accompanied by his new holiday amour, a fair-haired, blue-eyed girl who he’d chatted up on the boat. ‘I had seen her the day before in the Penzance Post-office, and invented a telegram that I might stick a stamp on her hands and touch her. She was as easy and frank as she was beautiful.’30

  Meanwhile, Eleanor held the frontline in the escalating war with the Freebooters and looked forward to Edward coming home from playing at Alec Nelson, ‘for I am rather lonely – in spite of my many four-footed friends’.31 Could they speak, her four-footed friends might have suggested she was better off sticking to their company. Freddy
and his son Harry Demuth alleviated Tussy’s loneliness. Tussy and Freddy spent more and more time together, chatting and eating together by each other’s firesides in Holborn and Hackney and taking the twelve-year-old Harry out for long rambles. As Freddy was a shop steward, socialist and active unionist, they had much in common politically. Both had chosen their partners poorly. Father and son lived alone together in Hackney, as they had done since Harry’s mother had absconded overnight two years previously, leaving Freddy to raise his son as a single parent, which he did very successfully. Freddy’s wife had not only stolen his heart when she ran away but most of his possessions and a £29 cash benefit fund trusted to his keeping by his fellow workmen. Out of consideration for Tussy, and perhaps sensing the potential danger in Edward, Freddy was ever courteous towards him. Harry recalled, ‘Eleanor was always very nice, but I didn’t like Aveling . . . He was very educated and that, but he wasn’t nice.’32

  Freddy had a ‘rough childhood’,33 leaving the home of his foster parents the Lewises as soon as he was of legal age. He had no further communication with them but he never lost touch with his mother Lenchen. Hard-working, self-reliant, interested in everything, Freddy was a resolute autodidact. ‘He hadn’t much schooling,’ Harry reported, ‘but he taught himself everything. Wonderful what he knew.’34 Harry recalled the two of them of an evening sitting either side of the table with an oil lamp, reading to each other: ‘Shakespeare it was – and I helped him with his pronunciation. He couldn’t pronounce all the words as well as I could.’35

  In this period in 1894, when Tussy’s relations with the General were strained for the first time in their shared lives, she must have felt more acutely the frightening chill of being outside his life-warming circle of sunshine. Children, she knew, invariably pay for their parents’ mistakes. Yet Engels of all people did not believe that mistakes were irreparable. So why – again that question for Tussy –did Engels, otherwise so often on the side of the angels, behave like a tetchy demon towards his only son, whom he refused to acknowledge?