Eleanor Marx

by Rachel Holmes

And so Tussy worked on, producing some of the great urtexts of Marxism. More manuscripts by Mohr were on the bench. She had a series of her own lectures to write for her spring lecture tours, as well as piles of correspondence to deal with in preparation for the Fourth Congress of the Second International, due to take place in London in July.

  With more money in his pockets, Edward tried to resurrect his career as a dramatist – a return to his old interests that had been rekindled in June 1895, when he organised a fundraiser at the SDF Hall on the Strand. Actors and entertainers had volunteered their talents for free, including a young actress, stage name of Lilian Richardson, who played a grieving widow to Aveling’s seducer in his one-act play In the Train. Will Thorne, chair of the entertainment committee, noticed with disapproval that Aveling ‘became very familiar’ with his leading lady off stage as well as on.

  Eleanor shot off on a whistlestop lecture tour raising awareness for the SDF in Edinburgh, Bristol and Aberdeen. She left on a Saturday and was back by Tuesday night – steam trains and the telegraph worked wonders to speed up the transmission of socialist ideas. As ever, Tussy was managing multiple demands on her hard-pressed time. There was the lecturing and the work on the Nachlass. ‘Then the accumulated correspondence and housework take another day! And the Congress! That takes no end of time one way or another, too.’39 During March and April Eleanor found herself at the helm of negotiating ‘a very useful “reconciliation” between us & the SDF as part of the preparatory work for the Congress’:

  For years we have (to the General’s distress) been on good terms with the SDF members. Now we are officially to work together. You know what such ‘official’ friendship means – Edward & Hyndman no more love one another than do Paul & Brousse – but it is useful for the movement, & especially for the forthcoming congress.40

  Realpolitiker to the tips of her boots – to paraphrase her mother. Parochial political skirmishes had to be held in respectful tension with the long-term political objective. Anarchist tendencies needed to be blocked. To opt out of the struggle to radically democratise the state was to render the worker movement, the trade unions and all forms of collective action and bargaining defenceless and voiceless. Throughout his life Engels had warned Eleanor that the relative passivity of English workers (clearly distinguished from the Irish, Welsh and Scots) was the Achilles heel the anarchists could exploit to bring down British socialism. Tragically, she realised, his prediction was proving correct.

  Factions jostled for their position under different names, manifestos and banners, but Eleanor understood profoundly that this momentous London congress would effectively be a struggle between the forces of anarchism and socialism. The primary political issue in question was that of the relationship between parliamentarians and anti-parliamentarians. Tussy believed in, and practised, political fair play and tolerance; but when it came to practical organisation and effective political and social programmes, there was no way of squaring anti-democratic anarchism with democratic socialism and its commitment to work within a representative parliamentary system. George Plekhanov, whose important though stylistically wooden work Anarchism and Socialism Tussy translated, argued that anarchism was a force of reaction. Anarchism benefited from its shared language, style and aesthetic with thrilling espionage and Sherlock Holmes-like brilliant antic individualism, but it had nothing to do with the more mundane practice of everyday democratic life and the less glamorous struggle for social justice and an open society.

  These primal ideological forces armed themselves for combat at the London congress in July. To rally support for democratic socialism and impress English workers with the political effectiveness of the parliamentary German party, Liebknecht travelled around Britain during May and June on a consciousness-raising tour. Eleanor and Aveling joined him on as many platforms as possible, Aveling often chairing and Eleanor speaking on British trade unionism, the woman question and economics. The venerable Liebknecht, reported Justice fondly, had ‘the appearance of an old English gentleman farmer’.41 Now an old political warhorse who in his day had gone into armed combat, Library was a figure well positioned to remind the modern generation of socialists that the old ‘days of romantic fighting had gone by’.42

  At the end of May Eleanor and Edward joined Library at the Mosley Hotel in Manchester for a reception held in his honour by the Independent Labour Party. The speaker who gave Liebknecht the vote of thanks was the barrister and legal reformer Dr Richard Pankhurst, husband of Emmeline Pankhurst, founder of the Women’s Social and Political Union. Sylvia, one of their three daughters, accompanied him to the reception. The thirteen-year-old was fascinated by Eleanor’s ‘attractive personality’ and, apparently, her dusky complexion, ‘with dark brows and strong, vivid colouring’.43 Sylvia thought Eleanor Marx marvellous, but ‘beside her’ the figure of Edward Aveling was ‘repellent’. The celebrated leader of the women gas workers, Sylvia Pankhurst saw, was attentive and engaged but her husband shifted about in his chair, grumbling about ‘that confounded draught’ and complaining that he was cold. At which Eleanor smiled at him and turned up the collar of his coat.44 The sharp-eyed Sylvia took in the whole scene and ever after remembered the impact Eleanor Marx made on her as a young woman.

  Library’s speaking tour ended in London in the middle of June. He stayed on for a while with Tussy and Edward at the Den and the three of them took some time out to go on an expedition into the past. As research for his memoir of Marx, Liebknecht wanted to go back to the part of the city where they had all lived as young immigrants and especially to see the places where the family had lived.

  On Monday 8 June Tussy, Edward and Library set out from Sydenham to Tottenham Court Road. They started their search from Soho Square. ‘We went about it methodically,’ Library wrote, ‘like Schliemann, who carried out the Troy excavations. It was by no means an easy job. He wanted to unearth Troy as it was in the time of Priam and Hector; our wish was to “excavate” the London of the emigrants from the end of the forties to the fifties and sixties.’45 They went to his former lodgings in Old Compton Street, his one-time home on Church Street, and round the corner to the General’s first London digs on Macclesfield Street; and then on to 28 Dean Street, the place of Tussy’s birth, which they only found with some difficulty because the house numbers had been changed.

  They rang the bell and asked the young woman who answered if they might go up and have a look. The two rooms on the second floor were locked, but the staircase was familiar and the layout exactly as Library remembered:

  Yes, that was the house that I had been in thousands of times, the house where Marx, assailed, tortured and worn out by the misery of emigration and the furious hatred of enemies . . . wrote his Eighteenth Brumaire, his Herr Vogt and his correspondence for the New York Tribune . . . where he did the enormous preparatory work for Capital.46

  And where he seduced Lenchen whilst his wife was away, leaving her pregnant with Freddy Demuth, born at Dean Street nine months later amidst storms and recriminations from which the great philosopher hid in the British Museum Reading Room, writing to his best friend in Manchester that he was scared of going home.

  This latter part, of course, did not form part of Library’s memoir. But Tussy knew Freddy’s birth date and had worked out that the great rift between Mohr, her mother and Lenchen had taken place, and been resolved for ever, behind those now locked doors. Soon after this trip down memory lane with Library, Tussy decided to start work on writing her father’s biography. ‘After all,’ she wrote to Laura, ‘Marx the “Politiker” and “Denker” can take his chance, while Marx the man is less likely to fare as well.’47 These were not the words of the wide-eyed, idolatrous, favoured daughter who gazed up in admiration at a flawless father.

  The secret of Marx the man had been taken to his shared grave. Engels, too, would have stayed silent if the opportunistic Freebooters hadn’t interfered. There was no question of her exposing Freddy and Harry to public scandal but the truth was now hers.
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  From Dean Street, the intrepid threesome hopped on an omnibus to Kentish Town, where they visited three of the graves of Tussy’s dead brothers and sisters who had died in infancy, including Edgar, with whom her life so briefly coincided. They were surprised by how built-up Kentish Town had become. By the time they had been to Maitland Park Road, where Jenny and Karl died, and wandered about the old haunts on Hampstead Heath, they were beginning to feel depressed by the pursuit of ghosts. So they went to Jack Straw’s Castle and got happily drunk: ‘How often we had been there in days of old! In the very room in which we sat I had sat dozens of times with Marx, Mrs Marx, the children, Lenchen and others . . . ’48

  Whatever really happened between Karl, Jenny and Lenchen over his infidelity and Freddy’s birth, it hadn’t broken the bond between Jenny and Lenchen, or Jenny and her husband. All of them had known each other from their earliest years. After the short-lived storm, they were able to go out to the pub together, children in tow. Except, of course, Freddy, who paid the price for his parents’ behaviour, as children always must.

  The famous Fourth Congress of the Second International opened on 27 July at the Queen’s Hall in Langham Place, preceded by a mass gathering in Hyde Park the day before. All legitimate socialist organisations in Britain were represented, including the Social Democratic Federation, the Independent Labour Party, the Fabian Society and the trade unions. James Ramsay MacDonald was delegated for the Fabians, and Charlotte Despard, Bernard Shaw and the Webbs were also present for the whole congress. Rosa Luxemburg, a contemporary of Library’s son Karl, was also a delegate, much to Tussy’s approval, since Luxemburg’s credentials had not been accepted by the 1893 Zurich congress. Eleanor, her friend Clara Zetkin, Charlotte Despard and Rosa Luxemburg were natural allies amongst the many socialist women participating in the congress.

  Eleanor represented the London gas workers, and led the team of translators that included Zetkin, Liebknecht, Bernstein, Luxemburg, the Swiss Johann Sigg – and everyone’s favourite misinterpreter, the notorious radical journalist Adolphe Smith.

  The mudslinging between socialists and anarchists started immediately. The British and German sections had, after lengthy argument and negotiation, agreed to exclude the anarchist factions from the congress. The French delegates, however, were divided on the issue. Matters were further complicated by the fact that, although the British had agreed to endorse the resolution, Tom Mann and Keir Hardie broke the agreement and organised demonstrations in favour of the ‘Anti-Parliamentarians’, i.e., as Tussy put it, clearly in favour of the anarchists. The argument over the resolution for exclusion was so loud and bad-tempered that Eleanor complained that she couldn’t hear to translate properly. Tolerance and, in Eleanor’s words, ‘fair play’, were debated. Hyndman kept a cool head, pointing out that, as the anarchists had stated over and over again that they didn’t believe in congresses or formal representational political organisation, why were they making a fuss about being excluded?

  Tussy, Edward and other congress organisers were on watch for an outbreak of anarchist violence. The sturdy secretary of the congress, Will Thorne, led a body of stalwart doorkeepers to bounce any insurgency. Once the resolution for exclusion was passed, the Fourth Congress of the Second International settled down to business. It was an eventful, productive and significant congress. The next big firework display was at the closing festival, held, conveniently for Tussy and Edward, at the Crystal Palace. Aveling MC’d the banquet, and after much singing of the Marseillaise, Auld Lang Syne and the Carmagnole, the congress disbanded until its next meeting, scheduled to be held in Berlin in 1899.

  Tussy was grateful for the opportunity to return to her desk after these events and particularly enjoyed writing her weekly column for Justice. Eleanor’s ‘International Notes’ are amongst her finest journalism. She covered the St Petersburg strikes throughout their duration from 1896 to 1897, bringing her reportage to life from her first-hand experience of serving on the Zurich Committee that organised international financial support and political solidarity for the St Petersburg strikers. In another series of articles Eleanor reflected critically on the development of the German SPD and also wrote a precise and critically sharp account of the famous Gotha congress of the German party in October. She wrote elegantly and forcefully about the controversy sparked by Bax’s theory of revisionism, which notoriously sought to separate Marxism from its revolutionary aspects. Who better to write a critique of Marxist revisionism than Eleanor Marx?

  More optimistically, Eleanor wrote columns on the evolution of French socialism in the public sphere, reporting on the impact of the socialist communes, free school meals, scholarships for poor children and theatre subsidies. However, when the French socialists supported the Greek invasion of Crete, she criticised them without hesitation:

  France, even Socialist France, seems quite – I mean Crete – mad. As the French Socialists . . . consider the Polish movement as ‘Chauvinist’, it is a little difficult to understand their present enthusiasm for the Greeks. And, personally, I must say I should be far more impressed by their diatribes against that much-damned Sultan if the French had even mildly damned the hideous Franco-Russian alliance.49

  As previously noted, Eleanor was highly critical of the spinelessness of the socialists in the French Chamber of Deputies who refused to take sides in supporting Dreyfus on the grounds that the affair was merely a skirmish between rival groups within bourgeois society. When Clemenceau and Zola came out for Dreyfus, she saluted them.50

  On balance Eleanor completed an impressive proportion of her birthday plan of action for 1896. After the Second International’s fourth congress she took up teaching at the Battersea socialist Sunday school and joined the local socialist choir, telling Kautsky how much she enjoyed singing with her ‘dear Lewishamers’.51 In September she began teaching weekly French and German language and debating classes on Friday evenings for SDF members, a voluntary job she was to continue with barely a few weeks’ interruption until January 1898.

  Eleanor was struck by how very few of the British delegates at the Fourth Congress of the Second International in London had any knowledge of foreign languages or the rules of debate followed in European political organisations. This prompted her to start the classes. Within a few months Eleanor’s advanced evening classes were reading and debating The Communist Manifesto in the original German and the manifesto of the Parti Ouvrier in French. What fun it must have been for the students to have the enlivening quality of Eleanor’s first-hand experience and knowledge of the authors – mostly her family – thrown into the mix of rigorous, demanding learning. She showed them how the rules of debate enabled freedom of expression and individual opinion, and created a safe, encouraging space for criticism and self-criticism.

  Edward offered to join the initiative by teaching science classes and preparing students for entry to the public Art and Science Examination. Their courses ran at the SDF Hall on the Strand. Tussy taught on Fridays, Edward on Wednesdays. As the Strand is so conveniently positioned in the heart of West End theatreland, Aveling naturally went to shows or dinner with his theatre folk after his Wednesday classes or individual tutoring sessions on other days. Or so Tussy believed.

  Towards the end of the year she advertised for a live-in servant, and hired Gertrude Gentry, who immediately – to Tussy’s wonder – removed from her the responsibility of a thousand necessary daily chores, freeing her up to spend long hours in her study, just as her mother and Lenchen had done for her father and Engels. As yet, no records have been discovered about Gerty’s background before she came to work for Eleanor. In the early days of their mistress-and-servant relationship, Tussy referred to her unkindly as ‘my very excellent but rather stupid Gerty’,52 but she revised and rescinded this condescending view as she got to know Gerty better. It was no special mark of honour to be called stupid by Tussy. It was a word she used freely and fondly about her friends, such as Library, when they demonstrated poor judgement or got distrac
ted by ephemera, or spoke before thinking.

  Gertrude Gentry, who had basic literacy when she arrived at the Den, expressed much interest in the books, journals, newspapers, play scripts, song sheets, leaflets and magazines that overspilled the furniture in most of the rooms she was tasked to keep clean and tidy. Reacting immediately to this curiosity, Tussy and Gerty started working together to improve her reading, writing and account-keeping. Maid and madam soon bonded in humour over Tussy’s poor cooking skills and some of Edward’s fussy foibles and masculine eccentricities. Eleanor imagined her cooking was merely mediocre until Gerty set her right and deemed her efforts generally inedible. In this regard alone, Dr Aveling was to be pitied: Lenchen had succeeded in teaching Tussy to play chess brilliantly, but had been far less effective in passing on her baking skills. Aveling was away a great deal but, when at the Den, he appears to have been a genial and generally undemanding master by the standards of the time. Yet for all that he appeared to be decent to her, Gerty never warmed to him.

  Conversely, she devoted extra attention to Tussy – who, after all, paid her wages – and did a great deal to make the Den a welcoming place for visitors. Gerty was also a keen follower of fashion. Her interest in matters faddish concerning clothes, hair, cosmetics and accessories was probably what earned her the appellation of stupid from Tussy who, as a child, poked fun at her mother for strutting around like a peacock when she received the unexpected gift of an over-fancy new hat. Tussy hated fuss about matters of dress and personal toilette – a word and concept she found rather absurd. Nevertheless, Gerty clearly succeeded in exerting a subtle influence over Tussy’s hitherto unruly hair and comfortably absent-minded dress sense – or rather lack of it. There was a visible improvement in the neatness and fashion of Tussy’s clothes and hair that coincided with Gerty’s arrival at the Den.