Eleanor Marx

by Rachel Holmes

  Anyone might feel pride from beyond the grave to be honoured in these ways. Yet none of this memorialising matches the quiet eloquence of two letters written by working-class women, Leah Roth and Gertrude Gentry, published here for the first time.

  Gerty is well known to us as Eleanor’s housekeeper. Leah Roth was one of the innumerable working-class women who, as Eleanor wrote in ‘The Woman Question’, were world-changers and history-makers. Leah Roth wrote to Eleanor and Edward from 42 Stepney Green Dwellings on 19 January 1898, in a laboured, careful hand:

  Great honerable [sic] Lady and Gentleman I am begging of you that you should not take this as a [sic] insulting and to help me out a little of our trouble as we are starving day by day and especially a baby from a year and a half which I have nothing to give her but just to save her life so I am feeding her on a bottle of pure water so I am begging of you dear lady and gentleman you should have pity on me and on my poor eight starving children and you should help me out a little with any thing that I should be able to buy some food for the children and I myself dear lady don’t know what to do with them I am only 7 weeks after my confinement and my husband is out of work these 3 months an [sic] we have not broke our fast these three days and if the kind lady would be good enough and to help me a little with a few old clothes I shall be very thankful to her.

  I am yours [sic] humble servant, Leah Roth

  (Pity us)32

  Eleanor regularly received individual requests for help. She assisted with money and care packages and put women like Leah Roth in touch with their local branch of the SDF, trade union or women’s organisation. A handful of these missives survive, unitemised, in the archive of Eleanor’s miscellaneous correspondence. They are the last trail of an aspect of Eleanor’s life that is otherwise hidden from history.

  The second letter is from Gertrude Gentry to Edith Lanchester, written – elegiacally – on 1 May 1898 from the Den, a few days before Edward closed up the house and moved to Battersea with his new wife.

  Dear Miss Lanchester,

  Thank you very much for your kind letter. I am so glad you liked the Pen. I thought you would like to have some little thing in remembrance of our dear Mrs Aveling and that you would like to have the Pen she used so much. Oh how we do miss her, and it nearly breaks our hearts when we go out into the garden and see all the flowers coming out that she was so fond of. I don’t know what we shall do when we leave it for good. I think it will quite break our hearts then. For while we are here we feel she must be coming back.

  We have had Dr Aveling very ill we did not know what to think of him at one time but he is better again now. How is your dear little boy, I should like to see him. Minnie’s babies are getting quite big children now, they will soon be able to go away. Dr Aveling has conscented [sic] to have dear Mrs Aveling’s last wish carried out about the cats as soon as the babies are ready to go. I think I must close now with love to you and heaps of kisses to dear baby trusting you are well.

  Yours very sincerely,

  G.M. Gentry33

  And so it was Gertrude Gentry who took on Aveling to make sure Tussy’s last wishes were carried out regarding her beloved four-footers. Gerty also made sure that Edith received a proper, appropriate memento – Tussy’s cherished writing pen.

  Gertrude bore a heavy burden. She was the unwitting bearer of the chloroform and prussic acid that killed Eleanor. It was Gerty who found her dead body in shocking rictus. Edith knew very well that Gerty never liked Aveling. Gerty’s observation that ‘we did not know what to think of him at one time but he is better again now’ seemed very pointed. Gertrude Gentry was powerless to act on her own but she could hope that Eleanor’s friends and family might take action.

  There was outrage at the verdict of the inquest, which did nothing except establish the ‘fact’ of suicide. Kautsky wrote to Adler from Berlin that he was in favour of taking immediate legal action against Aveling and of ‘proceeding relentlessly against the scoundrel’.34 Robert Banner, devastated by the news, looked closely at the order of the facts, and pursued Aveling in the press for an answer to why Eleanor’s letter to Crosse had not been delivered. As well as Aveling offering an explanation of why he intercepted this letter to her lawyer, Banner wanted him to explain publicly why his version of events differed in every point to Gertrude Gentry’s.

  Eduard Bernstein decided to take legal action against Aveling and blamed himself until the end of his life for not dealing with him before. The outcry for Aveling to be brought to criminal trial continued for the rest of his short life. As Bernstein bitterly observed, ‘If there were no party interest to take into consideration, the people would have torn Aveling to pieces.’35 Aveling’s death put an end to the call for justice – and his blood.

  Olive Schreiner wrote to Dollie Radford from South Africa, with unerring prescience:

  I have little doubt in my mind she discovered a fresh infidelity of Aveling and that ended it all. I had thought of writing a short notice of her in one of the monthly reviews. Then I felt that as I could not speak the truth about him I could not write of her. It would have hurt her to have him blamed . . . I am so glad Eleanor is dead. It is such a mercy she has escaped from him.36

  Olive had never doubted her first instinct that Aveling was a conman who would be the death of Eleanor if she didn’t leave him. She asked Dollie if there were any further details. ‘I have felt,’ she wrote, ‘that if I was in England I would find the servant who was the last person with her and get her to tell me all she knew.’37

  If only she had done it.

  Afterword

  Death can help people discover who they are.

  What forces drove Eleanor Marx to her death?1 asked Eduard Bernstein in an article published just four months after it happened. Bernstein believed that Edward Aveling was culpable, either morally, or criminally – or both. Only the law could decide if Aveling bore criminal responsibility, for which he should be brought to trial. Bernstein rather focused on the question of Aveling’s moral accountability.

  Bernstein’s piece was a response to anti-socialist press using the ‘opportunity’ of Eleanor’s suicide as an example of the ‘life-failure’2 of socialism as a way of living. Popular accounts of the story ran as follows: Aveling had decided to return to his first wife Bell Frank and their children and wanted Eleanor to join them in a ‘marriage of three’.3 Appalled, Eleanor preferred death to this free-love union. The fact that Bell had been dead for several years and no children existed from that marriage exposed the absurdity of this version of events.

  It’s important to hold in mind that at this stage, July 1898, very few people knew of the existence of Eva Frye, apart from a few complicit friends of Edward and Eva’s who went to their wedding party the year before in June 1897 – and even they weren’t exactly clear on the true circumstances of the marriage they witnessed.

  Bernstein’s speculation of what drove Eleanor to her death is full of supposition, leaning heavily on what he calls the ‘psychological enigma’4 of Eleanor’s attachment to Edward and her tragic belief that by sticking by him she could cure what she called his ‘moral disease’.5 ‘It was from the moral point of view the life of Ibsen’s Frau Alving,’6 Bernstein summarises. His questions, however, are substantively pertinent: ‘Did Dr Aveling desire or have any interest in the suicide of Eleanor Marx?’7

  For Labour Leader, the ‘ingratitude, injustice and hardness’ that Aveling displayed at the inquest spoke for themselves. Aveling publicly repudiated Eleanor Marx; he would be judged accordingly.

  Bernstein’s article stands for many similar ones written immediately and in the years after Tussy’s death by close friends and political comrades – including Havelock Ellis and the heartbroken Library. Like Bernstein, all Tussy’s close intimates had experienced her absolute delight in her new home: ‘An ideal existence seemed to open out before her; her face would beam with pleasure as she welcomed her friends to the “Den”.’8 Aveling was unable simply to leave, take only what
was fairly his and start a new life. He seemed compelled to try and destroy Eleanor’s contentment and security, as well as her legal entitlement to her own property. This was his psychological tragedy.

  However, the most striking aspect of this piece is its telling focus on Freddy Demuth. Bernstein publishes nine letters Eleanor wrote to Freddy from August 1897 to March 1898, correspondence directly concerning tumultuous events in her personal life with Edward. Bernstein introduces Freddy as ‘the son of Helen Demuth . . . who was a second mother to the children of Marx’:

  and in brotherly fidelity stood Frederick Demuth to Eleanor Marx. He is a simple workman, to whom life has not been too kind, and I have strong grounds for believing that in the documents left by Eleanor Marx for her legal advisor his name stood in a prominent position.9

  Documents retained and destroyed by Aveling.

  Cherchez les femmes. Two women, Helen Demuth and Jenny Marx, lifelong friends. They lived together, delivered and raised children together from their own childhoods to death. Tussy’s two mothers, who both had relationships with the same man. A ‘marriage of three’?10 These three intermeshed selves inseparable from Friedrich Engels, as he was from them. Each in relation to the other a friendship quartet. Each one kept secrets – for each other but also, for different reasons, for themselves. 11

  In brotherly fidelity stood Frederick Demuth to Eleanor. Freddy, whose physical likeness to Karl Marx in every point was, as Louise Kautsky brusquely put it, almost comical. Even without the father philosopher’s signature beard.

  Edward Aveling died three days after Bernstein’s article was published. Within weeks, Bernstein found himself confronted by new revelations as he worked on the settlement of Aveling’s estate with August Bebel. Freddy Demuth stayed in contact with Laura Lafargue and Eduard Bernstein for the remainder of their lives.12

  Bernstein wrote that Eleanor’s friends had a double duty to clear up the crime committed against her: the maintenance of personal responsibility as a shared, common interest of social existence, and the responsibility of friendship.

  And what of Eleanor’s personal responsibility to the common interest?

  There are as many theories of suicide as there are suicides. Aveling claimed at the inquest that Eleanor had several times suggested they end it together and he paid no attention to her threats of suicide, since she made them so frequently. Yet Eleanor was dead, apparently having agreed to the novel idea of a unilateral suicide pact.

  No theory will unravel a death so complex in motivation. Each case of suicide is fixed in the human particular: the individual story. Suicide takes place at moments of great crisis. It may be chaotic and anguished; it may be perfectly ordered and rational. It may be a form of murder.

  Ethical arguments continue over whether individuals have the moral right to take their own lives. In the end, all the argument and analysis and case studies and psychological profiling condenses into a clear set of choices. Ultimately, there are two kinds of suicide: one for the outside world; one for yourself.

  Suicide is not making a point; it’s making sense.

  It is an act of control over the body. Self-control if entered into voluntarily. Control by another if an act of coercion or concealed murder. The instinct for human survival is so strong that any experience overriding the control of the body takes hold and leaves a strong memory. Anorexia. Depression. Miscarriage. Physical and emotional violence. Extreme bodily exploitation. These were common experiences amongst women of all classes in the nineteenth century.

  Aaron Rosebury recalled that Tussy admitted to being sometimes tired of life. But who in her line of work wouldn’t be, sometimes? For every example of her despair at life and humanity there is a counter-example of Tussy’s stamina and joie de vivre. Her gloom at the global victory of capitalism and man’s inhumanity to man could be dispelled by a bus ride through London, a new book, or an evening in the company of friends at the Den.

  At the end of 1845, Karl Marx wrote an article on Jacques Peuchet’s memoirs, entitled ‘Peuchet: On Suicide’.13 In it, Marx observed that French criticism of society had ‘at least, the great merit of having shown up the contradictions and unnaturalness of modern life not only in the relationships of particular classes, but in all circles and forms of modern intercourse’.14 A decade before her birth Eleanor’s future father selected and highlighted the following passage written by Peuchet:

  Amongst the reasons for the despair which leads very sensitive persons to seek death . . . I [Peuchet] have uncovered as a dominant factor the bad treatment, the injustices, the secret punishments which severe parents and superiors visit on people dependent on them. The Revolution has not overthrown all tyrannies; the evils which were charged against despotic power continue to exist in the family; here they are the cause of crises analogous to those of revolutions.15

  Marx and Engels, and Eleanor after them, thought, wrote and spoke extensively about tyranny and contradiction within the family and the forms of social revolution required to adequately address them. Eleanor, however, was clear on the question of personal responsibility. In her darkest hour, she did not blame the sins of the fathers for her own predicament but took the measure of the situation from within herself. In September 1897 she wrote to Freddy urgently asking him to come and assist her:

  I am so lonely, and I am face to face with a most dreadful situation: Absolute ruin – everything, even to the last penny, or deepest shame before the whole world. It is frightful. It presents itself to me even worse than it is. And I need someone with whom I can take counsel. I know that the final decision and responsibility will rest with me – but a little counsel and friendly assistance will be of immeasurable value.16

  Eleanor Marx the woman leaves us with the contradictions of her life to consider. Eleanor Marx the politician, thinker, feminist and activist leaves us with our own question of personal responsibility to the common interest that is essential to social existence.

  Many of the freedoms and benefits of modern democracy Britain inherited for the twentieth century and beyond into our own new millennium were a direct result of the work done by Eleanor Marx and women and men like her. The eight-hour day. The outlawing of child labour. Access to equal education. Freedoms of expression. Trade unions. Universal suffrage. Democratically selected parliamentary representation, regardless of class, religion, gender or ethnicity. Feminism.

  To live with Eleanor for a while is to have an opportunity to remember how we got here, where the democratic liberties we enjoy came from. And at what price we let them go.

  Undermining employment rights, socially stigmatising the poor, blaming the sick, demonising immigrants, betraying child labourers, polluting the environment in the name of surplus value and incentivising families to send women home to make babies: all of these contribute to the re-creation of an economic underclass – and all of them are happening now.

  There is a deletion of historical memory under way. Ideational conditions have changed; it’s almost as if we have convinced ourselves that inequality, consumerism and global commodity capitalism are a naturally inbuilt economic system to which there is no viable alternative.

  Tussy’s life is a reflection on the methods and values that got us to the forms of liberty, education, job protection, reproductive rights and access to healthcare that underpin social democracy and a strong civil society. If we don’t remember how we got here, we won’t know how to fix it.

  This tale of Tussy’s life is a remembering, not a recuperation. As she would be the first to say, all work is just a small contribution towards the next thing. Eleanor was the child of a lost collectivist age. But there are signs in the new collective impulses towards social democracy around the world that radicalism is being rethought and struggled over anew, from within a different set of historical conditions.

  Eleanor outlived the classic dialectic invented by her revolutionary family: thesis, antithesis, synthesis. She named the next stage, with characteristic humour, ‘the sequel’.17
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  Above all else, Eleanor knew that without bringing the question of feminism to the centre and heart of every imaginative act and movement for social and economic change, the sequel would remain indefinitely in the making. Eleanor took the longer view of history, so would not be surprised to know the sequel is still in the process of being written and would no doubt remark encouragingly, ‘Go ahead!’

  Tussy’s life stirs memory and desire. As Gerty wrote to Edith from the Den on 1 May 1898, ‘For while we are here we feel she might be coming back.’18

  Picture Section

  Eleanor Marx, ‘Tussy’ to the family, in 1871, aged about sixteen.

  Helene Demuth and Jenny von Westphalen: best friends from childhood to the grave. ‘Lenchen had the dictatorship in the house, Mrs Marx the supremacy,’ wrote Wilhelm Liebknecht.

  The most dangerous family in the world. Family portrait taken in London, 1864: Frederick Engels (standing, left) and Karl Marx, with his daughters (from left to right) Jenny, Eleanor and Laura.

  Wilhelm Liebknecht, Eleanor’s dearest ‘Library’, as the Marx children knew him.

  Eleanor’s big sisters: Jenny and Laura Marx in the 1860s, when they still lived at home.

  Paul Lafargue, Tussy’s brother-in-law and leader of the French left.

  Hippolyte Prosper-Olivier Lissagaray or ‘Lissa’: Communard and revolutionary, to whom Tussy gave her virginity.