TORMENT AND TRAGEDY: The Doomed Partnership of Eleanor Marx and Edward Aveling

By Deborah Lavin

This book is a study of the Free Love Union of Eleanor Marx, the youngest daughter of Karl Marx, and her partner Edward Aveling, a topic which has been sorely neglected by historians. It was a union formed in 1884, which lasted for fourteen years, until the death of Eleanor in 1898. Aveling died a few months later that same year. During the years that the pair were together, Aveling was very active in the (still very small) British socialist movement. Eleanor was active primarily in the trade union movement.

Eleanor Marx has had several biographers and the main outlines of her life are well-known. Aveling, by contrast, has had none and far less is known about him. He led a strangely elusive life which left relatively few traces. What we do know is that he was Eleanor's senior by a few years, that he was the son of a prominent Congregational minister, that he had a scientific education and that he came to reject his religious upbringing, embracing Darwin's ideas with ardour. But rather than pursuing a scientific career, he became a populariser was soon a rising star of the mid-century secularist movement.

In the early 1880s he made the acquaintance of Eleanor and discovered Marxism. He fully embraced Marx's ideas and entered into a Free Love union with Eleanor the year after Marx's death. He had entered at an early age upon a short-lived marriage which had never been dissolved and was therefore not free to enter into legal matrimony with Eleanor.

Despite their shared interests, the pair were badly matched. He benefited enormously from his union with Eleanor, enjoying near-iconic status as "son-in-law of Karl Marx", which gave him an instant entrée to the top ranks of socialist politics. But he continued to live very much the life of a single man about town, cutting a dash with women, living well beyond his means, borrowing from friends and falling into debt. His faithlessness to Eleanor is evidenced by his secret marriage (his first wife having died by this time) to a young woman nine months before the death of Eleanor.

Eleanor sudden death, a suicide by the verdict of the inquest, drew wide condemnation upon Aveling from Eleanor's friends, who saw him as having driven her to extremity. Some friends had still darker suspicions, though none at the time had knowledge of Aveling's secret marriage.

The manner of Eleanor's death has also posed immense difficulties for Eleanor's biographers. It has always seemed to demand more explaining than the available evidence will bear. Eleanor as suicide does not sit well with Eleanor as a highly gifted woman who blazed an independent path in life, who was strong both in success and in adversity. Eleanor's biographers have struggled mightily to make sense of it all, but they have not done well. In fact, none of their interpretations has been remotely adequate.

It was not long before Deborah saw that everyone was stumbling on the opening block, the verdict of suicide, which had been uncritically accepted by everyone, but which Deborah determined to subject to an exhaustive re-evaluation. She was greatly aided in her inquiry by her close knowledge of the rudimentary state of forensic medicine in the nineteenth century and the manner in which inquests were often conducted. The inadequate state of medical forensic in the nineteenth century has not been well understood by other writers. The result of Deborah's investigation leaves us in no doubt that the inquest verdict was unsafe and almost certainly wrong.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Michael Wicks
• Release date: May 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201445010

Deborah Lavin

Deborah Lavin (1951-2020) was a poet, a playwright, and a writer and speaker on English social history. She curated numerous series of lectures, including 'The British Business of Slavery', an eight-part series on the slave trade delivered at Conway Hall, London, in 2015. Her ground-breaking study, 'Bradlaugh Contra Marx – Radicalism versus Socialism in the First International', was published by the Socialist History Society, of which she was a member, in 2011. Deborah’s plays, bearing mostly on contemporary social and domestic issues, have been performed in the British Isles and in a number of other countries, including Germany and Japan. Her play 'Happy Families' enjoyed a recent revival in Japan. Another play, 'The Deadly Incubus', arose from Deborah’s interest in the partnership of Eleanor Marx and Dr Edward Aveling, which ended with Eleanor's death. In the course of her research and writing for this play, Deborah came across many loose ends and unanswered questions. Deborah decided that a more exhaustive examination was needed, the outcome of which is the present book.

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About the Author

Deborah Lavin, 1951-2020, sadly died in the full flood of her creativity. She was a poet, a playwright, a keen student of English social history and a long-time member of the Socialist History Society (SHS). She curated numerous series of lectures, including The British Business of Slavery, an eight-part series on the slave trade delivered at Conway Hall in 2015. In addition, she gave many lectures herself. Her ground-breaking study, Bradlaugh Contra Marx – Radicalism versus Socialism in the First International, was published by the SHS in 2011.

Deborah’s plays, bearing mostly on contemporary social and domestic issues, have been performed in the British Isles and in a number of other countries, including Germany and Japan. Her play Happy Families enjoyed a recent revival in Japan. Another play, The Deadly Incubus, arose from Deborah’s interest in the ill-starred partnership of Eleanor Marx and Dr Edward Aveling, which ended with Eleanor’s death. In the course of her research and writing for this play, Deborah came across many loose ends and unanswered questions. Deborah decided that a more exhaustive examination was needed, the outcome of which is the present book.

Copyright © 2022 The Estate of Deborah Lavin

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any manner without the prior written permission of the copyright owner, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

To my grandchildren, Kit, Lottie and George.

List of Illustrations

Edward Bibbins Aveling about the time he earned his doctorate. 

Charles Bradlaugh, President of the National Secular Society. 

Eleanor Marx, daughter of Karl Marx

Annie Besant

Aveling in his later years

7 Jews Walk (The Den), the house where Eleanor died. 

Sample of Eleanor’s signature

Further sample of Eleanor’s handwriting

Sample of Edward’s signature

Further sample of Edward’s handwriting

(Signature samples courtesy the International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam). 

CONTENTS

FOREWORD

ELEANOR MARX

Lissagaray

The dramatic muse

Eleanor goes into the world

EDWARD AVELING

A summer escapade

University College London

Aveling takes a wife

A mysterious ailment and the end of a marriage

Obtains his doctorate

Another little mystery

CHARLES BRADLAUGH

ANNIE BESANT DISCOVERS AVELING

Annie finds a science tutor

Unholy Trinity: Three Persons and No God

Bradlaugh takes Aveling’s measure

Another unexplained bout of illness

An extravagantly false account of Aveling’s early life

ELEANOR AND AVELING DISCOVER EACH OTHER

A mutual interest

Annie makes an unpleasant discovery

Hyndman takes a sea voyage and discovers Marx

A stranger at Marx’s funeral

Beatrice Webb meets Eleanor

Eleanor and Aveling sift Marx’s papers

Aveling tries to square the circle

FREE LOVE UNION

Eleanor and Aveling together

Social Democratic Federation

Socialist League

An American interlude

Eleanor at home

Aveling dips his hand into the theatre

The New Unionism and the Eight-Hour Day

The Independent Labour Party and a Joust with Keir Hardie

Jews Walk

Full circle – and a secret marriage

DÉNOUEMENT

To the fateful day

A wintry morning

Forensic medicine in the nineteenth century

The Inquest

What Aveling said on the witness stand

What Gertie said on the witness stand

The signatures

What Gertie was thinking on the witness stand

The doctor gives vital evidence which is duly ignored

The Verdict

A porous alibi

The funeral and after

The A.K. Donald interview

Avoiding a scandal

Exeunt Aveling

The Reason Why

FOREWORD

The current work was originally conceived as a biography of Edward Bibbins Aveling, the nineteenth century secularist, later a convert to Marxism, who entered into a Free Love partnership with Karl Marx’s youngest daughter, Eleanor Marx, a partnership which ended only with Eleanor’s death. Aveling himself died a few months later. In the years that he was united with Eleanor, Aveling played a very active role in socialist politics, enjoying a very close working relationship with Engels and top billing as ‘son-in-law of Karl Marx’. Eleanor has had a number of biographers over the years, but there has, remarkably, been no biography of Aveling, and he receives only the most fleeting notice, no more than honourable mention, in wider-ranging works. It was as though Aveling was all but vanished from history.

Deborah Lavin was intrigued by this lacuna. It seemed that there were two reasons for the neglect of Aveling. One was that for all of the active role that he played in socialist politics in the last years of the nineteenth, Aveling left remarkably few traces behind him as he went through life, and actually very little record of solid accomplishment. There were many traces, in fact, that he would have wanted to kick over, much about his life that he would like kept hidden, and he had succeeded all too well. He led several lives in parallel which barely intersected with each other. He was the son of a Congregational minister who received a scientific education and still early in life became an ardent secularist and later an active proponent of Marxism. He saw himself throughout very much as man of science, though in truth he was a populariser rather than a practising scientist. This man of science combined within himself the ‘two cultures’, the artistic and the scientific, for he had a keen appreciation of poetry, particularly the work of Shelley, and no less of the theatre. He wrote several plays under an assumed name but failed in his ambition to achieve wide recognition or commercial success as a playwright. Not the least of his avocations, however, was as a sheer bounder. He left a trail of debt, hurt and distrust behind him wherever he went, though he managed to keep these less reputable activities sufficiently murky as to remain the stuff of whispered rumour only. He remained elusive to the end, destroying his own letters prior to his death and all of Eleanor’s that he could lay his hands on. So little material did he leave for the biographer that it was some time into the work before Deborah could be sure that a definitive biography was even possible.

The other consideration that made Aveling a difficult subject was his problematic role in the death of his partner. Eleanor Marx died, so we are to believe, by her own hand, poisoning herself with prussic acid. Such was the verdict of the inquest into her death, a verdict which has never been challenged or even, truth to say, closely examined. This verdict has posed enormous difficulties for Eleanor’s biographies, who have been uniformly sympathetic and have portrayed her, not unreasonably, very much as her father’s daughter—highly talented, keenly interested in the theatre, both in Shakespeare and the contemporary social drama pioneered by Ibsen, fluent in several languages, a dedicated and very capable activist in the cause of socialism. All of the above was true and conveyed a picture of a woman who had blazed an independent path in life, strong both in success and in adversity. But this is a depiction which is very dissonant with Eleanor as suicide. Eleanor’s biographers have been torn by the dissonance and have struggled mightily to work their way through it. They have not done well. What we have from them is a welter of speculation, their very perplexity driving them to reams of unsupported conjecture.[1]

Aveling was seen by Eleanor’s friends as a faithless partner who had driven her to extremity, and this much Eleanor’s biographers have had to accept. At the centre of every line of inquiry into Eleanor’s death has been the belief that she learned, on the very morning of her death, or very shortly before, that Aveling, for whom she had made great sacrifices, had secretly married another woman. The conclusion seemed unavoidable that Eleanor’s shock and distress at this ultimate treachery were what precipitated her deed on that morning. Eleanor’s most definitive biographer, Yvonne Kapp, was unwilling to admit that Eleanor had died as the distraught victim of an abusive male partner. While not doubting that Eleanor received word of Aveling’s secret marriage on the morning in question and that this would have been the ‘last straw’, Kapp shrinks this scenario down to virtual invisibility, concluding that Eleanor’s decision to take her own life was made not in a state of haste and torment but rather in one of relative composure, that hers was a ‘voluntary death’ (strangely anodyne phraseology) undertaken for primarily impersonal reasons, the chief of which, in Kapp’s rendition, was disappointment at the slow and halting progress of the socialist movement.[2] This is a construction which preserves Eleanor’s agency, leaving her in complete control, but it is extremely tendentious and psychologically inadequate.

In fact, none of the interpretations of Eleanor’s biographers is remotely adequate. They all rest ultimately on Eleanor’s supposed discovery of Aveling’s marriage on, or shortly prior to, the morning of her death, but there is actually no evidence that Eleanor ever learned of the marriage; the supposition that she did so is based solely on one report which surfaced later, very likely a piece of willful disinformation, which has gained credence only from oft repetition.

It became increasingly apparent to Deborah that none of Eleanor’s biographers, nor any historians who have touched at all on Eleanor’s death in the course of broader inquiries,[3] had examined the evidence from the morning of Eleanor’s death. Each and all had simply accepted the inquest verdict as the starting point for all further inquiry, in part, no doubt, because suicide was a less unpleasant verdict than the alternative, that Eleanor had been the hapless victim of foul play at the hands of a partner who had for years made ill use of her. Deborah determined to get at the truth. She was greatly aided in her inquiry by her close knowledge of the rudimentary state of forensic medicine in the nineteenth century and the slipshod manner in which inquests were often conducted. Many an inquest in these times was little more than a false show of an inquiry designed to bring an appearance of closure in cases where it was practically impossible to arrive at the truth, particularly cases of poisoning, which were notoriously difficult to prove. The inadequate state of medical forensic in the nineteenth century has not been well understood by other writers. Deborah’s examination of Eleanor’s inquest found the proceeding, not untypically, to have been conducted in a peremptory, if not downright prejudicial, manner, by a deputy coroner who was more interested in reaching a neat and tidy verdict and avoiding scandal for a local worthy than in doing justice to the memory of the daughter of a European revolutionary.

In light of the above, it was no longer possible to regard the manner of Eleanor’s death as a settled matter. The inquest verdict was very clearly unsafe and almost certainly wrong. At this point Deborah decided to lay aside her original project of a biography of Edward Aveling. She embarked instead on a journey which led not only to the heart of what happened on a wintry morning in March 1898 but also to the heart of whole tormented partnership between Aveling and Eleanor which culminated in that fateful day. How had it come about that two such different people as Eleanor and Aveling had been united together? And why had they stayed so long together? What were the consequences for the socialist movement in late nineteenth century Britain? This book is the product of the discoveries made upon that journey.

Treading much new ground as it does and drawing on previously unpublished material, the work was inevitably long in gestation both before and after Deborah redirected her efforts. Sadly, Deborah died before the work was finished. She left an almost complete manuscript which, with some editing, we are now able to offer to the public. Acknowledgments and thanks are due to a large number of persons who have helped along the way, some of whom, to my regret, are probably unknown to me. Special thanks are due to Stefan Dickers, the Library and Archives Manager at Bishopsgate Institute, which holds the Bradlaugh papers, for his indefatigable support. Deborah would also have wished to thank the staff at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam, which holds most of what survives of Eleanor’s correspondence. Thanks are also due to members of the extended Aveling family who helped with their insights and family lore, particularly to Dr Paul Redhead, the grandson of Edward’s brother, Rev Frederick Aveling. And special thanks to those who have read and discussed the manuscript of this book at various stages of its development, notably David Morgan and Stephen Williams, both of the Socialist History Society.[4] Deborah also had the benefit of contacts with two of Eleanor’s biographers, Yvonne Kapp and Chushichi Tsuzuki. Deborah would also have wished to thank Francis King for making known to her a recently discovered letter from Maria Mendelson to her friend Vera Zasulich, sent shortly after Eleanor’s death, which has a bearing on the case. Stephen Williams brought the same letter to my attention later, when it was still unknown to me. A thank-you goes to all the others, and I wish I could name them all, who have in any way assisted in the writing of this book by reading and commenting on parts of the manuscript.

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Michael Wicks

April 2022

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[1] Kapp, Yvonne, Eleanor Marx, Lawrence and Wishart, London, 1976, ii, 705ff.

[2] Ibid, ii, 707-708.

[3] Inter alia, Padover, Saul K, Karl Marx: An Intimate Biography, McGraw Hill, New York, 1978.

⁴ Williams, Stephen and Tony Chandler, Tussy’s great delusion – Eleanor Marx’s death revisited, Socialist History, 58, Lawrence & Wishart, London, 2020.

ELEANOR MARX

Eleanor Marx was the third daughter of the German revolutionary who took refuge in England, in common with so many others of his kind, escaping the tide of reaction which swept over the continent with the collapse of the revolutions of 1848. Eleanor was born in 1855, the only one of Karl Marx’s children to be born and grow to adulthood in the land of her father’s exile. Two boys had died in infancy, which is often put down to Marx’s failure to provide adequately for his family, but infant mortality was high among all classes in those pre-antibiotic times. It cannot be denied, however, that poverty may have been a contributory factor. The Marxes lived in very penurious conditions in the early years of their exile, though by the time Eleanor was growing up their circumstances, while they would never be easy, had become much more secure. Marx was by now deeply engaged in his life’s work, the writing of Capital, which, however, would bring in no income until it was published and very little during the rest of Marx’s thereafter. To make ends meet he depended on journalism, which did not pay well, and on subsidies from his fellow exile, Friedrich Engels, who was a man of substantial means in virtue of the position he held in his family textile business, Ermen & Engels, in Manchester.

Marx had been born into a well-established middle-class family in Trier, an old Rhineland city that was awarded to Prussia after the Napoleonic Wars. Marx’s wife, Jenny von Westphalen, was a daughter of the Prussian aristocracy, but Marx’s decision to devote his life to revolution substantially estranged both of them from their families and precluded that they would ever have an easy path in life. But estrangement was not total and a legacy from one of Marx’s well-to-do relatives in Germany enabled the family to move into ampler accommodation the very year that Eleanor was born, and from that time on, while the family was still financially crimped, they could at least be reasonably sure of having a roof over their heads.

Though the home in which the three surviving children grew to adulthood was by no means prosperous, it was in all essentials a scene of stable and nurturing, one might almost say bourgeois, domesticity. While the children were small there was very little room at home and Marx had spent most of his days working in the Reading Room of the British Museum, but when the family moved to their new and relatively commodious house in 1855 Marx had a fine study of his own and took to working mostly at home, where he could spend much more time with the children. Of his daughters, Marx’s eldest, Jenny, was always said to be his favourite, but while he and his middle daughter Laura were never close, Marx enjoyed the company of Eleanor, or as the family called her, Tussy, a charming child with a sunny disposition. Tussy loved her father, and being happy in his company, would spend hours writing and drawing in his study as he worked. From an early age she involved herself emotionally in her father’s politics. When the American Civil War broke out, Eleanor was a great partisan of the Union. When the Fenians rebelled against British rule in 1867, she took their part with a passion. As she became familiar with her father’s battles nearer home, taking them to heart, his enemies and friends became hers as well, to the point where Marx often used to say Tussy is me.¹

Eleanor may have been brought up to disdain strictly feminine accomplishments and fancy work like sewing,² which so defined a woman’s role at the time, but Marx never seems to have thought in terms of preparing any of his daughters for an independent career. Following on her older sisters, she attended the South Hampstead College for Ladies, a thoroughly respectable girls’ school, but one where the emphasis was on preparing girls for the marriage market. Modern languages, music, singing, and dancing formed the largest parts of the curriculum. By contrast, the North London Collegiate School for Girls (NLCSG), which was run by an indomitable feminist educationalist Miss Frances Buss and was just a walking distance from the Marx home, offered a curriculum geared to university entrance; its fees were actually somewhat lower than the £8.00 per term of the South Hampstead school. The first university to admit women was University College London, and that not until 1878 (Oxford and Cambridge not until much later), but by mid-century women were beginning to demand places in university on the same basis as men and NLCSG was in the forefront of the movement. Marx would certainly have known of its reputation, but the manner in which he educated his daughters suggests that he still saw women’s and men’s rôles to be so different that they did not require the same preparation for life. Marx could see a socialist future, but he did not see the coming of the New Woman.

Lissagaray

Eleanor grew and reached the age of eighteen having lived the life of a devoted and dutiful daughter. She idolised her father and shared all his political opinions, but she entered upon early adulthood with no fame, no path in life mapped out, public face of her own. She had, however, fallen seriously in love. The subject of her ardour was the thirty-five-year-old Hippolyte Prosper Olivier Lissagaray, a count [who] had given up his title and had been cast out by his whole family because of his socialist opinions and gone on to participate in one of the great events in revolutionary history, the Commune of Paris, in 1871, earning a heroic reputation as the last soldier of the Commune to escape from the last barricade on the last bloody day.³

Lissagaray was no Marxist, nor were most of the Communard leaders, who had tended to look back to the glories of the great Revolution of 1789, not forward to the emerging battle between capital and labour, but Marx nonetheless saw the Commune as a heroic revolutionary struggle against the old order, a precursor of the revolution to come, and had become its most ardent public defender in Britain with his publication of The Civil War in France, which was published in pamphlet form soon after the Commune’s suppression. Lissagaray found a welcome in Marx’s home almost immediately upon his arrival in London as a political exile. As a participant and witness, he had written his own history of the Commune in French and was in need of an English translator. Marx believed that Eleanor was up to the task and so it was decided. But Eleanor soon developed an attachment, not just to Lissagaray’s work but to the man himself, which Marx did not at view with favour. Lissagaray was known to be a volatile character and though he may have renounced his title, he had not given up some of his aristocratic habits, notably a penchant for duelling. It was also clear he had a past. Marx tended to be conventional in his approach to marriage and domesticity and refused to countenance an engagement between Lissagaray and Eleanor, at least not until Lissagaray had proved he was better than his reputation,⁴ which rather clearly would take a lot of doing.

Eleanor mounted no open protest, but was so desperate to see Lissagaray that she connived to do so without her parents’ knowledge, an extraordinarily bold step for so dutiful a daughter. The opportunity afforded in March 1873, when Marx took his Eleanor to Brighton for a change of scene. Eleanor surprised her father by insisting she would stay behind in Brighton and find work as a teacher. Although  lacking any formal teaching qualifications, she obtained a part time post teaching French at a private school for young ladies run by two sisters, known together as the Miss Halls.

While Eleanor was teaching in Brighton, Lissagaray came down from London to visit her several times, which had been Eleanor’s purpose all along. The Miss Halls made no objection, believing as they did that he was Eleanor’s fiancé. But Mrs Marx soon heard of these visits through the Communard grapevine in London, and ordered Eleanor back home immediately. Eleanor returned after two months to find herself under a ban from seeing Lissagaray, though she was allowed to proceed with the translation of his L’Histoire de la Commune. She was heartsick at being kept from the man she loved and soon went down with a bad case of nerves.

Eleanor’s nerves persisted and so did her pining for Lissagaray. She pleaded abjectly to be allowed to see him:

It is so long since I saw him and I am beginning to feel so very miserable notwithstanding all