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1918, twenty years after Eleanor Marx 's death: "The hall was fairly well
filled; the audience almost wholly women, as the speakers were too.
The pure essence of either sex is a little disheartening. Moreover,
whether it's a meeting of men or of women, one can't help wondering
why they do it. I get one satisfactory thrill from the sense of multitude,
then become disillusioned, finally bored and unable to listen to a
word."
Certainly "Tussy," as she was known to her family, seems to have
shared the Marxs ' political passions from early childhood, when she
espoused Irish Fenianism-"eine Politikerin von top to bottom,"
according to her mother. There were three gifted daughters, each in
turn a devoted secretary and helpmeet
to
the father whom they adored,
and whose need for help was bottomless. Eleanor was the youngest,
born in London in 1855; and the only one to live her adult life in
England. After Marx's death she became a respected figure in the
workers' movements of the eighties and nineties, and was idolized by
the poor of London's East End, among whom she rediscovered her
Jewish blood, identifying herself with the most oppressed of peoples,
and with the Trier rabbis from whom Marx was descended.
While socialism inevitably was the center of her life, her secret
passion was for the stage. Her father read
King Lear
with his daugh–
ters; her mother wrote articles on the London theatrical season for the
Frankfurter Zeitung.
Tussy took acting lessons and performed with
amateur groups; she often ended her speeches to the workers of
Liverpool or Birmingham with a recitation of Nora 's final scene in
A Doll's House.
It
was possibly her love of the stage that drew her to Edward
Aveling, a popularizer of Darwin and a notorious atheist, also known
as an actor and playwright under the name "Alec Nelson."
In
1884, a
year after her father 's death, she announced to family and friends that
she and Aveling (who was previously married) had decided to live
together as man and wife. They were now jointly to carry the banner of
Marxian socialism in England, mediating under Engels's protective
guidance between the continental parties and various English
groups-the Social Democratic Federation, William Morris's Socialist
League, the Independent Labour Party, the "New Unions" of the
unskilled. They toured America twice, addressing enthusiastic public
meetings organized by local socialist clubs; in London their work was
dominated by the campaign for a legal eight-hour day. At its height
this movement generated massive May Day demonstrations in the
central squares of every major city in Europe and America; the 1891
