Eleanor Marx
| Eleanor Marx | |
|---|---|
Eleanor "Tussy" Marx
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| Born |
Jenny Julia Eleanor Marx January 16, 1855 London, United Kingdom |
| Died | March 31, 1898 (aged 43) London, United Kingdom |
| Cause of death | Suicide |
| Occupation | Socialist activist, translator |
| Partner(s) | Edward Aveling |
| Parents |
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Jenny Julia Eleanor Marx (16 January 1855 – 31 March 1898), sometimes called Eleanor Aveling and known to her family as Tussy, was the English-born youngest daughter of Karl Marx. She was herself a socialist activist who sometimes worked as a literary translator. In March 1898, after discovering that Edward Aveling, her partner and a prominent British Marxist, had secretly married a young actress in June of the previous year, she committed suicide by poison. She was 43.
Eleanor Marx was born in London on 16 January 1855, the sixth child and fourth daughter of Marx and his wife Jenny von Westphalen. She was called "Tussy" from a young age. She showed an early interest in politics, even writing to political figures during her childhood. The hanging of the Manchester Martyrs when she was twelve, for example, horrified her and shaped her lifelong sympathy for the Fenians. Her father's story-telling also inspired an interest in literature in her, she could recite passages by William Shakespeare at the age of three. By her teenage years this love of Shakespeare led to the formation of the 'Dogberry Club' at which she, her family and the family of Clara Collet, all recited Shakespeare whilst her father watched.
While Karl Marx was writing his major work Capital in the family home, his youngest daughter Eleanor played in his study. Marx invented and narrated a story for Eleanor based on an antihero called Hans Röckle. Eleanor reports that this was one of her favourite childhood stories. The story is significant because it offered Eleanor lessons through allegory of Marx's critique of political economy which he was writing in Capital. As an adult, Eleanor was involved in translating and editing volumes of Capital. She also edited Marx's lectures Value, Price and Profit and Wage Labour and Capital, which were based on the same material, into books. Eleanor Marx's biographer, Rachel Holmes, writes: "Tussy's childhood intimacy with [Marx] whilst he wrote the first volume of Capital provided her with a thorough grounding in British economic, political and social history. Tussy and Capital grew up together".
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