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

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.