Blue Plaque for Eleanor Marx

-Socialist Campaigner and Youngest Daughter of Karl Marx-

 Eleanor Marx (1855-1898), Socialist campaigner and youngest daughter of Karl Marx has been commemorated with an English Heritage Blue Plaque at 7 Jews Walk, Sydenham, SE26, London Borough of Lewisham where she lived from 1895 until her tragic death in 1898. Widely remembered as an important figure in the history of both working class and women's emancipation, she won the respect and admiration of the leading socialists and trade-unionists using her father’s reputation to her advantage with modesty and effectiveness in raising support for her causes. Will Thorne remarked that, had she lived longer, she 'would have been a greater women's leader than the greatest of contemporary women'. The plaque was unveiled by Jim Dowd, MP for Lewisham West. Speeches were given by architectural historian, Dr Gavin Stamp on behalf of English Heritage; local historian Steve Grindlay and Peter Cormack - formerly of the William Morris Gallery. There was also a performance by the Strawberry Thieves Socialist Choir.

Despite the poverty and uncertainty suffered by the Marx household, Jenny Julia Eleanor Marx, known throughout her life as Eleanor or 'Tussy', flourished in an atmosphere thick with politics and Shakespeare. She began writing letters of advice to Abraham Lincoln when she was seven, becoming a passionate champion of the underdog. Her first great cause was that of the Fenians, and in 1871 she became involved with the suppressed Paris Commune. Acting as Karl Marx's secretary from the age of sixteen, she carried out research in the British Museum and accompanied her father to international conferences on socialism. She continued to work for him after his death, preparing unfinished manuscripts for publication, managing the English publication of Das Kapital (1867), and editing other works. She remained true to her love of literature, producing the first English translations of Flaubert's Madame Bovary and two of Ibsen's plays.

Eleanor's own political career began after her father’s death in 1883. Her work during the 1880s is significantly linked with that of Edward Bibbins Aveling, a former comrade of her father's and a married man, with whom she lived from 1884 until her death. Eleanor and Aveling, in association with Friedrich Engels - to whom Eleanor was very close- were a leading, if sometimes disruptive, presence in the English socialist movement. Eleanor was on the executive committee of the Social Democratic Movement, which she and Aveling left in 1885, joining William Morris to form the Socialist League.

From about 1889 onwards, Eleanor was more directly involved in campaigning with and on behalf of workers and it is this work, which she undertook independently of Aveling, that many see as her most important. She was at the heart of the development of the New Unionism, sitting on the council of the National Union of Gas Workers and General Labourers. A forceful presence in the campaign for the eight-hour day, and in the dockers' strikes of 1889, she was particularly admired for her work in helping women organise their own branches, speaking passionately in support of unity of purpose and equal pay. Eleanor was active in support of Jewish workers in the East End, whose religion and recent arrival excluded them from the main body of the working class movement.

Eleanor’s later years were marred by great personal unhappiness. Throughout their relationship Aveling had been dishonest, both sexually and financially, and in 1897 Eleanor discovered that he had secretly married another woman.  She also discovered in 1895 that Freddy Demuth, whom she had always supposed to be the illegitimate son of Engels, was in fact Karl Marx's son and she was ashamed of her adored father's treatment of his child. It has been suggested that Aveling blackmailed her with the threat that he would reveal Demuth's parentage. At the age of forty-three she died by swallowing prussic acid and it has been suggested that Aveling took an active role in her death. Dr Aveling signed the poison book authorising the chemist to sell prussic acid to Eleanor's maid, and left the house shortly before the maid found Eleanor near to death. The inquest returned a verdict of 'suicide while temporarily insane.'

Her biographer, Yvonne Kapp, writes that 'she would have wished to be counted among the ranks of that great army of anonymous men and women who, over the generations, without recognition or reward, have given their volunteer service to end the exploitation of man by man and, in doing so, helped to make history'; and it is partly as a representative of a hugely significant social movement whose participants are not widely known that she deserves recognition.