ABSTRACT
Who, we might ask, either needs or wants to dwell for long on the appalling Edward Aveling, to whom Eleanor Marx sacrificed herself so disastrously? There can be few men of his time for whom the record is so recurrently one of distaste – particularly as it has come down to us through the reactions of those who knew him well. His physical appearance prompted extreme reactions. For the leader of the Social Democratic Federation, H.M. Hyndman, he had ‘a forbidding face – ugly and even repulsive, nobody can be as bad as Aveling looks’. For G.B. Shaw ‘he had no physical charm except a voice like a euphonium’. Eleanor Marx’s friend Olive Schreiner found him morally as well as physically repellent – the real criminal type’. 1 For Shaw, to the question what sort of a man was Edward Aveling?’, the answer from anyone who knew him was a shriek of laughter and the question: ‘how much have you lent him?’ 2 Aveling was always hard up and on the lookout for a loan.
