“I want a man who is kind and understanding. Is that too much to ask of a millionaire?” The words are those of Zsa Zsa Gabor but the sentiment and the tone belong to Lizzie Burns, the eponymous heroine of this superb historical novel, whose salty voice, as distinctive as that of Dolores Keane, guides us through the labyrinthine course of 19th-century revolutionary politics and the equally convoluted personal lives of those who sought nothing less than to shape the destiny of mankind.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels laid the theoretical foundations of the most savage regimes of the twentieth century, which were responsible for the deaths of countless millions. They were the most dangerous men of their own or any age. Yet for the most part they lived the lives of upright bourgeoisie gentlemen, jealous of their respectability and entangled in relationships they sometimes found debilitating. Engels, second only to Marx in responsibility for bringing down empires and states, was prostrated for days by a querulous letter from his aged mother. Marx, in whose name Mao murdered millions, wept like a maiden aunt at his daughter’s engagement.
Marx and Engels strived to eradicate capitalist society and to make the world anew. It was Engels’ fascination with revolutionary Irish republicanism that brought him into contact with Mary and Lizzie Burns, young illiterate Manchester Irish women with tenuous links to the Fenians. Their subsequent ménage à trois in Salford and Lizzie and Engels’ life with the Marx family in London in the 1860s and 1870s are the context for this splendid exploration of the complexities of love and the contradictions between political ideals and intractable personal realities.
The book provides a gripping insight into the lives of extraordinary men whose impact on the life of subsequent generations is fathomless and consequently whose workaday existence can no more be humdrum than could the contents of Hitler’s diary.
Everything is seen through Lizzie’s sharp eye and described with a mixture of mordant wit, humanity and an unerring capacity for exposing the phoney and self-serving. Unimpressed by the pretensions of professional subversives, she recognises the revolutionary poseur as a braggart. Engels, seeking the kudos of victimhood, tells everyone that “the unfortunate circumstances into which I was born” are those of ‘”a capitalist and a bourgeois”. The risible hypocrisy of Karl and Jenny Marx is relentlessly exposed: the man who detests capitalism as a violation of human dignity is quite happy to live on the handouts of a factory-owner and to shamelessly exploit his generosity; he detests the family and bourgeois morality, yet dotes on his children, refuses to live in Whitechapel for fear they won’t make the right contacts and is preoccupied with finding husbands who will provide for them; he happily sacrifices the happiness of others to maintain his respectability.
Equally revealing are Lizzie’s observations of the tortuous relationship between middle-class revolutionaries and those on whose behalf they claim to speak. Her insight is scalpel-sharp, as true of today’s Bollinger Bolsheviks as of Marx’s coterie. Their patronising condescension to people of whom they know nothing and understand less is epitomised in Marx’s determination to address participants in the Paris Commune in order to help them understand what they have been involved in. This superior insight Marx has acquired, not on the barricades, but while safely ensconced in his Primrose Hill villa.
The revolutionaries’ dismissive attitude to working-class mores is always harmful to those who live in that milieu. Engels, meticulous in concealing his outré domestic arrangements from his respectable friends, fails to see that it is Mary and Lizzie who pay the price. The secret at the heart of the Marx family is maintained for their benefit despite its cancerous effect on the lives of the working-class women with whom they are involved.
Lizzie herself, invariably introduced as “a proletarian, Irish rebel and model communist”, is the token worker, hawked about to lend Marx’s ideas authenticity. Had anyone actually asked Lizzie her thoughts – “Isn’t a clean home and a stable situation what we’re all of us after?” – they would have found them not necessarily demanding of violent revolution. Lizzie finds more authentic idealism in the aspirations of the impoverished Fenians than in the intellectual posturing of middle-class visionaries.
Though referred to as a Fenian, Lizzie’s involvement in the movement is slight and this is perhaps one area the book neglected to fully explore. The momentous events in Manchester in 1867, immediately after the Fenian rising that year, which led to the Britain’s last public multiple execution, are referred to but their impact on the city’s Irish community is not conveyed. Nor is the strength and fervour of Fenian sentiment in Manchester, which was a stronghold of the movement. Lizzie’s attachment is entirely personal rather than political.
The spectacular Fenian outrage at Clerkenwell that led to the execution of Michael Barrett had a profound effect on Marx and his attitude to revolutionary nationalism. Yet this seminal event is only hinted at in reference to Lizzie’s former lover, a Manchester Fenian, who is involved in the murky machinations of the movement. Lizzie admires the Fenians’ capacity for self-sacrifice but demonstrates no sympathy for their cause.
Conversely, it is the self-obsessed narcissism, their insistence on dumping their problems on others, that Lizzie identifies as the principal moral weakness of the privileged. Love, decency, self-respect require us to keep certain sufferings to ourselves, to carry and endure them and to spare others from them. As Lizzie says, “Why don’t you keep your business to yourselves you people? [Do you want us to] carry the load around so you don’t have to?” A trouble shared, she believes, is always a trouble doubled.
Lizzie’s stoicism, her ability to accept and even love people despite their shortcomings – she is never blind to her sister’s capacity for manipulation or the lecherous Engels’ profound selfishness – is the demanding yardstick against which others are measured and found wanting.
Yet for all its forensic social analysis, what is most absorbing about this book is its exploration of the many-faceted nature of love. Every character in the book, no matter how shabby or mercenary, is capable of and is, to some extent, redeemed by love. In some cases it is patriotic love, in others parental love but at its core is the love between Lizzie and Engels, from its bizarre origins to its fulfilment only on her deathbed. It is the portrayal of this relationship, improbable yet rendered with such a resounding ring of truth, that drives the story on and keeps you turning the pages.
No book is ever the worse for trailing a mystery resolved only at the end and then in such a way as to cast a new light on what has preceded it. McCrea nurtures and reveals the secret with a deftness of touch that adds a new dimension to the entire story. For this alone it’s well worth reading.
Joseph O’Neill is a freelance writer and broadcaster whose work appears in all Britain and Ireland’s leading family history and genealogical magazines. He is the author of six books, including The Manchester Martyrs (Mercier Press), which deals with a major incident in the development of Irish nationalism and Britain’s last public multiple execution, and Crime City (Milo Press), the story of Manchester’s Victorian underworld. His latest books, The Secret History of the Victorian Lodging House and Manchester in the Great War, which deals with the profound impact of the war on the city’s civilian population, are both published by Pen & Sword
