A few families possess paper records stretching back through the centuries,
but for most of us, family history is handed down from mouth to ear. These
stories illuminate the past with a particular, fitful brilliance, but much is
left in the dark. This darkness is both a gift to a novelist and a daunting
responsibility. When a writer claims to speak for an illiterate woman who lived
in the mid-19th century, to what extent will he overlay her story with his own
preconceptions?
Although Gavin McCrea’s first novel is set in the circles of Karl Marx and
Friedrich Engels, this is not their story, and it does not flatter them. Engels
and Marx left copious records behind them, but were unable to describe how they
themselves might appear to a member of the working class, still less to a woman
of that class. Nor did they tell the history of two sisters born in Manchester
of Irish descent, Mary and Lizzie (Lydia) Burns, although both women were
closely connected with Engels and Marx for many years. Neither sister left any
account of their lives, but in Mrs Engels they step forward to dominate the
narrative.
Stepping out of the shadows of time … Lizzie Burns c1865
McCrea’s narrator is the younger, Lizzie (pictured), who was born in 1827.
According to Marx’s daughter Eleanor, Lizzie “was illiterate and could not read
or write but she was true, honest and in some ways as fine-souled a woman as you
could meet”. Like her elder sister Mary, Lizzie worked in a cotton mill. Mary
met Engels when he was sent to work at the family firm of Engels & Ermen in
Manchester, and she entered into a relationship with him which lasted until her
death at the age of 40. Some historians detect her influence on Engels’ The
Condition of the English Working Class, which deals with the industrial working
class of Manchester and Liverpool and describes in some detail the district of
Manchester known as Little Ireland. The Burns sisters knew about poverty, child
labour and slum housing from the inside, and would have made valuable guides for
a middle-class son of a factory owner. “Some 4,000 people, mostly Irish, inhabit
this slum ... Heaps of refuse, offal and sickening filth are everywhere
interspersed with pools of stagnant liquid. The atmosphere is polluted by the
stench and is darkened by the thick smoke of a dozen factory
chimneys.”
Mrs Engels moves back and forwards in time, between the earlier days in
Manchester and the later years after Mary’s death, when Lizzie becomes Engels’s
partner in her sister’s stead and moves with him to Primrose Hill. From the
outside, she appears secure, but inside she is torn, even tormented by the
contradictions of her life. The Engels and Marx menages are funded by reserves
of family money. Refugees from the French Commune pack the drawing room,
swallowing fine wines faster than they can be brought up from the cellar. The
Marxes’ servant, Nim, is the single mother of a child whose father Lizzie
believes to be Engels. Jenny Marx, with three surviving children out of seven
born, is obsessed with the future marriages of her girls. Meanwhile, Lizzie is
in contact with the Fenian movement through a former lover. This whirlwind of
politics and personalities might become dizzying were it not stabilised by
Lizzie’s unmistakable voice. She begins life by grabbing what she needs in order
to survive; she ends it having achieved deep self-knowledge. She tells her own
story with a fierce wit and trenchancy, shot through with poetry.
The historical Lizzie tells us nothing. Was she, as McCrea suggests, made
infertile after infection with syphilis, or did she make sure, in one way or
another, that no children were born to her? Did she hold on to enough of her
faith to see, at the closing of the coffin that held her sister’s body, “how her
hollowness and ash turned to a radiance that the oils and the candles couldn’t
fully explain”? No one will ever know, but McCrea’s fictional speculation makes
a fine symphony out of the silence that surrounds Lizzie Burns.
No comments:
Post a Comment