Edward Aveling

Edward Bibbins Aveling (29 November 1849 – 2 August 1898) was an English comparative anatomist, botanist and popular spokesman for Darwinian evolution, atheism, and socialism. He was also a journalist, editor, playwright, actor, short story writer and poet. Aveling was the author of scientific works and numerous literary and political pamphlets that were published by The Freethought Publishing Company; he is perhaps best known for his popular work The Student's Darwin (1881) that appeared in the 'International Freethought and Science' series; he also translated the first volume of Karl Marx's Das Kapital and Friedrich Engels' Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. Aveling was elected vice-president of the National Secular Society from 1880–84, and was a member of the Democratic Federation and then in August 1884 elected to the executive council of the Social Democratic Federation, he was also a founding member of the Socialist League and the Independent Labour Party. During the year-long imprisonment of George William Foote for blasphemy, he was interim editor for The Freethinker and Foote's monthly magazine Progress. With William Morris, he was the sub-editor of Commonweal. He was an organizer of the mass movement of the unskilled workers and the unemployed in the late 1880s unto the early 1890s, and a delegate to the International Socialist Workers' Congress of 1889. For fifteen years, he was the partner of Eleanor Marx, the youngest daughter of Karl Marx, and co-authored many works with her, and co-edited works of Marx. After her tragic death on 31 March ( by suicide, allegedly precipitated by Aveling's secret marriage to another), he continued and published: The Eastern Question by Karl Marx- A Reprint of Letters written 1853–56 dealing with the events of the Crimean War(1898) and Value, Price, and Profit.(1898) Both these last works were signed simply: "Edited by Eleanor Marx-Aveling, with a...