15 - A century of Ibsen criticism

Summary

MARXISM, PROPAGANDA AND SHAW: VARIETIES OF IBSENITE CRITICISM

'I feel I must do something to make people understand our Ibsen a little more than they do,' wrote Eleanor Marx to Havelock Ellis in late December 1885. So invitations went out to a 'few people worth reading Nora to'; and on 15 January 1886, in their flat in Great Russell Street, Karl Marx's youngest daughter and her common-law husband, Edward Aveling, played host to one of the first readings in England of an Ibsen play - A Doll's House in the Henrietta Frances Lord translation. Bernard Shaw was a favoured invitee, playing the part of Krogstad to the Mrs Linde of William Morris's daughter, May. And the evening turned out to be an auspicious one for 'Ibsenism', a meeting point for the plethora of '-isms' - Marxism, Socialism and Fabianism - that hailed Ibsen as a spokesman of their cause.

Before the Great Russell Street soirée, Ibsen had been the subject of articles by proselytizing but generally apolitical English Scandinavianists, like Edmund Gosse, who were intent on making him known beyond the boundaries of Norway. Now Aveling was giving rabble-rousing papers on Ghosts and stirring up debate in the Playgoers' Club at which (writes Shaw) 'Mrs Aveling and I, being of course seasoned socialist mob orators, were much in the position of a pair of terriers dropped into a pit of rats.' Eleanor Marx was spreading the Ibsenist gospel beyond the confines of Bloomsbury to the working-class districts of London and the Midlands.