Lizzie Burns

Lizzie Burns

Lizzie Burns c. 1865

Lizzie Burns c. 1865
Born 1827 (1827)
Died 1878 (1879) (aged 51)
Occupation British activist

Lydia "Lizzie" Burns (1827 – 12 September 1878) was a working-class Irish woman, best known as a long-term partner and wife of Friedrich Engels.[1][2]

Lizzie Burns was a daughter of Michael Burns or Byrne, a dyer in a cotton mill, and of Mary Conroy. The family may have lived off Deansgate.[3] Her mother died in 1835, and her father remarried a year later.[4]

Lizzie had an elder sister Mary (1823–1863), a lifelong partner of Engels until her sudden death of a heart disease. Mary Burns and Engels considered marriage a bourgeois institution and never married. In the 1850s, when Mary Burns and Engels lived in Ardwick, Lizzie stayed with them as a housekeeper, and after her sister's death eventually became Engels' partner. In the 1870s they lived openly as a couple in London, with Lizzie's niece, Mary Ellen (known as Pumps), as a housekeeper.[4][5]

Both Lizzie and her sister were known as formally illiterate yet intelligent women, with strong working-class ties.[6] They showed Engels the actual conditions of the factory employers in Britain.[4] Eleanor Marx wrote that[7]

[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.

In early September 1878 Burns fell seriously ill with some kind of tumor,[4] and to please her religious beliefs, Engels married her.[6] She died hours later. Her death made a strong impression on Engels. He later wrote about her:[1]

My wife was a real child of the Irish proletariat and her passionate devotion to the class in which she was born was worth much more to me – and helped me more in times of stress – than all the elegance of an educated, artistic middle-class bluestocking.

References

  1. 1 2 Henderson, William Otto (1976). The Life of Friedrich Engels. Psychology Press. p. 567. ISBN 978-0-7146-3040-3.
  2. ↑ Samuel Hollander (2011). Friedrich Engels and Marxian Political Economy. Cambridge University Press. p. 358. ISBN 978-1-139-49844-9.
  3. ↑ Whitfield, Roy (1988) Friedrich Engels in Manchester, Working Class Movement Library, ISBN 0906932211
  4. 1 2 3 4 Dash, Mike (1 August 2013) How Friedrich Engels’ radical lover Mary Burns helped him father socialism. Smithsonian Magazine
  5. ↑ Jones, Gareth Stedman (2004) "Engels, Friedrich (1820–1895)" in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press.
  6. 1 2 Green, John (7 May 2009) Friedrich Engels was not a hypocrite. The Guardian
  7. ↑ Irving, Sarah (15 March 2010) Frederick Engels and Mary and Lizzy Burns. wordpress.com
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