Edward Aveling
Edward Bibbins Aveling (29 November 1849 – 2 August 1898) was an English comparative anatomist and popular spokesman for Darwinian evolution, atheism and socialism. He was also a playwright and actor.
Edward Aveling | |
|---|---|
Aveling in 1886 | |
| Born | Edward Bibbins Aveling 29 November 1849 London, England |
| Died | 2 August 1898 (aged 48) Battersea, London, England |
| Other names | E.D., Alec Nelson, T.R.Ernest, Cover-Point, The Cockney Sportsman |
| Education | University College London |
| Occupation(s) | Comparative anatomist, socialist writer, editor, dramatist, translator of Marx's Capital; botanist, physiologist, zoologist |
| Spouses | Isabel Campbell Frank
(m. 1872; died 1892)Eva Frye (m. 1897) |
| Partner | Eleanor Marx |
Aveling was the author of numerous scientific books and political pamphlets; he is perhaps best known for his popular work The Student's Darwin (1881); he also translated Ernst Haeckel's Gesammelte populäre Vorträge, as The Pedigree of Man (1883); the first volume of Karl Marx's Das Kapital, and Friedrich Engels' Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. He was elected vice-president of the National Secular Society in 1880, he was a member of the Democratic Federation and then a member of the executive council of the Social Democratic Federation and was a founding member of the Socialist League and the Independent Labour Party. During the imprisonment of George William Foote for blasphemy he was interim editor for The Freethinker and Progress. A monthly magazine of advanced thought. With William Morris he was the sub-editor of The 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 fourteen years he was the partner of Eleanor Marx, the youngest daughter of Karl Marx, and co-authored many works with her.