Irish lives

Mary Burns 1823-63:MARY BURNS, mill hand and social radical, was born in Ireland, daughter of an Irish dyer who emigrated to Manchester. In 1842, while employed there at the Victoria Mills of Ermen Engels, she first met and fell in love with the socialist Friedrich Engels while he was on his first visit to the city. She introduced him to the slums of Manchester, in particular "Little Ireland", giving him a first-hand knowledge of working-class living conditions. They also attended workers' mass meetings in the Hall of Sciences.

Engels left Manchester in 1844, returned in the summer of 1845 and revisited Burns, and subsequently took her to live with him on the continent, where they continued to attend political meetings. The unofficial nature of their liaison attracted comment: Karl Marx and, particularly, his wife Jenny appear to have disapproved.

Back in Manchester, they settled down in a terraced house in Ardwick, on the outskirts of the city, separate from Engels’s private apartments. Burns’ niece Mary Ellen (known as “Pumps”) and sister Lydia (“Lizzie”) also lived with them. Credited with some responsibility for the interest Engels took in Irish affairs, Burns made a tour of Ireland in 1856 with her common-law husband.

After her sudden death on 6th January 1863, Engels wrote to Marx: “I feel I have buried with her all that was left of my youth.” Marx may not have appreciated the strength of the attachment, and his indifferent response greatly offended Engels.

Lizzie Burns (1827-78), described by Engels as “a real child of the Irish proletariat”, subsequently became Engels’s wife, though they were not officially married until the day before her death.

In 1865 she and Engels became members of the First International. She was a close friend of Marx’s daughter Eleanor, in whom she instilled a fervent enthusiasm for Irish nationalism. As a result of her influence, Eleanor took to reading the nationalist paper The Irishman, and the two women accompanied Engels on a return visit to Ireland in 1869, during which they witnessed the Fenian amnesty movement at its height.

Lizzie claimed she assisted and provided asylum for Fenian activists, including some of those involved in the attack on the police-van in Manchester in 1867 which led to the execution of the “Manchester martyrs”. Engels gave up his official home after retiring from business to live with her permanently. They later moved to London. She died on 12th September 1878 in London, and was buried in St Mary’s Roman Catholic cemetery, Kensal Green.

From the Royal Irish Academy’s Dictionary of Irish Biography. See dib.ie for more details