Lydia "Lizzie" Burns (6 August 1827 – 12 September 1878) was a
working-class
The working class is a subset of employees who are compensated with wage or salary-based contracts, whose exact membership varies from definition to definition. Members of the working class rely primarily upon earnings from wage labour. Most c ...
Irish woman, the wife of German philosopher
Friedrich Engels
Friedrich Engels ( ;"Engels" ''Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary''.dyer in a
cotton mill
A cotton mill is a building that houses spinning or weaving machinery for the production of yarn or cloth from cotton, an important product during the Industrial Revolution in the development of the factory system.
Although some were driven ...
, and of Mary Conroy. The family may have lived off
Deansgate
Deansgate is a main road (part of the A56) through Manchester City Centre, England. It runs roughly north–south in a near straight route through the western part of the city centre and is the longest road in the city centre at over one mil ...
. Her mother died in 1835, and her father remarried a year later.
Lizzie had an elder sister, Mary (1821–1863), a lifelong partner of Engels's 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
Ardwick is an area of Manchester, England, southeast of the city centre. The population at the 2011 census was 19,250.
Historically in Lancashire, by the mid-nineteenth century Ardwick had grown from being a village into a pleasant and wealt ...
, Lizzie stayed with them as a housekeeper, and, after her sister's death, eventually became Engels's partner. In the 1870s, they lived openly as a couple in London, with Lizzie's niece, Mary Ellen (known as Pumps), as a housekeeper.
Both Lizzie and her sister were known as formally illiterate yet intelligent women, with strong working-class ties. They showed Engels the actual conditions of the factory employees in Britain.
Eleanor Marx
Jenny Julia Eleanor Marx (16 January 1855 – 31 March 1898), sometimes called Eleanor Aveling and known to her family as Tussy, was the English-born youngest daughter of Karl Marx. She was herself a Socialism, socialist activist who sometimes ...
wrote that
Rachel Holmes notes that "Like her sister, Lizzie Burns was a dedicated player in the
Irish Republican
Irish republicanism () is the political movement for an Irish republic, void of any British rule. Throughout its centuries of existence, it has encompassed various tactics and identities, simultaneously elective and militant and has been both w ...
movement, and the house she shared with Engels at 86 Mornington Street was a meeting place and a safe house for
Fenian
The word ''Fenian'' () served as an umbrella term for the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) and their affiliate in the United States, the Fenian Brotherhood. They were secret political organisations in the late 19th and early 20th centuries ...
activists. She was freedom-loving, uncorseted, fiercely political and sparkling with fun". Lizzie had considerable influence on the young Eleanor Marx, converting her to an enthusiastic supporter of Irish Nationalism and the Fenians (Rachel Holmes "Eleanor Marx - a life", London, 2014, p. 88.) While her father Karl Marx had some reservations about the Fenians' violent methods, Eleanor completely identified with them, regularly signing her letters to Lizzie as "Eleanor, F.S." (Fenian Sister).
In early September 1878, Burns fell seriously ill with some kind of tumor, and to please her religious beliefs, Engels married her. She died hours later. Her death made a strong impression on Engels. He later wrote about her:
Engels had Lydia buried at
St Mary's Catholic Cemetery, Kensal Green
St Mary's Catholic Cemetery is located on Harrow Road, Kensal Green in London, England. It has its own Catholic chapel.
The cemetery, founded in 1858, is the resting place of over 165,000 Roman Catholics. The 29-acre cemetery has memorials fo ...
and wrote on the gravestone: ″LYDIA, Wife of Frederick Engels".Photography in Walther Vicror: Kehre wieder über die Berge. Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin / Weimar 1982, after p. 240.