The Working-Class Movement in America

by Edward Aveling

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218 pages, Hardcover

First published August 9, 2010

About the author

Edward Bibbins Aveling (29 November 1849 – 2 August 1898) was a prominent English biology instructor and popular spokesman for Darwinian evolution, atheism, and socialism.

Aveling was the author of numerous books and pamphlets and was a founding member of the Socialist League and the Independent Labour Party. For many years he was the partner of Eleanor Marx, the youngest daughter of Karl Marx.

Edward Aveling was born on 29 November 1849 in Stoke Newington, the fifth of eight children of Rev. Thomas William Baxter Aveling (1815–1884), a Congregationalist minister, and his wife, Mary Ann (d. 1877), daughter of Thomas Goodall, farmer and innkeeper, of Wisbech, Cambridgeshire.

Aveling attended Taunton School, and in 1867 began to study medicine at University College London. He graduated with a BSc degree in Zoology in 1870. Aveling began teaching biology and lecturing in science at King's College London but was unable to advance due to his atheism and avowed leftist views. He subsequently lectured on Anatomy and Biology at the London Hospital until 1882.

In 1880, Aveling delivered over a hundred freethought lectures and was made a vice-president of the National Secular Society. He edited the secular humanist magazine, The Freethinker when its founding editor George William Foote was imprisoned for blasphemy in 1883.