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 journalist and editor, playwright and actor, short story writer and poet. Aveling was the author of scientific works and numerous literary and political pamphlets that were published by The Freethought Publishing Company; he is perhaps best known for his popular work The Student's Darwin (1881); he also translated the first volume of Karl Marx's Das Kapital and Friedrich Engels' Socialism: Utopian and Scientific.

Aveling was elected vice-president of the National Secular Society in 1880–84, and was a member of the Democratic Federation and then a member of the executive council of the Social Democratic Federation, and was also 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 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 fifteen years, he was the partner of Eleanor Marx, the youngest daughter of Karl Marx, and co-authored many works with her.