• 1.1 Early years
• 1.2 Political career
• 1.3 Playwright
• 1.4 Writings on science
• 1.5 Later life, death, and legacy

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.

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.^[1] 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.^[2]

On 30 July 1872, Aveling married the heiress Isabel Campbell Frank (22 November 1849 – 12 September 1892), but the marriage lasted only two years before they separated amicably. According to Aveling, the cause of the split was that Isabel could not abide his atheist views, although there were rumours that he had married her for her money. They did not divorce and the marriage ended with her death.

From 1872 to 1876 Aveling was a teacher of elementary physics and botany at the North London Collegiate School for Girls.

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.

Political career