Helen Macfarlane

Helen Macfarlane, (25 September 1818 – 29 March 1860), was a Scottish Chartist feminist journalist and philosopher, known for her 1850 translation into English of The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels which was published in German in 1848. Between April 1850 and December 1850, Macfarlane wrote three essays for George Julian Harney's monthly, the Democratic Review and ten articles for his weekly paper, The Red Republican (which changed its name to the Friend of the People in December 1850). In 1851 Macfarlane "disappeared" from the political scene. Until recent research by Macfarlane's biographer David Black and BBC Radio Scotland researcher and broadcaster Louise Yeoman, very little was known for sure about her early and later life.

Yeoman writes of Macfarlane:

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a period drama must be in want of a feisty heroine who finds love at last. But our heroine, Helen Macfarlane was no fictional character and her life would have shocked Jane Austen's smocks off.^[1]

I am free to confess that, for me the most joyful of all spectacles possible in these times is the one which Mr. Carlyle laments; one which I enjoyed extremely at Vienna, in March 1848, i.e. "an universal tumbling of impostors..." For it amounts to this, that men are determined to live no longer in lies... Ca ira! And how do men come to perceive that the old social forms are worn out and useless? By the advent of a new Idea...^[5]

Following the post-1848 counter-revolutions, Macfarlane returned to Britain, first residing in Burnley, Lancashire, then in London. She began to write for the presses of George Julian Harney, and associated herself with Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (who, in exile, had taken up residence in London and Manchester respectively). Macfarlane's first articles for Harney's monthly Democratic Review appeared under her own name in the April, May and June 1850 issues. Then, when she began to write for Harney's weekly, The Red Republican, in June 1850, she began using the nom de plume "Howard Morton" (the real identity of "Morton" was first revealed by A. R. Schoyen in 1958 in his biography of Harney).^[6] Her translation of The Communist Manifesto appeared in The Red Republican in four parts (9, 16, 23 and 30 November 1850).

Macfarlane's own writings show a grasp of German philosophy (especially Hegel) that was unique to British radicals of the period. Surprisingly for a "Marxist", perhaps, Macfarlane found common ground between Christ and Communism:

Upon the doctrine of man's divinity, rests the distinction between a person and a thing. It is the reason why the most heinous crime I can perpetrate is invading the personality of my brother man, using him up in any way from murder and slavery downwards. Red Republicanism, or democracy, is a protest against the using up of man by man. It is the endeavour to reduce the golden rule of Jesus to practice. Modern democracy is Christianity in a form adapted to the wants of the present age. It is Christianity divested of its mythological envelope. It is the idea appearing as pure thought, independent of history and tradition.

Jenny Marx and Engels. According to Marx, Harney's wife Mary (like Helen Macfarlane a Scot) told Jenny Marx that she had declined Helen's acquaintance because of the antics of a man referred to as the "cleft dragoon" who, the evidence suggests, was Helen's fiancée Francis Proust, a revolutionary exile previously resident in Belgium. According to Marx,

Harney was stupid and cowardly enough not to let her get her own back for the insult, and so break, in the most undignified way, with the only collaborator on his spouting rag who had original ideas – a rare bird, on his paper...^[13]

In 1852 Macfarlane married Francis Proust and in 1853 gave birth to a daughter who they named Consuela Pauline Roland Proust (Consuela after the heroine of George Sand's 1842 novel Consuelo, and Pauline Roland after the noted French socialist feminist thinker 1805–52). In 1853 the family took a ship to Natal, South Africa to join Macfarlane's brothers, who had emigrated there. Tragedy struck. Macfarlane arrived in South Africa without her husband. Francis Proust was sick and had to leave the ship before it had even left British waters; he died shortly afterwards. On top of that, their eight-month-old daughter, Consuela, was also taken ill and died only days after her arrival in South Africa. Macfarlane, widowed and bereaved, decided to return. At some point after her return to England, in 1854, she met Church of England Reverend John Wilkinson Edwards, himself recently widowed with a family of 11 children and in 1856 she accepted his offer of marriage. Macfarlane, the first translator of the Communist Manifesto, became a vicar's wife, at St Michael's Church, Baddiley, in the sleepy, leafy Cheshire parish, just outside Nantwich. Helen gave birth to two boys, Herbert and Walter. She did not enjoy her quiet life for very long, however. In 1860, at the age of 41, she fell ill with bronchitis and died. She is buried in the churchyard of St. Michael's. The inscription on the gravestone reads: "Sacred to the memory of Helen, wife of the Rev. John W Edwards, who fell asleep in Jesus, March the 29th 1860, aged 41 years. So he giveth his beloved sleep."^[14]

Macfarlane, who fulminated in her writings against the

• Black, David. Helen Macfarlane: A Feminist, Revolutionary Journalist, and Philosopher in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England. Lexington Books: Lanham, Maryland (2004).
• Black, David. Red Antigone: The Life and World of Helen Macfarlane:1818-60 - Chartist Journalist, Feminist Revolutionary and Translator of the Communist Manifesto. BPC Books: London 92024).
• Helen Macfarlane: Red Republican. Essays, articles and her translation of the Communist Manifesto. Edited and annotated by David Black. Unkant Publishers, London 2014.
  ISBN 978-0-9926509-1-9
• Schoyen, A. R. The Chartist Challenge: A Portrait of George Julian Harney. Heinemann: London (1958).
• BBC Radio Scotland documentary; series Women With a Past, episode 2 "Helen Macfarlane", broadcast 26 November 2012; presented by Susan Morrison, produced by Louise Yeoman; featuring interviews with Liz Arthur, David Black and Richard Holloway; Helen Macfarlane's words read by Gerda Stevenson. (Podcast)