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Helen Macfarlane
Helen Macfarlane (25 September 1818 – 29 March 1860) was a Scottish Chartist, early feminist journalist, and a philosopher. She is best known for creating, in 1850, the first English translation of The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, which had been published in German in 1848. From April to December 1850, she contributed three essays for George Julian Harney's monthly, the Democratic Review, and ten articles for his weekly paper, The Red Republican.
In 1851 she "disappeared" from the political scene. Until research in the 21st century by Macfarlane biographer David Black, and by BBC Radio Scotland broadcaster Louise Yeoman, very little was known about many parts of Macfarlane's life. Yeoman wrote of her in 2012: "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."
Macfarlane's father, George Macfarlane [or McFarlane] (1760–1842), was the owner of calico-printing works at Crossmill, Barrhead and at Campsie in Stirlingshire. Her mother, née Helen Stenhouse (born 1772), came from a similar middle-class family of calico-printers. Both families prospered in the production of 'Turkey Red' bandanas, which were very popular fashion items. Helen was the youngest of the Macfarlanes' eleven children. The workforce in the calico mills was highly unionised, but during the economic distress of the 1830s, the calico printers went on strike against the introduction of unskilled labour. The mill-owners (including the Macfarlanes) were able to call on the government to break the strike by sending in the Dragoons. There is, however, some evidence of radicalism in the Macfarlane-Stenhouse families, and especially in their calico printworks. According to Yeoman,
In the Stenhouse works in Barrhead, the workers were solid supporters of Chartism, the big movement founded [in 1839] to get votes for working people. Here they were all solid Chartists, solid radicals, so radical even the tulips are radical, because the works manager, his pride and joy were his tulips. They were all beautiful, they all had names, all had pedigrees and his best, his beautiful, tallest, most symmetrical tulips were all named after his favourite radical politicians. So if you're having a works manager who's a convinced radical, maybe the Stenhouses who own the place are a bit radical. Which makes me wonder if Helen drank in her radical politics from her mother's milk.
In 1842 the Macfarlane mills went under, engulfed by the rising tide of technology-driven competition between Scottish millowners. The Macfarlanes are utterly ruined. Helen and her sisters and brothers had to sign away everything, including their mills and their fine house at 5 Royal Crescent, Glasgow. In Helen's case the prospect of a genteel marriage perhaps to a rising young lawyer or the son of a good merchant was gone and she had to take employment as a governess. The year 1848 found Macfarlane in Vienna when the Revolution in Vienna against the Habsburg monarchy broke out. Later, in a critique of Thomas Carlyle, she wrote:
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... Ça 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...
Following the post-1848 counter-revolutions, Macfarlane returned to Britain, initially 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, in June 1850 when she wrote for Harney's weekly The Red Republican (it was renamed Friend of the People in December 1850), she started using the nom de plume "Howard Morton". The real identity of "Morton" was not revealed until A. R. Schoyen's 1958 biography of Harney. 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 among British radicals of the period. Surprisingly perhaps for a "Marxist", Macfarlane found common ground between Communism and the teachings of Christ:
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Helen Macfarlane
Helen Macfarlane (25 September 1818 – 29 March 1860) was a Scottish Chartist, early feminist journalist, and a philosopher. She is best known for creating, in 1850, the first English translation of The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, which had been published in German in 1848. From April to December 1850, she contributed three essays for George Julian Harney's monthly, the Democratic Review, and ten articles for his weekly paper, The Red Republican.
In 1851 she "disappeared" from the political scene. Until research in the 21st century by Macfarlane biographer David Black, and by BBC Radio Scotland broadcaster Louise Yeoman, very little was known about many parts of Macfarlane's life. Yeoman wrote of her in 2012: "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."
Macfarlane's father, George Macfarlane [or McFarlane] (1760–1842), was the owner of calico-printing works at Crossmill, Barrhead and at Campsie in Stirlingshire. Her mother, née Helen Stenhouse (born 1772), came from a similar middle-class family of calico-printers. Both families prospered in the production of 'Turkey Red' bandanas, which were very popular fashion items. Helen was the youngest of the Macfarlanes' eleven children. The workforce in the calico mills was highly unionised, but during the economic distress of the 1830s, the calico printers went on strike against the introduction of unskilled labour. The mill-owners (including the Macfarlanes) were able to call on the government to break the strike by sending in the Dragoons. There is, however, some evidence of radicalism in the Macfarlane-Stenhouse families, and especially in their calico printworks. According to Yeoman,
In the Stenhouse works in Barrhead, the workers were solid supporters of Chartism, the big movement founded [in 1839] to get votes for working people. Here they were all solid Chartists, solid radicals, so radical even the tulips are radical, because the works manager, his pride and joy were his tulips. They were all beautiful, they all had names, all had pedigrees and his best, his beautiful, tallest, most symmetrical tulips were all named after his favourite radical politicians. So if you're having a works manager who's a convinced radical, maybe the Stenhouses who own the place are a bit radical. Which makes me wonder if Helen drank in her radical politics from her mother's milk.
In 1842 the Macfarlane mills went under, engulfed by the rising tide of technology-driven competition between Scottish millowners. The Macfarlanes are utterly ruined. Helen and her sisters and brothers had to sign away everything, including their mills and their fine house at 5 Royal Crescent, Glasgow. In Helen's case the prospect of a genteel marriage perhaps to a rising young lawyer or the son of a good merchant was gone and she had to take employment as a governess. The year 1848 found Macfarlane in Vienna when the Revolution in Vienna against the Habsburg monarchy broke out. Later, in a critique of Thomas Carlyle, she wrote:
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... Ça 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...
Following the post-1848 counter-revolutions, Macfarlane returned to Britain, initially 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, in June 1850 when she wrote for Harney's weekly The Red Republican (it was renamed Friend of the People in December 1850), she started using the nom de plume "Howard Morton". The real identity of "Morton" was not revealed until A. R. Schoyen's 1958 biography of Harney. 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 among British radicals of the period. Surprisingly perhaps for a "Marxist", Macfarlane found common ground between Communism and the teachings of Christ: