Helen Macfarlane, born Barrhead, 25 September 1818 (registered in the Abbey [i.e. landward] Parish of Paisley), Renfrewshire, Scotland, died Nantwich, Cheshire, England 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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
I cannot move a step in any direction without running into some creed, or catechism, or formula, which rises up like a wall between the unhappy sectarians and the rest of the universe; beyond which it is forbidden to look on pain of damnation, or worse.
Because they are organized into one compact mass, which, under the guidance of competent leaders, moves like an army of well-disciplined soldiers, steadily onward to a given point.
Reynolds, knowing that Harney was having serious problems with the distributors and Her Majesty's Stamp Office, wrote:This admirably conducted periodical is doing its work bravely.
Mr. Harney in his letters signed "L'Ami du Peuple" exhibits sound, statesman-like views, and shows up existing abuses with a merciless hand.
His contributor Howard Morton is also a man of intelligence and shrewdness...[10]A Times leader quoted the following lines from Macfarlane's translation of the Communist Manifesto as "evil teachings":Your Middle-class gentry are not satisfied with having the wives and daughters of their Wages-slaves at their disposal, – not to mention the innumerable public prostitutes – but they take a particular pleasure in seducing each other's wives.
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).
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.
It should be remembered, however, that Macfarlane merged Christianity with Communism:I think one of the most astonishing experiences in the history of humanity was the appearance of the democratic idea in the person of a poor despised Jewish proletarian, the Galilean carpenter's son who worked probably at his fathers trade till he was 30 years of age and then began to teach his idea, wrapped in parables and figures to other working men, chiefly fishermen who listened to him while they mended their nets or cast them into the lake of Gennesaret.
[15]Macfarlane's writings show an acute knowledge of Chartist affairs and international politics, written in a punchy, at times knockabout style, expressive of proletarian anger.
She critiques the factional opponents of the Red Republicans within Chartism, as well as the great literary figures of her day, such as Thomas Carlyle, Charles Dickens and Alphonse de Lamartine.
Her writings are full of literary references (to Homer, Sophocles, Miguel de Cervantes, John Milton, and Heinrich Heine) and show not only a thorough grasp of what was about to become known as Marxism, but also a familiarity with what later Marxists, such as Althusser, tried to "drive back into the night", namely the Hegelian dialectic.