- The Guardian
- Issue #2190
Helen Macfarlane was the first person to translate the Communist Manifesto into English.
Though she knew Marx and Engels well, hers is no longer the version used today and sadly neither does she get the recognition which her efforts on that and in other fields deserve.
Besides her venture into early communism she was a leading Chartist, though she would end up buried a Christian having married an Anglican minister. A remarkable life for a woman denied formal educational opportunities.
Born in 1818 to a prosperous calico printer in Barrhead, outside Glasgow, Macfarlane was the youngest of 11. Her gender shamefully limited her education, which seems to have largely been through others in the family.
However, as her life would show she was obviously very bright and a gifted linguist.
Disaster though befell her and the family in 1842 when her father’s business collapsed, driven under by new technology with which he was unable to compete.
The family home in a leafy part of central Glasgow was sold along with business and mills. Helen found employment as a governess, initially in England before moving to Vienna.
There’s some suggestion that she had already gained some knowledge of German through her father’s business with German machinery and products. She obviously immersed herself in the language in Austria not just within the family she was working for.
Living in Vienna in 1848, she experienced the revolution and tumult which convulsed not just the city but far more widely in Europe.
That appears to have had a profound effect upon her even if her radical sympathies were mainly back in Scotland. But a spark had been lit within her by those events, as with many others, and she was excited by the different world which now seemed possible.
The continent settled down and those early attempts at radical change in Europe faltered. Macfarlane’s contribution to the cause would be through her writings, which she set to with a will on her return to Britain. Many other European revolutionaries would also join her in heading there, including none other than Karl Marx.
A brief stay in Lancashire then saw MacFarlane move to London where her literary works soon started to appear in radical papers. Her early work showed a grasp of Hegel unusual at the time and she found common ground between ‘red republicanism’ and the teachings of Christ.
It was no doubt an exciting as well as challenging time as a fledgling movement sought to develop and organise. The push for democracy and the franchise under the wider ambit of reform came to include socialism. Marx had written the Communist Manifesto with its German edition first published in February 1848, just as the revolutions erupted.
As with her lack of a formal education the all-pervasive sexism of the time saw her required to use the male pen name of Howard Morton for her contributions. Her groundbreaking translation of the Communist Manifesto appearing in the aptly named Chartist Paper “The Red Republican,” over four editions in November 1850.
Much of her text is the same as the standard edition that appears today. But her introduction has been changed, and it would now perplex many though it had a basis, as well as logic, at the time.
The opening clarion call of “A spectre is haunting Europe, a spectre of Communism” was narrated by her as “A frightful hobgoblin stalks throughout Europe. We are haunted by a ghost, the ghost of Communism.”
Nowadays “hobgoblin” is more likely to conjure imagery of Harry Potter or other such novels, but back then it was a phrase which had been used by the Chartist leader Feargus O’Connor. Given ongoing debates, including between physical and moral force Chartism, it may well have seemed apt to MacFarlane, and its use and context would certainly have been understood by the readership. Some things though never change down through the ages and Macfarlane’s translation was denounced by The Times (for its content, rather than style).
Marx was not her only venture into the world of translation and she would also be the first person to provide an English edition of Hegel. Interpretation into a different language is never easy even with the simplest of works and to have completed two such heavyweight philosophers as Marx and Hegel is really quite outstanding given her lack of formal education. She also wrote extensively quoting widely from literary and philosophical works. Confirming not just her appetite for literature and learning but her intellect and talent.
Her involvement in the Chartist movement was to prove all too brief when she had a falling out with George Harney, the editor of The Red Republican as 1850 ended. Little’s known about the reason though it appears to have been an argument between MacFarlane and Harney’s wife. It saw her cease contributing to the paper and end her political activities, something which Marx was to regret and chastise the editor for.
Her later years were to be marked by tragedy. In 1852 Macfarlane married Francis Proust a radical exile from Belgium. They decided to move to South Africa where some of her family had gone. But there was to be no new life together as her husband and their eight-month old daughter died before the ship had even departed British seas.
Understandably given those tragedies she never settled in South Africa, returning to Britain where in 1854 she met and married an Anglican vicar. He was a widower with 11 children, and they had two children together as she settled down to the role of a vicar’s wife in the small town of Nantwich. It seems to have been a happy marriage, but didn’t last long. Contracting bronchitis, MacFarlane died in 1860 and is buried in St Michael’s Church there. Her headstone reads “Sacred to the memory of Helen, wife of the Rev John W Edwards, who fell asleep in Jesus, March 29th 1860, aged 41 years.”
MacFarlane had written of Christianity’s basis in communism as well as fulminating against the established church. She had stressed the communist aspect of Christianity, writing:
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 father’s trade till he was 30 years of age and then began to teach his idea, wrapped in parables and figures to other working men.
Macfarlane’s writings don’t seem to have been collected, but a collected edition of The Red Republican is available for free online.
