Helen Macfarlane. A Feminist, Revolutionary Journalist, and Philosopher in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England. By David Black, Lexington Books, 2004. £15.
Helen Macfarlane was radicalised in Austria by the revolutions of 1848 which swept through Europe. On her return to Britain she took up revolutionary journalism under the pseudonym Howard Morton for the Chartist George Julian Harney. It was in Harney’s weekly newspaper Red Republican in 1850 that Macfarlane produced the first English translation of what became known as the Communist Manifesto. In the German original it was called Manifesto of the Communist Party but in the Red Republican its title was German Communism: Manifesto of the German Communist Party. Black is critical of this name change because the insertion of the word “German” into the title twice over “de-emphasises its internationalist thrust.” But this misses the point of the change, a reason the Red Republican seems to have understood but which is now widely misunderstood. That is, while the theoretical parts of the Manifesto have universal application the practical proposals (particularly at the end of Section 2) were put forward with Germany in mind at that time. That is why Marx and Engels later said that some parts of the Manifesto, particularly in Section 2, were obsolete (see the Preface to the German edition of 1872).
In the Red Republican version of the Manifesto, some parts are missing and others changed mainly to suit its English readership. In the 1888 English translation, supervised by Engels, the famous opening line begins: “A spectre is haunting Europe. The spectre of Communism.” But in Macfarlane’s translation this becomes: “A frightful hobgoblin stalks throughout Europe. We are haunted by a ghost. The ghost of Communism.” Black states that her use of “hobgoblin” rather than “spectre” is unfortunate, but it is possible that her English readers at that time more readily understood the hobgoblin metaphor.
Marx called Macfarlane “a rare bird” – “the only collaborator on his [Harney’s] spouting rag who had original ideas.” She was the first person to translate and explain in English the work of the German philosopher Hegel. She wrote a few other articles for the Red Republican in the 1850s but almost nothing is known of her in the years before or after. What seems certain however is that Macfarlane could be described as the first British Marxist, a generation before that term came into use.
Lew Higgins
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