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NEWS & LETTERS, January-February 2005Excerpt from Helen Macfarlane: A Feminist, Revolutionary Journalist, and Philosopher in Mid-Nineteenth Century EnglandHelen Macfarlane and the Idea of FreedomWe print here an excerpt from Dave Black's newly published and groundbreaking study HELEN MACFARLANE: A FEMINIST, REVOLUTIONARY JOURNALIST, AND PHILOSOPHER IN MID-NINTEENTH CENTURY ENGLAND. Macfarlane was the first person to translate the COMMUNIST MANIFESTO into English and the book includes the long-unavailable text of her version. The following selection from the book's introduction situates Macfarlane in the context of the revolutionary events and ideas of her time. * * * In 1848, as the February Revolution in France unleashed a chain of insurrection across Continental Europe, the Chartist movement in England once more took to the streets. For the third time since 1838, a petition was presented to Parliament for electoral reform and universal male suffrage; and when the House of Commons rejected it, the middle class allies of the Chartists backed off once again from a confrontation with the government. Isolated uprisings broke out in parts of the country, but were easily suppressed by troops and special constables. Chartist leader and member of Parliament for Nottingham, Feargus O'Connor, drew the lesson from the defeat that the six-point "People's Charter" needed to be watered down in order to maintain the movement's alliance with the Manchester Liberals. Chartist radicals, such as George Julian Harney, on the other hand, saw in the defeat one betrayal too many. The radicals argued for a new independent working class movement with a "social" and internationalist perspective. To this end Harney, in June 1849, launched a new monthly, the DEMOCRATIC REVIEW OF BRITISH POLITICS, HISTORY AND LITERATURE; in spring 1850, he resigned from O'Connor's paper, the NORTHERN STAR to set up a new rival weekly, the RED REPUBLICAN. In November 1850, Harney published a translation of THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO in his paper, presenting it to his readers as "the most revolutionary document ever given to the world." In a biography of Harney published in 1958, A. R. Schoyen noted that one of the most prolific contributors to his presses, who wrote under the name of Howard Morton, showed a remarkable understanding of what would later become known as Marxism. Schoyen's probing into the identity of this mysterious person led him to ask:
Schoyen's statement has never been seriously challenged and, until now, has never been followed up as the important discovery it was. Macfarlane was of that generation of post-Napoleonic War "baby boomers," which included other original and radical women writers such as George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) and the Bronte sisters. Like these literary contemporaries, Helen Macfarlane had to use a male nom de plume to get her work into print; but for her, an avowed feminist and revolutionary, the obscurity inflicted on her by bourgeois male society-- and its historians--was to be near total. Historians of Chartism have always bemoaned the fact that most Chartist activists, living in modest circumstances, did not have the luxury of keeping archives. Schoyen, on writing about Harney, says:
Schoyen's words resound a lot more starkly in the case of Helen Macfarlane. Her life story, through no fault of her own, is more resistant to the "picklocks of biographers" than almost any other nineteenth century writer of outstanding talent, even the notoriously obscure Isadore Ducasse (Comte de Lautreamont) author of LES CHANTS DE MALDOROR, who died during the Siege of Paris in 1870. One obvious reason for Macfarlane "keeping her head down" behind a male pseudonym must have been the daunting prejudice that would face any woman who openly expressed radical political opinions. When two generations earlier, in 1792, Mary Wollstonecraft published A VINDICATION OF THE RIGHTS OF WOMAN and went off to Paris to support the French Revolution, she had been attacked by Horace Walpole as a "hyena in petticoats." But even in 1850, British society, in Helen Macfarlane's judgment, condemned itself in "the position of women, who are regarded by law not as PERSONS but as THINGS, and placed in the same category as children and the insane." Just as the storming of the Bastille in 1789 had introduced the sansculotte into the demonology of English opinion, so the June Days of 1848 in Paris provided the equally terrifying figure of the "Red Cap" Republican, this time armed not only with the rifle and the pike but also with the "damnable doctrines" of socialism and communism. In early Victorian England, a female "Red Republican" who openly proved that she could wield the pen as a revolutionary weapon better than most men, would have been scourged as a danger to public order and decency. Although I have been able to unearth some previously unknown biographical material on Macfarlane, most of her life story remains elusive; the problem is compounded by her sudden "disappearance" in 1851. Most of what has been discoverable about her comes from her published writings--twelve substantial essays in all--and some of the writings and correspondence of her associates, especially Harney, Engels and Marx. This book then, is necessarily and unashamedly, A BIOGRAPHY OF AN IDEA. Macfarlane was living in Vienna in 1848 when the Revolution against the Hapsburg monarchy radicalized her. Her fluency in the German language gave her access to the great philosophic works of German Idealism and its radical "Young Hegelian" inheritors, such as Heinrich Heine and Karl Marx. She was described by the latter as the most original of Harney's stable of writers; as a rara avis among the empiricist English. For Macfarlane, as for Hegel--and arguably Marx as well--the Idea of Freedom was identified with the Idea of History. Macfarlane was not only the first "British Marxist": she was also the first British commentator on Hegel's philosophy and the first translator of any of his words into English. |
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