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Helen Macfarlane, born Barrhead, 25 September 1818 (registered in the Abbey (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. Between April 1850 and December 1850, Macfarlane wrote three essays for George Julian Harney's monthly, the ''Democratic Review'' and ten articles for his weekly paper, the ''Red Republican'' (which changed its name to the ''Friend of the People'' in December 1850). In 1851 Macfarlane "disappeared" from the political scene. Until recent research by Macfarlane's biographer, David Black and BBC Radio Scotland researcher and broadcaster, Louise Yeoman, very little was known for sure about her early and later life. 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. But our heroine, Helen Macfarlane was no fictional character and her life would have shocked Jane Austen’s smocks off.” 〔Louise Yeoman, “Helen Macfarlane – the radical feminist admired by Karl Marx,” BBC News, 25 November 2012 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-20475989〕 ==Early life== Helen’s father, George Macfarlane (McFarlane ) (1760–1842), was an 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 (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.” 〔BBC, "Woman with a Past – Helen Macfarlane," Broadcast 26 November 2012.〕 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.〔BBC, "Women with a Past – Helen Macfarlane"〕 The year 1848 found Helen Macfarlane in Vienna when the Revolution in Vienna against the Habsburg Monarchy broke out.〔David Black, Helen Macfarlane (2004), p. 44〕 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... Ca 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...” 〔Helen Macfarlane, “Democracy – Remarks on the Times apropos of certain passages in no. 1 of Thomas Carlyle’s ‘latter-day’ pamphlet,” Democratic Review, April, May and June 1850.〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Helen Macfarlane」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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