In 1997 Socialist Workers Party members, Stuart Marsden and Dave McNulty, were on a lobby of the Labour Party conference in Brighton, when they heard of the link between Helen Macfarlane, Burnley and the first translation from German to English of the Communist Manifesto. It was the germ of the idea to produce a pamphlet, that wouldn’t be a study in local history, but a way of showing how “The Communist Manifesto,” written in 1848, explained not only the world then, but also the world we live in now. They gleamed as much background as they could from Walter Bennett’s “History of Burnley,” and the Working Class Movement Library in Salford. It is true to say that much was unknown about Helen at that time, researchers have discovered more since.

Macfarlane's father, George Macfarlane [or McFarlane] (1760–1842), was the 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. The workforce in the mill were radical Chartists and its reasonable speculation that Helen was influenced by the views of the workforce as even the mill manager named his red tulips after radical politicians of the day.

In 1842 the Macfarlane mills went under, engulfed by the rising tide of technology-driven competition between Scottish millowners. The Macfarlanes were 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. Helen, who had a good education and was fluent in French and German had to take employment as a governess. The year 1848 found Macfarlane in Vienna when the Revolution in Vienna against the Hapsburg Monarchy broke out. She witnessed its brutal repression.

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Following the post-1848 counter-revolutions, Helen Macfarlane returned to Britain, first residing at number 3 Bridgend in Burnley, Lancashire, where she translated The Communist Manifesto then in London. 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). Macfarlane's first articles for Harney's monthly Democratic Review appeared under her own name in the April, May and June 1850 issues. Then, when she began to write for Harney's weekly, The Red Republican, in June 1850, she began using the nom de plume "Howard Morton" (the real identity of "Morton" was first revealed by A. R. Schoyen in 1958 in his biography of Harney). Her translation of The Communist Manifesto appeared in The Red Republican in four parts (9, 16, 23 and 30 November 1850).

Julian Harney 

Helen’s own writings show a grasp of German philosophy (especially Hegel) that was unique to British radicals of the period. Surprisingly for a "Marxist", perhaps, Macfarlane found common ground between Christ and Communism.

Helen fell out with Harney at a New Years Eve party and stopped writing for his papers in 1850, resulting according to Marx, “with the only collaborator …. Who had original ideas – a rare bird on his paper.”

As stated earlier, much was unknown about Helen, but slowly different researchers have added to the story including her biographer David Black and BBC Scotland researcher and broadcaster Louise Yeoman, who discovered much about her early and later life. Yeoman writes of Macfarlane, “It’s 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 Austin’s smocks off.”