ヘレン・マクファーレンと The Red Republican

The year 1848 found Macfarlane in Vienna when the Revolution in Vienna against the Habsburg Monarchy broke out. 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..."

Following the post-1848 counter-revolutions, Macfarlane returned to Britain, first residing in Burnley, Lancashire, 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). Macfarlane'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: "Upon the doctrine of man's divinity, rests the distinction between a person and a thing. It is the reason why the most heinous crime I can perpetrate is invading the personality of my brother man, using him up in any way from murder and slavery downwards. Red Republicanism, or democracy, is a protest against the using up of man by man. It is the endeavour to reduce the golden rule of Jesus to practice. Modern democracy is Christianity in a form adapted to the wants of the present age. It is Christianity divested of its mythological envelope. It is the idea appearing as pure thought, independent of history and tradition."