The Selected Works of Robert Owen Vol I

Gregory Claeys

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781138646377
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000415728
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Storia economica

Robert Owen (1771-1858) was the founder of British socialism, and one of the most influential reformers in Britain and America in the first half of the 19th century. This book contains all Owen's key writings on the ideal community, socialism, religion, and the capitalist economic system.

INTRODUCTION

1. Owen’s Life

The eighty-seven adventurous years of Robert Owen’s life can be divided into two phases, each as extraordinary as they are extraordinarily different from each other. In his first four decades, Owen rose from obscure origins and small fortune, through great effort and ingenuity, to become one of the classic success stories of his age. Moreover, he was a pioneer in a field, cottonspinning, which helped greatly to propel Britain towards industrial supremacy. By 1817, at the age of forty-six, Owen could boast a substantial fortune. His name opened palace gates and ministerial doors throughout Europe. He enjoyed wide respect as a successful entrepreneur and a philanthropist to boot. But during the second half of his life, Owen’s passion for benevolence led him to expend his fortune, to defy respectable public opinion, and to herald a ‘new moral world’ of economic and social justice, security and equality, in which poverty would be abolished for all time. With comparable energy as he had mustered getting rich, he became a prophet, socialist, co-operator, secularist, feminist, and trade union organiser. At his death, he was widely regarded as among the most influential opponents of unrestricted laissez-faire in an age still reluctant to concede the limits of the doctrine. His name remains synonymous with all that the industrial revolution threatened and promised.

Owen was born in Newtown, Montgomeryshire, North Wales, on 14 May 1771, the next but youngest in a family of seven. His father, a saddler and ironmonger as well as the local postmaster, seems to have started well in life, but lost an estate worth £500 per annum through, he believed, his lawyer being bribed by an opponent. Owen’s mother came from a farming family. A good sportsman, dancer, and budding clarinettist, the young Robert was a precocious child, devouring books at the rate of one a day, and becoming the schoolmaster’s assistant. Pious in the extreme – it was a habit of mind which never entirely left him – he wrote youthful sermons and was known as ‘the little parson’. But at the age of ten, Owen reached a great turning point in his life in concluding that ‘there must be something fundamentally wrong in all religions, as they had been taught up to that period’.^a Scepticism did not undermine his industriousness, however. Apprenticed to a Lincolnshire cloth merchant named James McGuffog from 1781-4, Owen still read five hours daily (including the Stoic, Seneca, whose advocacy of benevolence to all doubtless had some influence on his youthful views). But he also learned much about the clothing trade, and showed clear signs of initiative and promise. After three years, he joined a London retailer, here on his feet twelve or more hours daily, until a better offer arose in Manchester, at that time still a town of about 45,000, but poised to become the great industrial metropolis it would be by 1820.^a Becoming curious about the new machinery being applied to cotton-spinning, Owen borrowed £100 from his brother William and entered into a partnership with a machine-maker constructing ‘mules’ for making thread. This was a success, with forty employees soon at work, and Owen’s half was soon bought out by another eager investor, leaving him, in 1789-90, with the promise of six machines, though he finally received only three.

Opportunities now abounded for Owen. He seems to have made a striking impression on all around him; and his old master, McGuffog, offered him half of the profits in his shop. But Owen decided to spin thread instead, for the profits were considerable, with demand well outstripping supply. He was doing well when a large manufacturer, Drinkwater, advertised for a manager for his mill of five hundred employees.^b A naive and inexperienced youth of twenty-one, Owen was hired nonetheless, though failure was widely predicted.^c He spent six weeks scrutinising the factory, and quickly saw ways of refining the manufacturing process. Soon the quality of his thread was recognised as the best in the country, and he assumed the management of another mill of Drinkwater’s in Cheshire employing several hundred workers.^d Though he was still awkward socially, and spoke an accented Welsh English, Owen had a natural flair for dealing with all sorts of people, especially his employees. For some reason he also took a special interest in the morals and condition of his workforce, and the question of poor relief generally.^e At the time, it was commonly believed that only religious conviction and draconian laws could restrain the natural anarchy and sloth of the poor. But Owen suspected, and experience within a few short years at Manchester seemingly confirmed, that substantial differences in the moral behaviour of individuals, rich and poor alike, resulted primarily from their upbringing and environment. (His earlier loss of religious faith was clearly important in this respect).

Soon the order and discipline in Drinkwater’s factory were the admiration of other cotton-spinning masters throughout Manchester. Drinkwater offered him a partnership with his own sons, which he accepted. He was solicited to join the prestigious Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, which admitted him on 1 November 1793, and here he mingled with prominent local physicians, scientists, and fellow manufacturers. For an autodidact in illustrious company, he was precocious here, too, reading several papers, two of which, ‘On the Origin of Opinions with a View to the Improvement of the Social Virtues’ and Thoughts on the Connection Between Universal Happiness and Practical Mechanics’, now lost, indicate that he had already thought much about moral reform. Owen was not, however, politically minded. He affirmed his loyalty to king and constitution during the great debates about reform in the early 1790s, declaring that he was ‘fully confident that a Constitution, thus formed, will not fail to redress every real grievance, and effect every necessary improvement’.^a But he also signed a petition supporting efforts to make peace with France in early 1795.^b There was an air of independence, in fact, in much of what he did. When a powerful manufacturer, Samuel Oldknow, became Drinkwater’s son-in-law and demanded greater control over his assets, Owen, in an impulsive if honourable move, voluntarily renounced his agreed partnership. But he soon attracted new partners, opened a new mill, and prospered. On a business visit to Glasgow, he met Caroline Dale, the daughter of a well-known Scottish manufacturer, David Dale, and they were married on 30 September 1799 at Dale’s palatial house on Charlotte Street, Glasgow.^c Dale and Richard Arkwright had built a mill south of Glasgow at New Lanark, in 1785, and commenced cotton-spinning the following year at a beautiful location on the banks of the Clyde which greatly impressed Owen on his first visit there (arranged as a pretext to meet Dale while courting his daughter), on 15 June 1798.^d At the mill, Dale, who also had a philanthropic bent, had tried to improve his workers’ living standards and conditions, and, by the mid-1790s, had achieved considerable respect for his efforts.^a Acquiring the factory with several partners in 1799, Owen moved there to take the post of manager of the New Lanark Twist Company on 1 January 1800. He had a ninth share in the proceeds, though when Dale died in 1806, he formed a new partnership which gave him about forty per cent of the profits, averaging about twelve and a half per cent per annum. Eventually he would share in some £300,000/$ 1.5 million (at contemporary prices) from its operations.^b

But Owen was already thinking about more than profits. He sought at New Lanark ‘to introduce principles in the conduct of the people, which I had successfully commenced with the workpeople in Mr Drinkwater’s factory; and to change the conditions of the people’.^c His approach here was not ‘socialist’. Not only was the word not coined until the late 1820s,^d Owen did not advocate profit-sharing at the mills. Nor did he dream of eliminating ‘competition’, which he would come to see as the chief cause of poverty. Indeed, he would later write that ‘but small justice’ had been done to the New Lanark population ‘compared with that to which all humanity is justly entitled’.^e Instead he sought to eradicate vice with minimal punishment, and without invoking eternal damnation, and to improve living and working conditions for his labourers. Initially, however, his ideas met with considerable resistance. The workforce naturally resented a foreigner living in their midst. Most were in Owen’s eyes idle, intemperate, and dishonest to the point of regarding the mill as public property. He could have prosecuted several for theft. But Owen chose instead to treat them as victims of circumstances, and to adopt a more forgiving if also ‘firm’ and ‘determined’ approach to reform their habits.^f

Some eighteen hundred people were settled at New Lanark, including about five hundred pauper children sent by parishes to gain respectable employment. (By 1820 about twenty-five hundred would reside there.) Despite Dale’s educational efforts, life at the mill was far from idyllic. The working day remained long, goods in the company store were shoddy and expensive, and the housing was inadequate.^a Owen set out to change all this.^b He brought in superior goods at lower prices, reducing the cost of living by some twenty-five per cent. When an American cotton embargo halted production for four months, Owen continued to pay full wages. The risk cost him £7000, but it won him ‘the confidence and the hearts of the whole people’.^c Within six years of arriving, Owen’s efforts were relatively unhindered. His next ambition was to improve performance in the workplace. This he effected in part by using a ‘silent monitor’, a painted piece of wood which reflected with different colours the achievements of each worker, from black denoting poor performance to white connoting excellence. Slowly black gave way to white in the workshop. In 1816, he reduced the working day from eleven and three quarter hours to ten and three quarter hours. That year, he opened his school, the Institute for the Formation of Character. Paid for entirely out of profits from the store, it combined dancing, singing, and military exercises. (Owen taught military tactics himself, and the workers marched to the mills to a fife and drum.)^d At the Institute, Owen, who could rightly later claim to be a pioneer in the field of infant education^e, sought in particular to exclude punishment, to make learning interesting to young minds, and to encourage the children to see their own happiness as contingent on that of others. Several visitors commented that he was much loved by the children, and had gone far towards extinguishing a ‘government by fear’.^f But fear played some role in his efforts to combat social indiscipline in the village itself. He fined all who had illegitimate children, the proceeds going into a sick fund. Pilfering, absenteeism and sloth were reduced by a firmer system of checks on stock and output. One-sixtieth of wages was automatically set aside for sickness, injury and old age. Internal order was also encouraged by reorganising the village into groups of houses called ‘neighbourhood divisions’. Annually, the heads of households in each division chose a ‘principal’. These elected twelve ‘jurors’ to sit monthly for one year, hearing and judging cases respecting the internal order of the community.^g

The experiment was a marvellous success. Sometimes referred to as ‘the happy valley’, within fifteen years New Lanark was renowned throughout Europe, and became a mandatory visit for touring foreign nobility, philanthropists, and the merely curious.^a Despite the isolated location, over twenty thousand visitors arriv...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• General Introduction
• Bibliography of the Writings of Robert Owen
• Observations on the Cotton Trade (1803)
• Mr Owen’s Speech at a Public Dinner … given to Joseph Lancaster (1812)
• A Statement regarding the New Lanark Establishment (1812)
• A New View of Society; or, Essays on the Principle of the Formation of the Human Character (1813–16)
• Observations on the Cotton Trade (1815)
• Observations on the Effect of the Manufacturing System (1815)
• Address delivered to the Inhabitants of New Lanark (1816)
• Report to the Committee of the Association for the Relief of the Manufacturing and Labouring Poor (1817)
• Letter published in the London Newspapers of July 30th, 1817 (1817)
• Letter published in the London Newspapers of August 9th, 1817 (1817)
• Address delivered at the City of London Tavern, on Thursday, August 14th (1817)
• Letter published in the London Newspapers of August 19th, 1817 (1817)
• New State of Society – Address delivered at the City of London Tavern, on Thursday, August 21st (1817)
• Peace on Earth – Good Will towards Men! Development of the Plan for the Relief of the Poor (1817)
• Address dated September 19th, 1817, on Measures for the Immediate Relief of the Poor (1817)
• Letter to the Earl of Liverpool on the Employment of Children in Manufactories (1818)
• Letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury on the Union of Churches and Schools (1818)
• Two Memorials on behalf of the Working Class ( 1818)
• Address to the Master-Manufacturers of Great Britain on the Present existing Evils in the Manufacturing System (1819)
• Address to the Working Classes (1819)
• Report to the County of Lanark (1821)
• An Attempt to explain the Commercial and Other Difficulties which are now experienced in the Civilized Parts of the World (1821), in R. N. Bacon, A Report of the Holkham Sheep Shearing, pp. 118–24
• Permanent Relief for the British Agricultural and Manufacturing Labourers (?1822)