Robert Owen and his Legacy

Chris Williams, Noel Thompson

• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780708324431, 9780708324424
• eBook ISBN: 9781783162932
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

A radical thinker and humanitarian employer, Owen made a major contribution to nineteenth-century social movements including co-operatives, trade unions and workers' education. He was a pioneer of enlightened approaches to the education of children and an advocate of birth control.

1

Robert Owen: Reputations and Burning Issues

Ian Donnachie

Reputations

Robert Owen is an iconic figure in the annals of social reform and is widely celebrated in many parts of the globe where his ideas, transported from New Lanark, took root. In his time Owen was highly controversial, a situation partly of his own making. Thanks to a flood of speeches, pamphlets, books and other propaganda, allied to his numerous interventions in issues of the day, he was often victim to extreme responses from his audience. Indeed, after he went public and became a personality on the national and then international stages, he was endorsed or vilified in equal measure for nearly half a century until his death in 1858.1

Whatever we say about Owen, whatever burning issues we raise about his ideas and agenda there is no question he had a reputation, indeed reputations, for an enormous variety of ideas and schemes in many contexts throughout Britain, Ireland, continental Europe, the USA, and even in Latin America. The continuing contemporary interest in Owen is reflected in ongoing scholarship and a continuous stream of publications revisiting and reassessing his remarkable career.2

First, it can reasonably be claimed that Owen was most famous for New Lanark and, apart perhaps from his more dubious sobriquet, particularly in library catalogues, as the ‘Father of Socialism’ (to which we will come), or his association with infant schools, this was the greatest of his accomplishments. While there are major questions to be asked about what Owen actually achieved at New Lanark given that much was already in place from the regime of his father-in-law David Dale, there is no question that his twentyfive years there helped make him an international celebrity. He was director of one of the largest factories in the world and, more to the point in Scottish parlance, the laird of New Lanark. In fact, he was a great deal richer and more powerful than most lairds. Indeed, such was his fame within a few years of publishing A New View of Society (1813–16) that he was telling people anxious to contact him, including John Quincy Adams, the future President of the United States of America, that letters addressed simply to Mr Owen of Lanark, North Britain, would readily reach him. Such renown is no surprise given the apparent success of the workplace and community reforms Owen claimed to have instituted on the back of the paternalistic Dale management. The point was not lost on others that he did not start ab initio, and this ultimately raised problems for Owen. However, as a test bed for a broader social agenda New Lanark proved ideal and this was why it came to be so closely identified with Owen and his achievements.3 Before A New View there was much else that helped to raise his profile. He had quickly become a member of the Glasgow mercantile and intellectual elite; he had contributed, like Dale, to worthy causes; he had promoted popular education, notably the monitorial system of Joseph Lancaster; he had skirmished with a series of partners; and he had already published a Statement Regarding the New Lanark Establishment (1812), which gave some insight into his thinking in advance of the more substantial essays. Much of this, like the tables and chairs on pulleys that he suggested could be raised to the ceiling in the Institution (a device also adapted to raise and lower the famous visual aids in the classrooms) was highly practical as well as ingenious.4

These qualities of practicality and ingenuity were also characteristic of the essays in A New View. These were published initially as pamphlets rather than in one volume, which may have been Owen’s ploy to monitor the reception of his ideas as they developed. On the other hand, he might have been trying to avoid prosecution for sedition, for which he would have been an easy target had the authorities decided to act. Owen would have known that some outspoken Scottish kirk ministers, including the Revd Henry Duncan, a regular visitor to New Lanark and famous for promoting savings banks and other initiatives to aid the poor, were under suspicion.5 Owen was, therefore, careful to put his proposals to Vansittart, Chancellor of the Exchequer, to Sidmouth, the Home Secretary, and ultimately to Liverpool, the Prime Minister.6 Like much else Owen wrote in this period his essays were extensively circulated, suggesting a self-financed publishing project, and the use of his contacts among the political and intellectual elite. A New View brought Owen instant fame, since anyone promising solutions to the dire economic and social problems at the end of the Napoleonic Wars was likely to command attention. The essays stated his opinion that education held the key both to social progress and at the same time to social renewal with strong moral undertones. This was exemplified in the second and third essays by reference to New Lanark, apparently transformed by his presence and ideas, and then everything was elevated in the fourth essay to a scheme of national, even international, regeneration.7 However, it should be noted that at this stage there was no mention of egalitarianism, if that was ever part of Owen’s agenda. Since Owen had apparently proved that defective characters could be reformed, his ideas had an immediate appeal to the elites, who felt threatened by potential disorder. Owen claimed that within the gates of New Lanark there were no fears, no resort to the law. And, despite rumours to the contrary, not only was religion tolerated; it was even promoted, possibly as another means of social control, though Owen was careful to avoid suggesting this.8

There was much more in the essays of A New View that went beyond the questions of character formation and popular education. They included extended discussions on factory issues and the attack on poverty, a major problem accompanying rapid industrialization, rural–urban migration and mushrooming towns and cities, both Manchester and Glasgow being good examples of the latter. While slavery, on which the whole edifice ultimately floated, was not at this point mentioned, though Dale at least had abolitionist sympathies, other humane issues commanded Owen’s attention. In advance of Shaftesbury, who as the young Ashley also visited New Lanark, Owen was one of a group of reformers involved in the fight against the exploitation of child labour. His concerns were probably first raised in Manchester, finding expression through his involvement with the Manchester Board of Health, which promoted the cause in and beyond the town. Humanitarianism and health issues certainly played a part in his thinking at New Lanark, for there he was confronted with the problem of several hundred child apprentices recruited by Dale as well as numerous other village children and some from Old Lanark who also worked in the mills. Owen again led by example, highlighting the plight of factory children as early as 1812.9

A New View had much to say about conditions in the factories, a campaign Owen took up after 1816. Whether or not he later exaggerated his role is hard to determine, but he and young Robert Dale Owen went round gathering data and trying to see what was going on in other mills, in both Scotland and England. Giving evidence to a parliamentary inquiry, Owen certainly put up a bold challenge to the reactionary mill masters who attempted to dismiss his views. His plausible account of what had been achieved at New Lanark by de-committing from the apprenticeship system, placing age restrictions on child labour, limiting hours of work, and providing nearcompulsory education undoubtedly justified the moral indignation evident in his stance. So factory reform, promoted again by a vigorous propaganda campaign before and after the first parliamentary Act in 1819, brought Owen widespread recognition. Owen’s contribution to the debate was longlasting: it was revisited by the Factory Commissions of the 1830s, and many later investigations also acknowledged his contribution to reform.10

Education was another important platform for Owen’s campaigns, but like factory reform it had much wider implications given the crusade for social and moral regeneration signalled in A New View. If character formation was to work it would be most effective from infancy, hence the importance attached to early childhood education in and beyond what John Griscom, one of numerous distinguished American reformers seen at New Lanark, called the ‘baby school’.11 But, as David McLaren has shown, Owen’s interest extended to all ages, ultimately delivering a progressive curriculum with innovative methods derived partly from Joseph Lancaster and Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi. The evening schools and uplifting lectures were also open to adults, in order that the reforming of character started in infancy and childhood could be pursued into adult life. Interestingly Owen himself, when called upon much later in life to reflect on his career, said that the schools were his biggest achievement at New Lanark. His reputation as a formidable contributor to the promotion of early-years education, while raising many issues about what he anticipated it would bring about, is well deserved.12

However, although education was important, wider social reform issues raised Robert Owen to even higher platforms, first national, then international. Again the essays of A New View and the many pamphlets that came in their wake held the key. If at New Lanark workplace and community reforms could turn round a drunken, corrupted and undisciplined society and set it on the road to moral reform and economic recovery, then New Lanark itself could become a template for a national and international programme of social renewal. From this period, fraught with economic and social problems, emerged Owen’s ‘Village Plan’ which he insisted had widespread application. From 1817 onwards, and deploying millennial discourse, he refined his plan, attempted to justify his case and raise government support. His efforts were informed by what he was able to find out about existing communities that seemed to fit his agenda. These included the planned estate and industrial villages common in the Scottish Lowlands, workhouse schemes in Bavaria, villages for the poor in the Netherlands, and several religious communities in the USA. He almost certainly knew about the American communities when he was writing the essays, and was in touch with George Rapp at Neu Harmonie by 1820, possibly earlier. Owen’s communities, transformed into ‘Villages of Unity and Mutual Co-operation’, acquired potentially complex social and class structures and embraced the then fashionable spade husbandry advocated by the horticulturalist William Falla, an early promoter of self-sufficiency in industrial society.13 This initiative was soon followed by another major policy document, the Report to the County of Lanark (1820), which sustained the argument for social regeneration enhanced by the community scheme, the focus of which remained the central message of Owen’s attack on poverty for the rest of his career.14 Owen of course thought poverty inexcusable given the vast resources and manufactures industrialization had released. He repeatedly returned to that theme, especially after 1817, said by some to have been his ‘millennialist moment’.15 He began to attack competition and promote co-operation. But his reputation as a pioneer in the field of battling poverty (and thereby bettering the poor) remained critical.

Owen was closely identified with co-operation in its many forms. While this could be said to have begun with the attack on poverty, co-operation became more important to Owen through the community schemes. Communitarians would not compete but theoretically contribute to the common wealth in which they would all have a stake. While the arrangements about labour value, shares and rewards remained confused, Owen saw the communities as something like modern public–private partnerships promoted by capitalists who would get a return on their investment, but with the members ultimately becoming shareholder-owners of their communities.16

Co-operation also found its expression in the early co-operative associations which sprang up in the 1820s, not consumer co-operatives, but groups drawn from the middle classes and artisans, including many women, interested in promoting communities. Many Owenite organizations had communal and co-operative aspirations, notably the Owenite Labour Exchanges, based again on labour value, and the Association of All Classes of All Nations, one of several promoting popular education and community with millennial undertones. Of course, the long story of the Owenite community experiments from the 1820s to the 1840s also gave expression to co-operative principles, though we may note that Owen’s links to consumer co-operation, while widely celebrated, are more tenuous.17

Owen also has enjoyed a reputation, whether deserved or not, as a socialist. Here, as in everything else, we need to be on our guard about what that word meant in its early usages and in his lifetime, rather than the associations it came to have later in the nineteenth century. In the 1820s ‘socialist’ meant the promoter of a ‘social system’, a system of society, mainly but not exclusively based on Owen’s principles and plans. Whether or not the Villages of Unity and Mutual Co-operation or the Community of Equality introduced with such speed at New Harmony and at Orbiston around the same time could be described as ‘socialist’ is debatable. Certainly the social and cultural dimensions of Owenism were much more robust than their economic framework, about which Owen was consistently woolly. Back in Britain in 1829 after his North American and Mexican ventures, Owen found himself head of an Owenite Social System with myriad platforms and organizations which he periodically headed as ‘Social Father’. The man had become a movement...

Table of contents

• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Abbreviations
• The Contributors
• Introduction
• 1: Robert Owen: Reputations and Burning Issues
• 2: Robert Owen and Some Later Socialists
• 3: The Great Experiment: New Lanark from Robert Owen to World Heritage Site
• 4: Robert Owen and Education
• 5: Robert Owen and Religion
• 6: Owen and the Owenites: Consumer and Consumption in the New moral World
• 7: Robert Owen as a British Politician and Parliamentarian
• 8: Robert Owen’s Unintended Legacy: Class Conflict
• 9: Robert Owen and ‘the greatest discovery ever made by man’
• 10: Exporting the Owenite Utopia: Thomas Powell and the Tropical Emigration Society
• 11: Robert Owen and Wales
• Afterword: Looking Forward: Co-operative Politics or Can Owen Still Help?
• Select Bibliography