Robert Owen

Robert A. Davis, Frank O'Hagan, Richard Bailey

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781472518934
• eBook ISBN: 9781472518941
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This text offers a major reassessment of the life and thought of the distinguished 19th century industrial philanthropist and educational reformer, Robert Owen. In a period when Owen's radical new visions for learning and teaching, adult and vocational pedagogy and social transformation are receiving fresh and global attention, Robert Davis and Frank O'Hagan place Owen's thought right at the heart of the Enlightenment advocacy of popular, democratic mass education. Tracing both the ancestry and the legacy of Owen's reforming spirit, they also offer a critical appraisal of the relevance of his ideas for the development of education at all levels and stages in the challenging contexts of international 21st century education.

Part 1

Intellectual Biography

Chapter 1

Robert Owen: Industrialist and Reformer

A Welsh childhood

It was Robert Owen himself who insisted that the life of the mind and the content of the individual character were shaped decisively by experience and environment. The emphasis in much of his educational thought on the crucial importance of early experience in the molding of personality suggests than any proper understanding of Owen and his ideas should pay due attention to the influences at work in his own childhood. One obstacle, however, to this otherwise promising approach – widely recognized by his biographers – is that the materials for reconstructing Owen’s childhood and adolescence are incomplete and sometimes unreliable. Our principal source, an autobiography entitled The Life of Robert Owen Written by Himself of 1857, is the partially dictated memoir of an old man with a failing memory and an understandable tendency to embellish self-servingly the recollections of his earlier years (Owen 1993e). While not without merit as a record of forces that shaped his values and outlook, the Life always requires to be treated with caution and there is little supplementary evidence with which to enrich its account of his childhood and its background. Nevertheless, and despite these limitations, the broad patterns of the elderly Owen’s memories of his origins do provide a consistent enough foundation for pointing to several of the key factors in his family heritage that were to prove of lasting significance to his later development. Some of these factors were deeply personal and domestic; others part of the social and cultural fabric of the dramatic epoch into which he was born. Still more can be traced to the complex interplay between these two zones, where individual biography meets the processes of historical change. We shall see all three dimensions setting the terms of reference for our understanding of the man and his ideas throughout Robert Owen’s long and remarkable career.

Robert Owen was born in 1771 in Newtown, Wales. He was the second youngest of seven children in a family of farmers who, in keeping with employment patterns of the time and region, moved in and out of other occupations such as innkeeping and saddlemaking as economic conditions in a sometimes unpredictable agrarian environment dictated. While never in penury, the family’s fortunes were sometimes uncertain and they appear to have sustained themselves on a combination of strong, extended kinship ties and a domestic resourcefulness from which Robert was eventually to acquire almost inexhaustible reserves of self-reliance. Newtown itself was in many senses a classic Welsh borderland market town of the period, its appearance of rural stability signifying subtle and longstanding patterns of agricultural life evolved over several centuries, while at the same time conveying unmistakably an openness to commerce, trade, and the currents of new products and ideas emanating from the much larger population and economic centers of England. It is certainly possible to see that there were many features of the Newtown environment of his childhood that Owen expended much of his later philanthropic energy endeavoring to recapture in the many community-building projects with which he became associated: the self-contained sense of belonging; the low-key but pervasive practices of neighborly cooperation; the ready access to pleasant and uplifting natural surroundings with their attendant beneficial effects on individual well-being. It is also reasonable to conclude from Owen’s own memories that something of the gradual but ultimately far-reaching economic changes beginning to affect the region of Montgomeryshire in which late eighteenth-century Newtown was situated played an important part in the formation of the young Owen’s emerging self-awareness, highlighting for him both the tensions and the potential in settlements of people where the contrasting experiences of continuity and social change existed in such close proximity to one another.

Within his own family, Owen appears to have formed a strong initial bond with his mother, Anne, while the exertions of his father, Robert Snr, in seeking to provide for his wife and five surviving children seem to have rendered him an inevitably more distant figure. Certainly, in later years, Owen took pains to emphasize the distinction of his mother’s lineage and her resultant interest in learning. Household resources were sufficient to enable the family to send Robert unusually early to school (perhaps as young as 4 years) where the intelligence he himself regarded as an inheritance from his mother’s branch of the family swiftly established him as an able and imaginative pupil. Although the education available at Newtown Hall was by all accounts basic, its influence on the young Owen proved vital in two respects. First, it convinced him of the value of children attending school at a time when the education of the young was still in many quarters viewed skeptically. Secondly, it introduced him firsthand to the then increasingly fashionable model of learning and teaching subsequently known as the monitorial system, the key feature of which was the employment of older, talented pupils to teach younger children in return for fee exemptions. Developed in the following decades by Andrew Bell and Joseph Lancaster into a fully-fledged pedagogical method, the monitorial principle was essentially an application of the Factory System to education, whereby the more able and more senior pupils passed on their learning by rote to their juniors, often in very large classrooms. Owen encountered an early version of the monitorial system directly under the tutelage of his teacher, William Thickens, who, despite his obvious limitations as a provincial educator, recognized the academic potential in Owen and made him an ‘usher’ or monitor from age 8. We can in fact see in his acceptance of this early role Owen’s first formal involvement in the instruction of others, a task to which he took enthusiastically and which in several respects formed a blueprint for many of his later approaches to education (Podmore 1906, pp. 4–12; Donnachie 2005a, pp. 6–8).

Like many a capable young person of the period, denied access to the benefits of the elite education reserved for only the wealthiest sectors of British society, Owen had to supplement his basic schooling in literacy and numeracy with much home education and self-teaching. Owen recollected that as a child he read widely in the literature customarily prized in Protestant artisan households of the period. Two books stood out for him, however, and can reasonably be said to have etched themselves onto his imagination as a child (Owen 1993e, 4.53; Donnachie 2005a, pp. 8–9). Daniel Defoe’s famous and popular novel of 1713, Robinson Crusoe, described the adventures of a castaway on a desert island struggling to survive and prosper in a difficult and uncivilized environment, and then succeeding in forging a successful master-servant relationship with a Carib ‘savage’ also left abandoned on the same island. The appeal of Robinson Crusoe to the young (to boys especially) lay primarily in its sense of adventure and of survival against the odds. It was also, however, an emblematic text in the emergence of a particular set of eighteenth-century attitudes associated with the rise of a new class of self-made entrepreneurs, advancing and flourishing on the basis of individual effort and ingenuity rather than simply birthright. Similarly, Robinson Crusoe’s portrayal of exotic island locations and mysterious, ‘uncivilized’ races patronized by the innately superior European mind appealed to those elements of the same rising classes who attached themselves firmly to the expanding empire-building ambitions of the British maritime state, which, at the time of Owen’s birth, had succeeded in subordinating or colonizing considerable stretches of overseas territory across the globe. The most celebrated of these British imperial possessions at the time of Owen’s birth was, of course, the American colonies, only to be lost to British rule in a momentous revolutionary war when Owen was 5 years old.

A second text to which the young Owen was devoted was John Bunyan’s spiritual masterpiece of 1678, Pilgrim’s Progress. This was a staple book of pious Protestant households of the eighteenth century, a companion volume to the Bible prized for its edifying allegory of the Christian pilgrim’s lifetime journey through the traps of temptation and sin towards the final goal of salvation in Christ. Bunyan’s simple, unaffected prose style commended his book to children, and was pressed on them for its encouragement of individual zeal in the cultivation of moral righteousness. It seems evident that the elements of Pilgrim’s Progress strongly critical of the luxury of worldly pursuits made an enduring impression on the young Owen, who absorbed Bunyan’s promotion of plain living and the perils of material excess pursued for its own sake. There is in Bunyan’s presentation of the Christian Gospel a powerfully egalitarian message, skeptical of worldly riches, privilege, and aristocratic hypocrisy. The roots of these ideas of course run deep into the New Testament, but they acquired fresh impetus when adopted by radical Protestant sects of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, of the type to which Bunyan himself belonged and which saw him persecuted for his beliefs by the authorities of his time.

It is impossible to understand the appeal of a book such as Pilgrim’s Progress to young people such as the youthful Owen without also appreciating that the most superficially obvious sign of permanence and continuity in the community into which Owen was born was the pervasive presence of Christianity. The Christian faith in many respects sustained the fabric of life in late eighteenth-century rural Wales, subject as it often was to abrupt shifts in economic fortune. Owen’s family appears to have been religiously observant without being unduly devout, with prayer and Church attendance part of the rhythm of domestic and community existence through the pattern of the agricultural year. The Established Church in Wales (i.e. the national Protestant Church equivalent to the Church of England and officially recognized by Crown and Parliament) operated through a network of rural parishes manned by local parsons mostly appointed by local squires, nominally (though rarely actually) in consultation with the bishops of the Welsh Church. Through their preaching and teaching, these parsons performed an important role in the pastoral support of the population and in the promotion of a distinctive tradition of Christian values that afforded shape and meaning to the often harsh and unpredictable lives of the majority of worshippers. In its more elite forms, the Welsh Christianity of Owen’s time could be remote and authoritarian, encouraging uncomplaining submission to the will of an inscrutable God. At its most successful and popular, however, local clergy identified closely with the struggles of the indigenous people and preached a Protestant Gospel of hard work, social solidarity, and the equality of all before God (Williams et al. 2007, pp. 134–165).

In Owen’s childhood, the relatively settled patterns of Welsh Christianity were shaken and revitalized by the arrival of missionaries acting on behalf of sects and reform groups with a strong resemblance to the congregations to which John Bunyan had belonged a hundred years before. Broadly speaking, these groups were commonly referred to as ‘dissenters’ because, though Protestant, they ‘dissented’ from the authority of the Established Protestant Church in key areas of Christian doctrine and Church governance. Some of these groups tried to stay within the Established Church and encourage reform internally. Others were more fully separatist, with a longstanding history of ‘nonconformity’ with the Established Church and highly critical of its alleged worldliness and complacency. Indeed, part of the motivation for the waves of evangelical renewal that swept Wales from the 1740s onwards was a growing perception that the Church was failing in its mission to the new classes of workers and townspeople emerging out of the processes of economic change steadily overtaking Welsh society. In the expression of these sentiments, the dissenters and nonconformists gathering strength in the Wales of Owen’s childhood retained something of the revolutionary energy of earlier centuries, when puritan piety had reverberated with political grievance and helped fuel the series of tumultuous civil wars of the 1640s that had culminated in the execution of King Charles I and the creation for a short time in England and Wales of a republican Protestant Commonwealth. By the 1770s, much of this insurrectionist feeling had dimmed, but memories remained of the power of concerted resistance to authority when galvanized by shared religious conviction. In Owen’s late teens, a rekindling of these forces was to take place in response to the still more convulsive revolutionary events unfolding in the France of 1789–1793.

The most immediately successful of the new Christian groups in the Newtown area of Owen’s childhood and youth was the Methodists, who preached a strict Calvinist gospel of personal salvation, suspicious of many of the forms and rituals of the mainstream Church. The Methodists accompanied this austerity with a strongly motivated program of individual and social renovation, focused on the alleviation of poverty and the removal of the blight of vices such as alcohol and promiscuity from the lives of the poor. The young Robert Owen came into contact with a group of Methodist women in Newtown when he was about 8 years old. The women shared Methodist tracts and pamphlets with him, which he digested enthusiastically. In his autobiography, Owen was later somewhat smugly to suggest that the main consequence of this encounter with Methodism was to convince him of the pointlessness and inherent sectarianism of all religious attachment. It seems much more likely, however, that the rudimentary social gospel of Methodism, with its stress on spiritual renewal accompanying material improvement in the lives of the poor, played its part in the longer-term formation of the charitable dimensions of his thought while also contributing to the intense burst of personal piety he experienced at around the time of his meeting with the Methodist revival (Owen 1993e, 4:54; Williams et al. 2007, pp. 165–223).

In the decades after Owen’s departure from Wales, movements such as the Methodists and then the Baptists were to make serious inroads into the territory of the Established Church in the principality, eventually eclipsing it in numerical strength. In Owen’s childhood, this was still a relatively distant prospect, but the challenge of evangelical sects did provoke some sort of response from some of the vicars of the Established Church alert to many of the day-to-day challenges facing their flocks and troubled by the likely appeal of rival groups. In the person of charismatic Rev. Samuel Drake of the parish of Llanllwchaiarn, Owen appears to have encountered one such vicar, someone who became for a time his mentor and who helped encourage his interest in the moral and pastoral aspects of religious faith. While Drake remained firmly attached to the Established Church, Owen portrayed him as strongly committed to the welfare of his congregation and ready to imitate some of the moralism of the evangelicals in, for example, publicly reproaching the shortcomings of the local squire. Under Drake’s guidance, Owen took to a sustained period of religious reading and reflection, stretching, he tells us, to the composition of sermons for which he earned the ironic local soubriquet ‘the Little Parson’ (Owen 1993e, 4.54; Donnachie 2005a, pp. 9–10). We know nothing of the content of these sermons except indirectly, because Owen claimed to have destroyed them after discovering their close coincidental resemblance to some of the sermons of the famous novelist and clergyman, Laurence Sterne. Recently, Geoff Powell has ingeniously suggested that a survey of the Sterne sermons to which Owen was referring reveals something important about the impact of Christianity on the development of Owen’s thought (Powell 2008). The common theme of the sermons in question is the failure of vision that prevents one class or category of human being from identifying with the experience and the suffering of another. Sterne’s preaching highlights the radical insistence of the Jesus of the Gospels on the urgent need for abandonment of the egocentrism handicapping human solidarity and evident most damagingly in the otherwise unbridgeable gulf separating the realms of the rich and the poor. It is possible that Powell takes a too literalist view of Owen’s self-narration, here, and particularly his portrayal of himself as an emerging, enlightened Christian ethicist, free of the baggage of traditional metaphysical dogma. Certainly, it seems clear that Owen’s estrangement from orthodox Christian belief took place over a much more protracted period than his autobiographical reflections suggest. Nevertheless, attention to episodes such as this, from Owen’s earliest stages of development, correctly underscores the extent to which the pedigree of his later social and educational thought had roots in moral and theological questions of considerable longevity in British culture.

From Newtown to Manchester

It might have been anticipated from this portrait of his earliest years that a boy of Owen’s obvious intellectual abilities could reasonably have expected to pursue his formal education beyond the provincial confines of rural Wales. Educational opportunity was for Owen and his class, however, severely restricted. While belonging to the Established Church removed any formal religious impediment to possible entry into one or other of the two English universities (Oxford and Cambridge) or the Inns of Court in London where the legal profession was trained, economic and social realities of the late eighteenth century made a move of this kind inconceivable for a youth of Owen’s relatively humble origins. Instead, we find that from his earliest years, and despite his undoubted talent for learning, education was for Owen constantly accompanied by the experience of work. There was nothing unusual in this. In the absence of all but the most primitive forms of subsistence support for the destitute from local parish relief, families such as Owen’s required that every member be economically productive in contributing to the family’s earnings and sustaining often parlous living standards. With five children to look after, Robert Snr appears to have encouraged this in all of his offspring, combining their basic instruction with varieties of labor from which either money could be earned or services provided related to the various occupations in which he himself was active.

Robert Jnr’s work experience seems to have begun locally, assisting his father directly and occasionally working casually for neighboring farmers and tradesmen. The rapid expansion of shops in the late eighteenth century was one of the most obvious signs of economic change taking place across provincial Britain and it is easy to see why a boy of Owen’s noticeably precocious social skills and capabilities in reading, writing, and arithmetic proved apt to the growing retail sector. In a previous generation, this settled pattern of education and employment would probably have set the parameters for much of Owen’s later life in rural Wales, with the ratio of one to the other tilting markedly in favor of employment as he matured. Hence he might in an earlier time have disappeared from history as one of the unremarked masses of shopkeeper artisans of the kind his own father typified. A new and complicating factor had entered into this long-established life schedule, however, in response to the wider economic changes of which the proliferation of shops was only one important signifier. Increasing numbers of people in the towns and villages of the Welsh countryside were staking their relatively meager resources on migration. They were drawn to the expanding economic opportunities available beyond the provinces and made newly accessible to them by the improvements to transport resulting from the growth of the canal system, the arrival of improved turnpike roads, and the spread of the coach network across large parts of the British Isles. The young Owen watched several of his siblings embark on this route out of Wales, seeking advancement in the new realms of employment and opportunity available in the major cities of England and with the full encouragement of their ambitious parents.

The backdrop to these changes in the detailed patterns of domestic and working life – reaching, it is clear, even into the backwaters of rural Wales – was the massive historical transition we call the Industrial Revolution. It is doubtful whether members of the Owen family or the community of Newtown more broadly were particularly conscious in the 1770s and 80s of the magnitude of the forces beginning to reshape the lives of the population of which they were a part. However, as we shall see, there is abundant evidence that as his career blossomed, Robert Owen, in common with many of the self-taught but practical innovators of his generation, did indeed acquire a sophisticated understanding of the processes of social and economic change overtaking the British Isles in the course o...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Contents
• Dedication
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part 1 Intellectual Biography
• Part 2 Critical Exposition of Owen’s Work
• Part 3 The Influence and Relevance of Owen’s Work Today
• References
• Index
• Copyright