Robert Owen and His Legacy

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Author: Chris Williams and Noel Thompson (Editors)

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Robert Owen and his Legacy

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In Memory of Nina Fishman (1946–2009)


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Robert Owen and his Legacy

Edited by

Noel Thompson and Chris Williams

Cardiff University of Wales Press 2011


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© The Contributors, 2011 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner. Applications for the copy right owner’s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the University of Wales Press, 10 Columbus Walk, Brigantine Place, Cardiff CF10 4UP. www.uwp.co.uk British Library CIP Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-0-7083-2442-4 (hardback) 978-0-7083-2443-1 (paperback) e-ISBN 978-0-7083-2444-8 The rights of the Contributors to be identified as authors of this work have been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Typeset in Wales by Eira Fenn Gaunt, Cardiff Printed by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham, Wiltshire


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Contents List of Abbreviations List of Contributors

vi ix

Introduction1 Noel Thompson and Chris Williams â•‡ 1 Robert Owen: Reputations and Burning Issues Ian Donnachie

13

â•‡ 2 Robert Owen and Some Later Socialists Gregory Claeys

33

â•‡ 3 The Great Experiment: New Lanark from Robert Owen to World Heritage Site Lorna Davidson and Jim Arnold

55

â•‡ 4 Robert Owen and Education Francis J. O’Hagan

71

â•‡ 5 Robert Owen and Religion Robert A. Davis

91

â•‡ 6 Owen and the Owenites: Consumer and Consumption in the New Moral World Noel Thompson

113

â•‡ 7 Robert Owen as a British Politician and Parliamentarian Margaret Escott

129

â•‡ 8 Robert Owen’s Unintended Legacy: Class Conflict Ben Maw

155

â•‡ 9 Robert Owen and ‘The Greatest Discovery Ever Made By Man’ Geoffrey Powell

175

10 Exporting the Owenite Utopia: Thomas Powell and the Tropical Emigration Society Malcolm Chase


197

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11 Robert Owen and Wales Chris Williams Afterword: Looking Forward: Co-operative Politics or Can Owen Still Help? Stephen Yeo

219

239

Select Bibliography 259 Index261


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Abbreviations

AACAN BL CJ CM GNCTU LJ LRS MC MS NAS NLW NMW NS NUWC OSPC PD PMG PP SWRO TES TNA UCL

The Association of All Classes of All Nations British Library Commons’ Journals Caledonian Mercury Grand National Consolidated Trades Union Lords’ Journals Leeds Redemption Society Morning Chronicle Morning Star National Archives of Scotland National Library of Wales New Moral World Northern Star National Union of the Working Classes Owenite Socialism: Pamphlets and Correspondence, ed. Gregory Claeys (London, 2005), 10 vols Parliamentary Debates Poor Man’s Guardian Parliamentary Papers Selected Works of Robert Owen, ed. Gregory Claeys (London, 1993), 4 vols Tropical Emigration Society The National Archives University College London


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The Contributors

Jim Arnold

Formerly Director of the New Lanark Trust

Malcolm Chase

Professor of Social History, University of Leeds

Gregory Claeys

Professor of the History of Political Thought, Royal Holloway, University of London

Lorna Davidson

Director of the New Lanark Trust

Robert A. Davis

Professor of Religious and Cultural Education, Glasgow University

Ian Donnachie

Emeritus Professor in History, The Open University

Margaret Escott

Honorary Research Fellow, Swansea University, formerly Senior Research Officer, History of Parliament

Ben Maw

Tutorial Assistant in History, Swansea University

Francis J. O’Hagan Formerly Lecturer in the Faculty of Education, Glasgow University Geoffrey Powell

Formerly Lecturer in Education, Keele University and Tutor in Philosophy, Coleg Harlech

Noel Thompson

Pro Vice-Chancellor and Professor of History, Swansea University

Chris Williams

Professor of Welsh History and Director of the Research Institute for Arts and Humanities, Swansea University

Stephen Yeo

Formerly Principal of Ruskin College, Oxford


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Introduction


The present volume comes from papers given at a colloquium held to com memÂ�orate the 150th anniversary of the death of Robert Owen at the Uni versity of Wales’s Gregynog Hall in August 2008. Gregynog is just six miles from Newtown, Montgomeryshire, where Owen was born and brought up and where he died at the Bear’s Head Hotel on 17 November 1858 and was buried with his parents beside the abandoned church of St Mary. With the possible exception of New Lanark there could have been few more appro priate venues for such a conference, and ambience, papers and personalities comÂ�bined to do justice to the life and work of this remarkable man. The colloquium papers illustrate both the complex character of his achieve Â�ment, legacy and personality and how he in turn both shaped and reflected the spirit of the age in equally complex ways. New Lanark is the most power ful physical legacy of that shaping. Like many in this volume Davidson and Arnold argue for the centrality of New Lanark to what Owen achieved and what he communicated to future generations. They tell the story of its physical retrieval from dereliction to the status of a world heritage site in 2001; a trans formation that required the same combination of business skills, idealism and perseverance that Robert Owen himself deployed in his original trans formation of the New Lanark community. It is a retrieval of this monument to Owen’s achievement which also keeps alive, in its rejuvenated and living community, many of the ideals which Owen himself embraced. New Lanark, as it was and as it is, reminds us of the potent forces un leashed by the revolution in industrial organization and technologies that drove the rapid industrialization of this period and the genius of Owen in

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harnessing them both for the conventional purpose of profit but also the concomitant creation of what might be termed a welfare community. For if profit was a consequence it was not the motive force of what he did. Similarly if New Lanark, as the world heritage site it has become, now aims to pay its way in a demanding world, its restoration has been driven by other ideals, and other imperatives; ideals manifested in New Lanark’s social enter prise and social housing. Its status as a site of global historical significance has enÂ�capsulated and preserved for the future the physical embodiment of what it sought to achieve: a living community where the social takes prece dence over the acquisitively individual. The inspiration which Owen gave reconfigured the way in which many viewed the world; what it was and, more importantly, what it might become. And not only did it inspire many who sought to create a new moral world at home but also those, like Owen himself, who sought to transplant the moral values of communitarianism, often with disastrous consequences, to the New World of the Americas. Chase’s essay focuses on the export of Owenism to South America through the agency of Thomas Powell (like Owen a native of Newtown) and the Tropical Emigration Society (TES). Drawn by prospects of abundance, despair at what could be achieved in the old immoral world and frustration with the authoritarianism of Owen, the society looked to Venezuela as a suitable location to realize their aspirÂ�ations. Powell had been involved in the early co-operative phase of Owenism and then went on to play a prominent role in Montgomeryshire Chartism in the late 1830s. Following a period of imprisonment for his political activities, he threw his energies into the TES as its founding secretary and editor of its journal the Morning Star, and shortly after, in 1845, a colony was founded with a population of around 250. As Chase makes clear, the disaster which followed was as total as it was predictable: a hostile climate, lack of resource, virgin forest and an absence of effective leadership made for death, despair and dissension. Broken by the experience Powell himself stayed on in Trinidad, dying there in 1862. Chase’s chapter tells us much about the nature of Owenism and its appeal: its millenarian nature, the desire for a new world in the physical as well as the figurative sense; the failing faith in the capacity to build a New Jerusalem in a land that seemed neither green nor pleasant and lacking the potential to be either (particularly for those artisans in declining trades); the importance it gave to the acquisition of land and, above all, the appeal to many wouldbe communitarians of the exotic, the other, where with the constraints of 2


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Introduction

the old had been removed and all things became possible, at least in the imagination. As Chase shows these were the psychological, political and socio-economic imperatives which fuelled an interest in emigration, and the possibilities it held out, throughout Owenism’s history. Less dramatically, but in many ways more constructively there was what Owen contributed to the social reforms of the period. Marx and Engels might use the epithet of ‘utopian’ but the former in Capital, with more than a touch, surely, of self-directed irony, acknowledged what Owen had con tributed in a very real and practical sense. Not only had he ‘maintained the necessity of the limitation of the working day in theory but actually intro duced the 10 hours’ day into his factory at New Lanark. This was laughed at as a communistic utopia; so where his “Combination of children’s education with productive labour” and the Co-operative Societies of working-men, first called into being by him. To-day the first Utopia is a Factory Act, the second figures as an official phrase in all Factory Acts, the third is already being used as a cloak for reactionary humbug.’1 And in particular there was what he achieved as an educationalist and the inspiration that this gave to others. O’Hagan in his essay discusses the educational legacy of New Lanark where Owen demonstrated a new and potent relationship between education, work and society; something which, for many commentators, represents his most significant and lasting achievement. Certainly, for Owen, education was seen as the primary driver of the social transformation he hoped to effect. As O’Hagan points out, ‘at the heart of Owen’s educational programme . . . was the determination to create a disciplined “docile” population for factory, home and the shared spaces of social circulation.’2 And this he argues explains its appeal to those concerned with the fundamental tensions which industrialization was creating in the new social order. A New View of Society was, after all, aimed at political and cultural elites. This is in no way denies the radical nature of what Owen proposed: an education that integrated the utilitarian and instrumentalist with the pro moÂ�tion of self-knowledge and self-realization and, in consequence, the develop ment of a curriculum that embraced natural history and science together with music and dance. And Owen’s was a legacy which influenced, and had significance for, adult, early and citizenship education. If Owen was, as Hazlitt has suggested, a man of one idea, or in the patois of Isaiah Berlin a hedge hog rather than a fox; then that idea was one which profoundly shaped the thinking of many about what humankind was and what it might be made 3


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to become. Just how profoundly revolutionary was this vision of what edu cation might be was again something specifically recognized by Marx. Writing in Capital he opined that Owen had ‘shown us in detail, the germ of the education of the future, an education that will, in the case of every child over a given age, combine productive labour with instruction and gymnastics, not only as one of the methods of adding to the efficiency of production, but as the only method of producing fully developed human beings.’3 As Escott’s contribution makes clear, Owen was not someone who stood aside from politics and the political process where he felt it might be used to practical, legislative or proselytizing effect to advance the cause of social reform. This essay looks at Owen’s engagement with British parliamentary and electoral politics, both as a lobbyist and as a putative parliamentary candidate – an experience which largely served to confirm his underlying belief that ‘any government founded upon popular elections has within it the seeds of continued irritation, divisions and corruption’.4 It was, though, in his capacity as lobbyist that this engagement was most intense and ap parent: involvement in the movement for factory reform; petitioning of the House of Lords to create model communities similar to New Lanark; petitions in relation to the distressed condition of Ireland in the early 1820s; contributions to the deliberations of select committees; interventions in debates surrounding the key political issues of the day – grain shortages, high prices and the restoration of cash payment. All provided an opportunity not just to mark out his position on these matters but also to advance his own more general plans as to how a new society might be created. Elections and electoral politics in particular furnished a variety of platforms and media to engage with the political community and to disseminate his ideas beyond the circle of the Owenite faithful. These Owen used to the full. But it was on the minds of men and women that Owen left the most lasting imprint; an imprint sufficiently profound to provoke the critical categorization of ‘utopian’ which Marx and Engels bestowed. Most obviously there was the efflorescence of Owenite socialist political economy in the 1820s and 1830s and the practical expression of this in co-operative societies and labour exchanges. This was an ideological awakening that found expres sion in tracts, pamphlets, books and above all the working-class press and, for a period, posed one of the most formidable and profound challenges to classical political economy that it was to experience before the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Not until the late-nineteenth-century socialist revival was there such an upsurge of critical and constructive thinking that challenged 4


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Introduction

the fundamentals of capitalism’s economic rationale and its associated value system. Aspects of this challenge are considered in Maw’s contribution, in which he discusses what he sees as the unintended aspects of Owen’s ideo logical legacy. Thompson also looks at the impact that Owen had on con temporary socialist thinking on how it negotiated the perils and sought to exploit the possibilities of abundance. Maw’s essay focuses on one of the pivotal periods in Owen’s career, when he assumed de jure if not de facto leadership of the upsurge in working-class Radicalism of the late 1820s and early 1830s. Often seen, not least by Marx, as someone who failed to grasp the irremediable nature of class antagonism under capitalism, Maw sees Owen’s thought as nonetheless establishing the ‘key building blocks of new ideas about class and class conflict’.5 Thus his environmentalism and moral determinism and his thinking in terms of systems and the actions of social groups rather than individuals could be, and were, articulated in social analyses with class at their core: analyses that were to be developed and disseminated by organizations and media associated with Owenism and co-operation in the politically and economically charged atmosphere of the early 1830s. What emerged in consequence, as Maw sees it, was what can legitimately be termed a popular, anti-capitalist political economy that found expression in the working-class press and through trade unions and co-operative societies. Such a political economy was articulated with particular force and coherence by figures such as Bronterre O’Brien and James Morrison, and in papers such as the Poor Man’s Guardian and the Pioneer, whose direct experience of working-class organizations was to give both an edge to their class analysis and a more determinedly and rounded democratic view of their role in transforming the existing order than that of Owen himself. Thompson’s contribution considers the place of consumption in early nineteenth-century socialist thought, and in particular that of Robert Owen. Like later writers the Owenite socialists sought to reconcile the socially atomizing potential of private consumption with the desire to improve the material well-being of the working classes. Mechanization, and the industrial expansion which it fuelled, had persuaded Owen that the age of scarcity had ended and that of abundance had dawned. What was needful were social and economic arrangements which would allow the realization of its potentialities in ways that would not be divisive, self-serving or self-regarding. The resolution of this tension was to be effected by way of the prioritization of social consumption. Social opulence was to be the counterpart of personal 5


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restraint; something that was to be reflected in the quality of the social and cultural infrastructure which characterized socialist communities, both real and imagined. In an age whose priorities are quite the opposite, with material consequences with which future generations must live (or die), Thompson argues the need for a return to the Owenite vision of a social opulence that a prioritization of social consumption might deliver. But of course the influence of Owen’s ideas has extended far beyond the early part of the nineteenth century and their longevity, impact and con temporary relevance are discussed in two essays in this volume. Claeys examines how, in the light of the collapse of Marxian socialism, we should view Owen’s reputation vis-à-vis the later socialist movement and where this leaves the binary divide between ‘utopian’ and ‘scientific’ socialism. Here Claeys challenges the Marxian critique of Owen’s political economy: in particular its unhistorical character, its inability to elucidate the nature of capitalist exploitation and its failure to recognize the irremediable nature of class antagonism. As Claeys notes, despite this critique, all shades of socialist opinion in Britain, from MacDonald to Cole to Hyndman, acknowledged the remark able and distinctive contributions which Owen had made to the cause of the working class. And, if later British commentators made a distinction between their socialism and that of Owen and the Owenites, it was not with reference to any ‘utopian’/‘scientific’ dichotomy but with regard to the different explanatory and conceptual frameworks which they used and the different modus operandi they proposed for the delivery of socialist progress. This is made particularly evident by Claeys in his discussion of Alfred Russel Wallace and the latter’s view of Owen. Claeys also, and rightly, raises the issue of the relevance of community and scale to our society, with its present discontents, threatened public services and threatening public space. Owenite communitarianism celebrated the virtue of civic responsibility, public service and fellowship. Like Morris some fifty years later, Owen saw fellowship as creating the possibility of a full and rounded existence, while its absence made for social death. Yeo’s ‘Afterword’ seeks to do two things: to mediate a political conver sation between the early nineteenth and early twenty-first centuries and to consider critically the traditional historiographical view of the third quarter of the nineteenth century as a a particularly flat plain between two peaks. As to the first, he illustrates how the power of the co-operative movement as a set of associations has remained recognizable across time; a power which, 6


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Introduction

along with its associational ethos makes possible and legitimate the explor ation of a contemporary co-operative politics and what it might look like; a politics (emphatically lower-case) that could be used to challenge the acquisi tive culture of contentment that has taken us to within a few steps of the abyss. It is in this context that Yeo celebrates the intellectual achievement of Greg Claeys in having made more accessible and usable the Owenite inheritance upon which those who would forge a co-operative politics can draw. As to the flat socialist landscape of third-quarter Victorian Britain, this can now be seen as populated by a rich associational culture; one embraced and developed by those drawing on an Owenite legacy or inspired by its values to engage in active, working, productive and above all ‘social’ associ ations – trade unions, co-operatives, friendly and building societies and educational associations. This is something which Yeo sees as carried forward, in muted and transmuted forms, through the twentieth century into the growth of the New Mutualism of the New Labour years; and views it too as an Owenite-rooted legacy whose retrieval could lay the basis for aspirations for a fully social life. But if we are to take seriously Owen’s own emphasis on the determining influence of upbringing and environment, we must touch base, as we did in the conference, with Wales, the market town of Newtown and the rolling hills of Montgomeryshire. For only by doing so can we fully appreciate the early influences that helped shape his personality and thinking. Williams’s essay examines Owen’s relationship with Wales during his lifetime: the impact of Owenite communitarianism on Wales, which inspired amongst other developments the communities of Garn Lwyd and Pant Glas, and the evolving relationship between Wales and Owen or, perhaps more accurately, the changing Welsh perception of Owen, in the 150 years since his death. Building on the work of Donnachie, Powell and others he seeks to identify the nature of Owen’s intellectual and other debts to the town and rural community in which he was born and brought up and the nature of any distinctively Welsh cultural imprint which this left. The significance of this is difficult to gauge but certainly neither Owen nor, more interestingly, his subsequent critics, were to make much of it. Moreover Newtown, his birthand last resting-place was slow to acknowledge and embrace his memory. In significant part, it would seem, as a consequence of his perceived atheism. However, that was to change at the turn of the century when New Liberals, Welsh nationalists and the Labour movement were able to unpack Owen’s 7


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social thinking in ways consistent with their respective political credos. Sub sequent generations have done likewise; the multifaceted character of Owen’s political economy lending itself to such ideologically disparate appropriations of his legacy. Williams, like others before him, rightly notes Owen’s Nonconformist roots. And religion and the Bible had a particular place in his early life. Just how profound that influence was and how Owen subsequently engaged with religion, religious practice and religious institutions is considered by Davis. His discussion of Owen’s position on religion is set in the context of the historiographical reassessment of religious institutions and practice of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain that has occurred in the last four decades; something which has involved a more nuanced treatment than has previously been the case. Discussion of this aspect of Owen’s life and thought has portrayed him as a figure in the traditional narrative of the inexorable progress of Enlightenment rationalism; a reading to which his autobiographical Life lends credence. For Davis, however, Owen’s thinking can be seen rather as the product of a complex interaction with the language and habits of religious adherence. Certainly, as Davis makes clear, Owen was profoundly influenced by his exposure to Enlightenment thinkers, particu larly in the context of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society. Moreover his rejection of the notion of free will and therefore of the concept of moral responsibility represented an attack on religious systems that have that as their core. Further, in the 1820s he began to attack more overtly the philosophical assumptions of religious belief and to see it as a fundamental source of sectarianism and intolerance. Yet as Davis sees it, Owen, from an initial deism, ultimately looked to the renovation of religion and the accomÂ�modation of the religious impulse within a rational belief system – ‘a religion of truth’ – scientifically grounded in an understanding of nature; one ultimately yielding a signal improvement in the human condition. More over the religious language of conviction, conversion and millenarian trans formation came to be secularized and rationalized and then used as a means of articulating Owen’s social philosophy. In such a context Davis sees his final embrace of spiritualism not as an aberration but as a naturalistic and scientific explanation of religious claims to the existence of an afterlife. Powell’s chapter also touches on Owen’s understanding of the nature of religion and religious thought but with a specific consideration of his epistemology. His focus is on Owen’s understanding of the misconception of reality, and the more general bearing this had on his thinking. For Owen, 8


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Introduction

the existing order was characterized by misconceptions consistent with the ‘rank insanity’ of those who possessed them. Religion, private property and marriage were at the root of these. They generated the contradictions that characterized modem industrial society: private property was at the root of poverty in the midst of plenty and religion preached love but engendered hatred amongst those of differing religious persuasions. Reconciling such contradictions required a distortion or occlusion of vision that represented a form of insanity. How then could the capacity to see things as they were be restored, insanity dispelled and the possibility of a new order created? That was the role of Owen. A man who saw the world clearly as it was and as it might become; a secular Messiah who used millenarian and religious language to envision a material world characterised by abundance, from which the socially and morally corrosive effects of poverty could be removed. As Powell points out, despite the millenarian rhetoric of total transformÂ�ation, Owen was concerned that the new moral world must emerge from a trans formation of humanity’s perception of the world rather than the revolutionary overthrow of existing institutions; a transformation of perÂ�cepÂ�tion that would involve, in the terms of Piaget, the elimination of a pervasive egocentrism. Humanity must see the world clearly and not through a glass darkly. But achieving this, as Owen increasingly recognized, was profoundly problematic. Marx saw the clarification of vision as coming pari passu with the unfolding of the historical process itself. But it is to Piaget that Powell looks and to his ‘decentred thinker’ with the capacity to think rationally, to understand the interests of the community and live by internalized principles; a capacity hardwired into the psyche through the child’s experience of social groups where there is mutual respect and the recognition of a common interest. For Powell it is Piaget who points the way ‘to secur[ing] Owen’s educational route to restoring the clarity of vision’ upon which his new moral world was predicated.6 While this book begins with the contribution of Ian Donnachie, whose splendid volume provides the most recent biographical treatment of Owen, and one that does full justice to his Welsh roots, it could equally well have ended with it. This essay both assesses our current understanding of some of the controversies and issues surrounding Owen and also points to the oppor tunities for future scholarship in its assessment of those that have yet to be resolved. More specifically Donnachie addresses the multiple reputations which have been constructed for Owen. There can be little doubt that the substance 9


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of his reputation was created at New Lanark; a reputation, indeed an inter national one, that derived from its social transformation in microcosm at a time when turbulent economic times, and a prolonged conflict with revoÂ�lutionary and Napoleonic France, threatened social destabilization. It was New Lanark that attracted the attention of the elites but it was also this that laid the basis for his ideas on educational and factory reform which were in turn to establish a reputation with which those social elites came to be less at ease. This was the reputation that attached to Owen the advocate of communities and producer co-operatives and the Owen who excoriated the prevailing ethos of competition. This was a reputation which, whether legitÂ�imÂ�ately or not, was to see Owen transmuted into the ‘Father of Socialism’ by later generations of socialist and other writers and into someone whose ‘socialism’ was to receive the sustained critical attention of other socialists. Donnachie’s essay raises some of the unresolved and important issues still surrounding Owen’s career. How for example to explain his undoubted success in Manchester as manager of the Drinkwater mills? What explains the speed with which his career progressed on arrival at New Lanark: power, sex and money were, as Donnachie sees it, germane to this but in what ways and in what combinations? What allowed, and continued to allow him access to political and social elites? What prompted his attack on religion or rather sectarianism? Was it the inevitable corollary of Enlightenment rationalism or fired by other pressures and considerations? And then there is his stance on the position of women and gender equality. As Donnachie’s piece makes plain, there are, for the future, still many questions to be answered if a more complete picture and understanding of Owen is to be furnished. But if the flow of scholarship which characterizes the volume continues unabated, we can confidently anticipate that such a picture will have emerged when we come together, as some of us shall, and perhaps at Gregynog, to celebrate the 250th anniversary of Owen’s birth in 2021.

Notes 1 2 3 4

Karl Marx, Capital (London, 1976 edition), Vol. 1, p. 413n. P. 81 below Marx, Capital, p. 614. P. 138 below 10


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Introduction 5 6

P. 156 below P. 192 below

11


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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 scholar ship 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


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Ian Donnachie

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 eduÂ�cation, notably the monitorial system of Joseph Lancaster; he had skir mished 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, 14


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Robert Owen: Reputations and Burning Issues

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 abolition ist 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, find ing 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 cam paign 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 15


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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 at tempted 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 in novative 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 inter national. 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 wide spread application. From 1817 onwards, and deploying millennial discourse, 16


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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 com munities, 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 manu factures 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. Com munitarians 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 com munities 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 17


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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 ex clusively 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 frame work, 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, sustaining a multifaceted propaganda campaign and being associated with practically every popular movement of the 1830s through to the 1850s. The charismatic leader who was ‘Social Father’ and who blessed couples and named children brought forward at lectures and soirées was readily transformed by his early biographers and hagiographers into the ‘Father of Socialism’ after his death in 1858.18 Owen in due course became less cele brated in this regard by the left than Marx or Engels, but they both recognized his formidable contribution to early socialist thought. However, it was as a promoter of a social system that he was known in his lifetime, not as an advocate of what came to be understood as socialist ideology from the late nineteenth century onwards.

Burning Issues How did Robert Owen’s background help bring him to the position of a leading capitalist in the Industrial Revolution and a potential reformer of its excesses? While we are on safe ground on his early adulthood, knowledge of his childhood is something of a grey area, relying mainly on an auto biography written in his eighties. His family background and boyhood in 18


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Newtown, Montgomeryshire was almost certainly very influential. Kin, class, education, language and culture generally had considerable impact on the personality and thinking of a highly precocious child. The skills Owen acquired in Newtown were essentially practical: reading, writing, simple accounts, shop work, potential social skills and, it seems, monitorial duties at school supervising younger pupils on behalf of the master. Owen read widely and in this was supported by his teacher and one of the local clergy, who lent him books – of which some conveyed enlightened messages. There were also interesting religious and linguistic influences. He was apparently highly religious and, while the family were Anglican, perhaps touched by evangelical Methodism, though he claims otherwise. The millen nial tone that characterized much of his later writing is likely to have come from this background, supplemented by his exposure to Unitarianism in Manchester. Since Newtown was a bilingual town in a sea of Welshness did he also understand or speak Welsh? Although the language was different, might he even have understood some of the Scots Gaelic he heard spoken by the New Lanark Highlanders, hence enjoying a rather different relation ship with them than the picture he sometimes painted? Both religion and language were certainly to become significant issues later in his life.19 Kin connections were very important: his mother, his father, and his brothers all aided his start in life. He might not have shifted so far if his brother had not already been established in London, as out-migration from mid-Wales over such a distance was uncommon. His subsequent apprentice ships were also fortunate for young Owen, who always seemed to land on his feet, acquiring useful and varied retail experience in the drapery trade as well as continuing his education in works of the Enlightenment. The places where he worked – London, Stamford, and Manchester – represented interesting contrasts of size, location and function, but all three reflected in different ways the economic and social turmoil of the period. Owen was also astute enough to learn how to deal with different classes of customer, deferring to his betters as seemed appropriate. Mentors were always critical, the most interesting being James McGuffog, the successful Scottish linen draper and a leading citizen of Stamford, a possible prototype of David Dale in both business and moral ethics.20 Owen’s Manchester period was enormously important to his future career. His success there was remarkable by any standards and demands scrutiny. But Owen was at the centre of a boom town in a dynamic textile industry being transformed by new technology. His rapid shifts and promotions, 19


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often at the cost of edging out rivals and overcoming other threats, suggest an ability to absorb new ideas, enhance skills and deploy a ruthlessness to advance in an environment where high risks and potentially high returns prevailed. Maybe too he had a glib tongue, an eye for the opportunity, and a great deal of luck. Religion was used for social advancement though apparently his church attendance also gave him the opportunity to meet women. Beyond the church, his employment with Peter Drinkwater, another successful cotton master, and his connection with young men anxious to improve themselves, helped ease his way into the intellectual elite of Man chester which, like Birmingham and Glasgow, was becoming a centre of educational and scientific progress, as well as an industrial powerhouse. The Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, which Owen joined, had many distinguished members, including evangelical clergy, scientists, scholars, reforming doctors, and teachers. Once again Owen used this intellectual environment and these people to advantage. He soon delivered papers, several of which seem to point to future ideas about education and social reform issues generally. He also claimed to have disarmed critics, who were sidelined either by his charisma or his personal knowledge of industry. Owen absorbed more enlightened ideas and saw them put to practical use in another body, the Board of Health, one of the earliest such organizations promoting medical and sanitary reform in the fight against disease in the new industrial towns. Some of its recommendations were evidently applied in Drinkwater’s factories, and it also made Owen think about factory conditions, particularly those in which he was to be found. But it is the business success that was most critical: by his mid- to late twenties Owen was one of the most successful managers in the cotton industry. While there were many other people in his situation who were young, his success and potential were already remarkable before he ever set eyes on New Lanark.21 Like other Manchester cotton masters and merchants, Owen certainly knew what was going on in Scotland and may well have been acquainted with Dale’s numerous enterprises. He had the opportunity to learn more through his business connections and the fact that the Board of Health, surveying the views of factory masters, actually elicited information about child labour in the mills by the Clyde. Indeed, Dale’s philanthropic regime at New Lanark was already nationally and even internationally recognized through newspaper articles, travelogues and reports of visiting reformers.22 The long story of Owen’s acquaintance with New Lanark and his ultimate arrival there contains many puzzles and raises interesting and intriguing 20


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issues as to how he again struck lucky as entrepreneurial heir to the wealthy Dale. Certainly power, sex and, above all, money have their part in the story. Owen was an enormously astute and successful businessman, apparently charismatic, not lacking in looks and, for his age, already rich. His marriage in 1799 to Caroline Dale and her father’s generosity, brought Owen not only New Lanark’s management but also access to resources and influence on a substantial scale. In Glasgow, as before in Manchester, he was intro duced to the mercantile and intellectual elites, including some of philanthropic and reforming views. The way doors were opened to Owen at every turn suggests a possible Masonic connection, though no evidence has so far been found of this and he himself denied membership of the order.23 Wealth itself was a great lever, as it proved in his subsequent career, and elites every where were prepared to listen to a wealthy man who might well hold the key to deflecting threats to their own property and persons. However, this lay in the future: first he had to turn New Lanark around and make it a more profitable enterprise for himself and his partners. Quite how he achieved this raises many more interesting issues. Like Owen’s beginnings in Newtown, there is also something of a blank in the story of his early management at New Lanark. It is important to remember that the holding company was being run from Manchester and the Lanark Twist Company mainly from Glasgow, where Owen spent much of his time. While Owen later criticized Dale (though not in his lifetime, I suspect) for his failure to visit his factory with sufficient regularity, it is hard to tell how much time he himself actually spent in the mills and how much of the day-to-day management was delegated to overseers. In moves replicating those he had made in Manchester, he wasted little time getting rid of Dale’s managers, apparently because they got in the way of his plans. There may well have been other reasons, such as challenges to his authority, or in the case of William Kelly, who made notable improvements to the spin ning machinery, the potential threat of an inventive genius. The reforms in workplace and community enacted by Owen are well known, and the new order found expression as early as 1800 in his rules and regulations designed to enhance order. These were soon followed by gradual de-commitment from the apprenticeship system, with labour being replaced by families recruited locally or through migration. This was, clearly, much less bother, reduced discipline problems and saved money. Young children, in any case, did not make very effective workers, especially if they took up living space in buildings that could be filled with machinery and made productive. The 21


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factory itself seems to have been partly retooled with new water-wheels and more modern equipment. All of this was observed by visitors, some on spying missions from the USA and the Continent. But visitors seem to have been actively discouraged then, since, it was said, they took up too much time, though the threat of espionage seems equally convincing. Most, as in Dale’s time, praised the philanthropy of employing pauper children, though some were critical. In correspondence with the Stanley management Owen hinted at what he was achieving, albeit at the expense of a great deal of trouble, caused by resistance to his innovations. However, the workers and the women who complained most about his new discipline were ultimately tied to the place, and so as far as is known, few left. Despite various owner ship problems, the business history of New Lanark suggests that Owen was highly effective in raising both productivity and profits. His personal stake in the business was greatly enhanced in 1806 following Dale’s death, giving access to funds via the Dale Trust that could help the enterprise grow still further.24 At the same time Owen clearly had the leisure to involve himself in intellectual and reform issues, notably the subject of popular education – his first utterances beyond those on the cotton trade. It was this issue that opened the way to his more detailed thinking about social reform issues and New Lanark’s potential as a test-bed for his ideas. As noted above, Owen later claimed that educational innovation was his greatest achievement and represented an acknowledgement of its role in his own life. The Statement Regarding the New Lanark Establishment of 1812 indicated how all this might progress once Owen had the opportunity to act. The more sympathetic partnership of 1814, including the wealthy and brilliant Quakers, John Walker and William Allen, and the famous thinker, Jeremy Bentham, plus Owen’s enormously enhanced stake in the operation, was to make this possible. Once A New View was published and the institute and schools up and running, there was a great deal more interest in Owen and his ideas. As he widened his campaign to embrace the children and the poor, New Lanark attracted growing numbers of visitors, anxious to see Owen and his community. Owen seemed to hold the key to the problems of the day, and the visitors, beyond those coming to see the Falls of Clyde, represented a huge range of enlightened, intellectual and reforming interests from all over Europe, once more opened up to travel after the defeat and fall of Napoleon. All of these people, and in addition many Americans, interacted and opened doors to others. When Owen himself visited Europe in 1818 he was lauded to the skies. How else could he be bold enough to 22


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present memorials to the sovereigns at the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle in the expectation that his ideas would be taken up? There are many interesting questions about the European tour, highly influential for his educational agenda, which remained the most practical of his plans beyond New Lanark. When translated to New Harmony and other Owenite communities, the schools again and again proved the most successful aspects of the social reform programme.25 After his campaigns of 1817 and the European tour of 1818 Owen devoted himself and his vast resources to promoting the village scheme. How much did this derive from New Lanark and A New View? Their population was to be much the same, the architecture of the earliest designs similar, but the planning and layout were very different. The social arrangements might be comparable but the economic structure differed substantially. Unfortunately Owen was at his weakest in explaining the transposition of capitalism into co-operation, assuming such a shift was then possible. How would all this work, people asked, how would labour be valued, how would property be shared, if at all? What would happen if people wanted to leave?26 Given the contemporary obsession with the poor reproducing themselves in great numbers and the interests of Malthus and others in this debate, could Owen explain how numbers would be regulated in his communities? What about religion and class? How were differences to be accommodated? If the poor were to be educated, to what purpose? Such issues were inescapable, suggest ing that Owen failed to grasp the fact that a community sustained by profits (and huge profits at that) could readily support corporate philanthropy, but that it would be very difficult to maintain this in an enterprise where cooperation rather than competition prevailed. As events at New Harmony, Orbiston and later Queenwood proved, New Lanark was in many ways an inappropriate model. However, as with much else we need to see this in the context of the time and remember that Owen spoke of ‘trials’ or ‘experiments’ that might alleviate distress and at the same time promote social and moral regeneration.27 There are inevitably numerous issues swirling about Owen that take us beyond New Lanark, although in speculating about them many times we are returned there. The rejection of organized religion was not unusual for someone who had been personally touched by Enlightenment thinking, who had become effectively a deist (rather than an agnostic). Owen believed he had been called by some divine force to lead a crusade of social and moral reformation. He continued to use religious and millennial language. His 23


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attack, more specifically, was not on religion but on sectarianism, as he was generally careful to make clear, since the clergy remained highly influential and he needed their support as much as that of other elites. And while local ministers of the Scottish Kirk pursued Owen because they thought he was treading on their toes, many clergy seemed to have been interested in his ideas about the treatment of the poor and parochial education which, beyond the gospel and moral order, were the prime concerns of their parish ministries. Owen’s clerical connections were themselves of a high order in cluding proÂ�fessors of theology in the Scottish universities, the archbishop of Canterbury, many senior bishops, leading dissenters, even the members of the Irish Catholic hierarchy whom he addressed at Maynooth during the Irish tour of 1822–3. However, there is no question that, after 1817, when he first pronounced on religion, the issue of secularism constantly got Owen into trouble and muddied the waters of Owenism during his many campaigns.28 Owen’s emphasis on education was another key issue around which debate inevitably arose. If society was to be made moral, then character formation was a key educational aim. But beyond that what was the working class to be taught and to what purpose? Despite the interest the schools and the curriculum at New Lanark and in the later communities generated, these questions remained unanswered. Even more puzzling was Owen’s view that the working class was too ignorant to vote, when the implementation of a scheme of popular education he was actively promoting as early as 1815 might overcome that impediment. Owen is often said to have avoided political action, at least before the 1830s. But in the dangerous times after 1815, even if he had been inclined towards political intervention, it would have made little sense for him to pursue this avenue. As it was, he made extensive use of parliamentary connections through sympathetic MPs, members of the House of Lords and his parliamentary candidature of 1820 which, although he failed to get elected, garnered him additional publicity. His connections with the political elite were extensive not only in Britain and Ireland but also in Europe and above all in the USA, where even Owen’s manservant was said to have shaken hands with every living president. This story reminds us of Owen’s remarkable ability to ease his way into the salons of the political elite, the great and the good. Was it wealth, charisma and benevolence that made this possible? Always one returns to the notion of an enormously successful and wealthy businessman with solutions to the problems of the time, none of which necessarily negate his genuine benevolence. Even though 24


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his ideas were sometimes overambitious and unrealistic, people regardless of class would listen if it suited their own interests. Gender issues also became increasingly important in Owenism. At New Lanark, they are seen in the central role women played in both the work force and the home, and in their participation in many community activities. In the schools the infant provision, the openness of the curriculum to girls as well as boys, the evening schools, and the women engaged in classroom teaching and lecturing, were all exceptional for the time. Catherine Whitwell, sister of the Owenite architect Stedman Whitwell, was clearly highly in novative in her use of visual aids and teaching of natural history, one of several subjects not seen in school curricula for several generations.29 Owen was a promoter of equality so far as it could be taken at the time. He decried the marriage laws, and especially the married property laws, as further means of victimizing women (though it has to be admitted he had been a bene ficiary of Dale’s fortune). His promotion of birth control as a means of checking population, as well as easing the lot of women, was always discreet. Indeed he never spoke openly, but always in riddles and made much of his knowledge, claiming to ‘possess the means’ or ‘know a secret’ which would solve the problem of poverty. It is an interesting speculation that he was as widely recognized for his covert promotion of contraception as for his championÂ�ing of reform generally, and that this gave his message a particular appeal to women. Certainly huge numbers of the female sex flocked to his meetings, some in Dublin being so overcome by the crowd (rather than the charisma of Owen himself?) that they had to be passed through windows to recover their composure. Even larger numbers of women, and of all classes, visited the New Lanark schools, particularly to see the infant school and the famous dancing children. Owen and his relationship with and to women beyond their roles in the communities is a subject that merits more detailed investigation. Although it is notoriously difficult to decode, Owen certainly seems to have had an enormous appeal to women. Social reform, rather than politics or civil life, was one of the few fields in which women could be involved, and this might well explain the importance of the man as much as his message. What of Owen’s leaving New Lanark behind for the New World and New Harmony? There is no doubt that after the failure of his efforts to get govern ment support in Britain and then in Ireland Owen became increasingly dis illusioned. The odd thing is that, even on the basis of his own calculations, he could well afford his own community and the evidence points to the 25


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failed Motherwell Scheme actually bringing him a profit when he sold the land back to General Hamilton of Dalzell. Owen had become acquainted with many Americans and was very well informed about the United States, where he knew land was cheap and the costs of setting up any venture poten tially lower than they would be in Britain. Thanks to this association with American reformers, he gained the impression that the US government was likely to be more susceptible to his powers of persuasion and the potential of his plans than the reactionary politicians he had dealt with in Britain, all of whom gave him polite attention but were evidently not prepared to act. The post-war economic slump had hurt New Lanark and the partnership’s profits, though all the partners including Owen were still enormously rich. Further, the attacks against him by some of the clergy seemed to suggest that his own glowing reports of labour and community relations at New Lanark were not the complete truth.30 In the summer of 1824 the potential of the US was confirmed by another reformer and educationist, William Maclure, who may well have raised the possibility of a prospective partner ship in an American community. The fact that the Harmonist’s agent, George Flower, appeared at New Lanark soon after Maclure’s visit suggests an orchestrated campaign to persuade Owen into inspecting Harmonie. Contrary to the advice of another American, the artist Chester Harding, who thought a community was more likely to succeed in the eastern states rather than the wilds, Owen quickly decided to cross the Atlantic to inspect the community on the Indiana frontier. Given that the Scottish Owenites Abram Combe and Archibald James Hamilton seemed likely to make progress with their revamped Motherwell Scheme at Orbiston, only fifteen miles from New Lanark, there are more interesting questions about Owen’s position. Why did he not link up with Combe and Hamilton, since they had been loyal supporters for years? Hamilton had even accompanied him to Ireland and Combe had begun publishing works about Owen’s ideas. Did Owen have to be the first and have to prove he could do it himself? Did he want to avoid the risk of others taking the credit? Did he know he would probably lose money in Britain and stood a better chance of making a profit in Indiana even if the com munity scheme did not succeed? Beyond Harding many others were puzzled, from the British and Irish supporters left behind to those Owen and his party later encountered on board ship or on arrival in the States. Limitations of space make it impossible to relate the remarkable story of New Harmony, but it certainly throws up numerous issues as well as points of comparison and 26


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contrast with New Lanark and the British communities, notably Orbiston, another victim of dystopian confusion. New Harmony may have been an economic failure but Owen retained substantial assets there, and socially and culturally it was an interesting experiment in Owenism. Indeed Owen’s activities in the US and later in Mexico surely indicate the huge reach and influence of this remarkable individual who had learned so much at New Lanark. Owen’s later record as ‘Social Father’ reveals nearly thirty years of un remitting efforts to sustain the proposals set out in A New View of Society and other works of the 1800s. How could Owen jump from one platform to another and adapt the message to suit the context? How could he remain so consistently optimistic in the face of all the odds? The term ‘failure’ is not used, because Owen did not fail. His message was appropriate for the time and, like both factory reform and popular education, eventually brought results. The man and the movement he inspired were wholly committed to social betterment and driven by ideals which challenged the inequalities of late Georgian and early Victorian Britain. The fact that it took so long to effect real social change, beyond the modest changes we have reviewed in Owen’s lifetime, may be explained by the prevalence of notions of laissezfaire that were rejected by Owen and the Owenites. In common with other liberal and radical thinkers, they were struggling against an established order that proved highly resistant to change. Reform was a long-term business.31 So, what did Robert Owen actually achieve at New Lanark? He made New Lanark world famous, a focus of fair treatment for workers and for the promotion of a raft of pioneering educational and environmental ideas linked to social and moral regeneration. Owen had enjoyed many advantages in the place, its single industry focus, its distinctive, even unique, location, its relation to an established community, the support of local elites plus the tacit approval of the civic authorities in Old Lanark and the county, to make it an ideal test-bed for his ideas. He found in David Dale’s New Lanark further confirmation of general notions developed earlier in Manchester, and there was much that was circumstantial in the course of events. With the help of others like Godwin and Place, to name but two, Owen while at New Lanark developed his insights into a social system and then a plan of regeneration apparently appropriate to the time, but in reality timeless in its application. Working on the principles of character formation Owen made famous, New Lanark could be said to have influenced him more than he did it. Nevertheless the achievement was undoubtedly of unusual significance 27


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for the development of his ideas and his influence on issues of workplace relations, community, citizenship, co-operation and the environment – that resonate powerfully to this day. While there is much that Owen left unsaid and much that continues to puzzle us about his ideas and motives, they remain strikingly modern in their potential application. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation recently reported that society had lost its ‘moral compass’, with government, the media, big business and religion sharing the responsibility. In 1904, the founder of the social policy charity had identified poverty, war, slavery, intemperance, the opium trade, impurity and gambling as the ‘great scourges of humanity’. According to the study of a century later the top ten evils were: the decline of community, indi vidualism, consumerism and greed, a decline of values, the decline of the family, young people as both victims and perpetrators, drugs and alcohol, poverty and inequality, immigration and responses to it, and crime and violence. The report concluded that people felt a strong sense of unease about some of the changes shaping British society. ‘People are concerned about the way our society has become more individualistic, greedy and selfish, seemingly at a cost to our sense of community.’ The media were criticized for propagating negative and damaging attitudes, and religion was identified as a cause of conflict and confusion. Big business was blamed for fuelling inequality and consumerism (its culpability exacerbated by global financial crises).32 Sadly all of this suggests that despite rapid economic and social progress the problems Owen confronted are still with us. More than a century and a half after his demise his message rings out loud and clear from the place he made famous in A New View of Society, essays remarkably still in print two centuries after their publication.

Notes This chapter is based on ideas presented in the Robert Owen Commemorative Lecture at New Lanark, May 2008 and in the Robert Owen and His Legacy Conference, Gregynog, August 2008. â•‡2 In addition to the seminal study by J. F. C. Harrison, Robert Owen and the Owenites in Britain and America: The Quest for the New Moral World (London, 1969), the two bicentenial collections by John Butt (ed.), Robert Owen: Prince of Cotton Spinners (Newton Abbot, 1971) and by Sidney Pollard and John Salt (eds), Robert Owen: Prophet of the Poor (London, 1971), see inter alia R. G. â•‡1

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3

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6 7

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12

13

Garnett, Co-operation and the Owenite Socialist Communities in Britain, 1825-45 (Manchester, 1972), Anne Taylor, Visions of Harmony: A Study in Nineteenth Century Millenarianism (Oxford, 1987), Edward Royle, Robert Owen and the Commencement of the Millennium: A Study of the Harmony Community (Manchester, 1998), Ian Donnachie, Robert Owen: Owen of New Lanark and New Harmony (East Linton, 2000; 2nd edn as Robert Owen: Social Visionary, Edinburgh, 2005), and the collections by Chushichi Tsuzuki (ed.), Robert Owen and the World of Co-operation (Tokyo, 1992) and Chushichi Tsuzuki, Naobumi Hijikata and Akira Kurimoto (eds), The Emergence of Global Citizenship: Utopian Ideas, Cooperative Movements and the Third Sector (Tokyo, 2005). For major publications by Owen and the Owenites see SWRO and OSPC. On New Lanark’s history and its role in Owen’s promotion of his views see Ian Donnachie and George Hewitt, Historic New Lanark: The Dale and Owen Industrial Community since 1785 (Edinburgh, 1993; 1999). Robert Owen, A Statement Regarding the New Lanark Establishment (Edinburgh, 1812) [SWRO, 1, pp. 13–21]. Beyond his parish and interest in poor relief issues, Duncan was a proprietor of the Dumfries and Galloway Courier. SWRO, 4, pp. 162–4. For modern editions of the essays with contextual commentaries see Robert Owen, A New View of Society and Other Writings (ed. Gregory Claeys, Harmondsworth, 1991); SWRO; and Ian Donnachie and Carmen Lavin (eds), From Enlightenment to Romanticism: Anthology II (Manchester, 2004). See SWRO, 4, p. 114, the first of many references in his autobiography to the role of religion in his thinking; Donnachie, Robert Owen: Social Visionary, pp. 83, 118, 180 on religion at New Lanark. On Dale and his regime see Donnachie and Hewitt, Historic New Lanark, pp. 17–58; David MacLaren, David Dale: A Bright Luminary to Scotland, 2nd edn (Glasgow, 1990). Donnachie, Robert Owen: Social Visionary, pp. 121–31. The best single account of his participation in the factory movement at the time is still J. T. Ward, ‘Owen as factory reformer’, in John Butt (ed.), Robert Owen: Prince of Cotton Spinners (Newton Abbot, 1971), pp. 99–134. On factory children generally a recent excellent study is Peter Kirby, Child Labour in Britain, 1750–1870 (London, 2003). John Griscom, A Year in Europe (New York and London, 1823), II, pp. 385–6. Griscom’s account of Owen’s educational system proved highly influential in both Britain and the US. David J. McLaren, ‘Education for citizenship and the new moral world of Robert Owen’, Scottish Educational Review, 32 (2000), 107–16; Donnachie, Robert Owen: Social Visionary, pp. 149–50, 165–70. Falla merits further research as he clearly played a critical role in Owen’s thinking about the agricultural basis of the proposed communities, evidently touring Ireland with Owen and visiting Orbiston. 29


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Ian Donnachie 14 15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

SWRO, 1, pp. 287–332. Owen, it has to be said, experienced many such moments, but the apposite phrase was coined by W. H. Oliver, ‘Owen in 1817: the millennialist moment’, in Sidney Pollard and John Salt (eds), Robert Owen: Prophet of the Poor (London, 1971), pp. 166–87. Gregory Claeys, Machinery, Money and the Millennium: From Moral Economy to Socialism, 1815–1860 (Princeton, 1987), provides a detailed discussion of Owen’s thinking in relation to the then current orthodoxy and other views; see also his introductions to the two collections cited above. A concise overview of Owen’s economic ideas is found in Ian Donnachie, ‘Robert Owen’, in David Rutherford (ed.), The Biographical Dictionary of British Economists (London, 2004), pp. 887–91. Owen’s links to co-operation have generated a substantial literature, partly of a historical nature, partly positioning Owen’s views in the modern co-operative movement. Recent contributions include Stephen Yeo (ed.), New Views of Cooperation (London, 1988); Tsuzuki (ed.), Robert Owen and the World of Cooperation; and Richard Bickle and Molly Scott Cato (eds), New Views of Society: Robert Owen for the 21st Century (Glasgow, 2009). On the labour notes see Takashi Maruyama, ‘The local currencies and Robert Owen’s Labour Notes’ in Chushichi Tsuzuki, Naobumi Hijikata and Akira Kurimoto (eds), The Emergence of Global Citizenship: Utopian Ideas, Co-operative Movements and the Third Sector (Tokyo, 2005), pp. 111–27. For early biographies see Harrison, Robert Owen. Frank Podmore, Robert Owen: A Biography (2 vols, London, 1906) remains a key source, as does Alexander Cullen, Adventures in Socialism: New Lanark Establishment and Orbiston Community (Glasgow, 1910; new edition 1972). Ian Donnachie, ‘Robert Owen’s Welsh childhood: kin, culture and environment 1771–c.1781’, Montgomeryshire Collections, 86 (1998), 81–96. On the Highlanders see Margaret Nicolson and Ian Donnachie, ‘The New Lanark Highlanders: migra tion, community and language 1785– c.1850’, Family and Community History, 6 (2003), 19–32. Donnachie, Robert Owen: Social Visionary, pp. 20–36, on his apprenticeship and retail background. There is undoubtedly scope for further discoveries on Owen’s business history and his interest in reform issues. Ian Donnachie, ‘Historic tourism to New Lanark and the Falls of Clyde 1795– 1830’, Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change, 2 (2004), 145–62. This has been investigated in both England and Scotland, but not as far as I know in the US. I suggest money was the great lever, though the power of his personality was considerable. John Butt, ‘Robert Owen as a businessman’, in idem (ed.), Robert Owen: Prince of Cotton Spinners (Newton Abbot, 1971), pp. 168–214, remains the best account of his business acumen. 30


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Introduction 25

26 27

28

29

30 31

32

There is a substantial literature on the educational and social aims of Owenism. Valuable reviews are David McLaren, ‘Robert Owen, William Maclure and New Harmony’, History of Education, 25 (1996), 223–33; and idem, ‘Education for citizenship’, Scottish Educational Review, 32 (2000), 107–16. See also Ian Donnachie, ‘Education in Robert Owen’s New Society: The New Lanark Institute and Schools’, the encyclopaedia of informal education (2003) www.infed.org/thinkers/et-owen. htm; and for wider perspectives Harrison, Robert Owen, and Taylor, Visions of Harmony. These were the major issues underpinning the economics of the communities. Ralahine has been the object of recent research, including Vincent Geoghegan, ‘Ralahine: Ireland’s lost utopia’, Communal Studies, 9 (1989), 91–104. A recent contribution is Richard J. Cherok, Debating for God: Alexander Campbell’s Challenge to Skepticism in Antebellum America (Abilene, TX, 2008). Some further information has come to light on Catherine Whitwell, but she would repay investigation. There is a growing literature on gender issues in Owenism, most recently Catherine Durieux, ‘Marriage as seen by Robert Owen and the Owenites’, in Chushichi Tsuzuki, Naobumi Hijikata and Akira Kurimoto (eds), The Emergence of Global Citizenship, pp. 95–109. Donnachie, Robert Owen: Social Visionary, pp. 195–9. It is often forgotten that while Owenism faded, the ideas continued to influence reform and many Owenites occupied important positions in later popular move ments in Britain, the US and elsewhere. Beth Watts, Charlie Lloyd, Alice Mowlam, and Chris Creegan, Modern-Day Social Evils: The Voices of Unheard Groups (York, 2008).

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2

Robert Owen and Some Later Socialists

Gregory Claeys

This volume commemorates the 150th anniversary of the death of Robert Owen, born at Newtown on 14 May 1771, who returned to expire gently at the Bear Inn, near his place of birth, 87 years later, on 17 November 1858.1 It is also very slightly over one hundred and ninety years since, on Graham Wallas’s admirably precise reckoning, Owen began to preach socialism, at that memorable meeting at the City of London Tavern, at a quarter to one on 21 August 1817, when he first publicly announced his disrespect for all established religious opinions.2 By coincidence, it is also thirty years since I became a historian of socialism and began to plough in Owen’s field. It may be, therefore, that this is an appropriate occasion to consider how much the historiography of socialism has altered in principle as a result of the failure over the past twenty years of its most famous experiment, the inter national communist state system. Owen remained throughout his life, after that August afternoon, a controversial figure, in his views on education, religion, politics, socialism, the malleability of human behaviour, and much else. How we view these issues, however, has altered greatly over the decades. I have elsewhere considered how Owen’s late Victorian reputation was expressed in biographies.3 This essay examines how, in the light of the collapse of Marx ian socialism, we should view Owen’s reputation vis-à-vis first, the later socialist movement and then, in reference to some more contemporary concerns. For about a century, from the 1880s to the 1980s, the historiography of socialism was dominated by a binary, teleological division between the ‘utopian’ socialists, principally Owen, Fourier and Saint-Simon, who were


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rather awkwardly mustered together, and their ‘scientific’ successors, Marx, Engels and Co. This juxtaposition was of course imposed upon the histori ography by Marx and his disciples, who, while they have made many notable contributions to historiography, could never be accused of writing without an ill-disguised contempt for their deluded socialist forebears, and accordingly, in this field at least, have much to answer for. From the Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848) onwards, we have been persistently told that ‘utopian’ socialism was both pre- and unscientific, that it had been superseded by its Marxian successor, and that what remained was of largely idle historical interest, fit for the socialist equivalent of boy scout character-building tales and not much else. Not all Owen scholarship has been dominated by these categories; the more incisive studies of Owenism, notably those by J. F. C. Harrison and Edward Royle, do not deploy this scheme, preferring an emphasis on Owenite ‘communitarianism’ and abjuring comparisons with most forms of later socialism.4 Nor, though my own starting-point as a historian was partly Marxist, did I ever feel much sympathy for the propositions this dichotomy implies, my own preference being for a simple chronological distinction between ‘early’ and ‘later’ socialism. Yet the dichotomy remains surprisingly resilient in the literature of socialism as a whole, as well as in that of utopianism. This is lamentable and requires redress. This essay asks how far the narrative framework of the above categories actually accounts for the development of later Victorian and Edwardian socialism. Was there a ‘break’ between ‘utopian’ and ‘scientific’ socialism, or do these labels describe contending traditions within socialism which never disappeared, but remained juxtaposed, side by side, up to the present? The question will be addressed in four stages: first looking briefly at the ‘utopian–scientific’ nomenclature; then considering how a number of later socialist writers viewed Owen, giving (thirdly) a special precedence to one case, that of Alfred Russel Wallace, about whom little has been written. Finally the merits of the ‘utopian’ label today will be assessed by looking specifically at three interrelated areas: the question of the scale of life, the meaning of socialism when defined as ‘community’, and the issue of socialist cosmopolitanism, and asking what resonances, if any, these quintessentially Owenite themes retain for us in the twenty-first century.

34


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The Emergence of ‘Utopian’ vs. ‘Scientific’ Socialism First, we need briefly to be reminded how Owen came to be categorized pejoratively as a ‘utopian’ socialist. In the Manifesto of the Communist Party Marx distinguished between ‘Critical-Utopian Socialism and Communism’. Here it is ‘the undeveloped state of the class struggle, as well as their own surroundings’ which ‘causes Socialists of this kind to consider themselves far superior to all antagonisms’, which in turn leads them to ‘reject all political, and especially all revolutionary, action’ in favour of attaining ‘their ends by peaceful means, and small experiments, necessarily doomed to failure’. What gives their critical component ‘a purely utopian element’ is thus in particular the extent to which their ‘proposals point solely to the disappearance of class antagonisms which were, at the time, only just cropping up, and which . . . are recognised in their earliest indistinct and undefined forms only’.5 The lack of recognition of the agency of the proletariat in effecting the overÂ�throw of capitalism, in other words, the seeing it solely as ‘the most suffering class’, was crucially ‘utopian’.6 In the later pamphlet, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, Engels also lent weight to the ‘discovery’ of the ma teriÂ�alÂ�ist conception of history, or the analysis which predicted the inevitability of capitalist crisis and proletarian revolution, and to the ‘revelation of the secret of capitalist production through surplus value’. He was willing to acknowledge that ‘Every social movement, every real advance in England on behalf of the workers links itself to the name of Robert Owen’. But he would not admit that he had done Owen an injustice in insisting that the latter believed that ‘Socialism is the expression of absolute truth, reason, and justice, and has only to be discovered to conquer all the world by virtue of its own power. And as absolute truth is independent of time, place, and of the historical development of man, it is a mere accident when and where it is discovered.’7 The concept of ‘scientific’ socialism, then, rested on the claim of the un historical nature of the ‘utopians’. Such a claim was itself founded upon three premises: the necessity of violent class struggle by the proletariat, the veracity of Marx’s predictive capacity, and the concept of surplus value. Lenin would reduce these formulae to the simpler description of the ‘utopian character of the plans of the old advocates of co-operation, beginning with Robert Owen’s failing to take ‘into account such basic questions as the class war, the conquest of political power by the working class and overthrow of the rule of the class exploiters’.8 35


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To examine these premises in adequate detail would take us far beyond our concerns here. There are, however, serious misconceptions both in the delineation of the supposedly ‘utopian’ qualities of Owen, and the superior ‘scientific’ insights of Marx. In particular, Owen did not believe that the system could be transformed at any possible time, but in fact built upon a stadial concept of social development which proclaimed that the advent of commercial society, as the leading Scottish theorists termed it, coupled with industrialization, alone provided the means of securing an adequate standard of living for the majority. Owen’s theory of the unequal exchange of labour between capitalist and labourer also accomplished, albeit in cruder form, much of what would be described in Marx’s theory of surplus value. Owen ism developed a relatively sophisticated theory of capitalist crisis, and so sophisticated a theorist as John Hobson, thus, would later write that ‘The Owenite and early Socialistic analyses and proposals presented a powerful and various challenge to the theory and accepted practice of the capitalist control of industry for private profit, anticipating almost all the valid critic ism of the later socialism.’9 Owen notably in 1833–4, also attempted to utilize proletarian power to engineer a fundamental shift in the capitalist system. There also remains the counter-charge that it was Marx, rather than Owen, who was the more utopian, in proposing a world-historical revoÂ�lution occurring throughout the advanced capitalist countries and accompanied by a substantial improvement in human behaviour, not to mention the later vision of communist society which was to follow the dictatorship of the prole tariat. And Marx’s predictive capacity respecting the inevitability of capitalism’s demise hardly inspires confidence in 2008, when, while the system indeed retains the instability and destructiveness which marked its nineteenth-century emergence, we had a New Labour government willing to forestall the Apoca lypse by spending £50 billion to bail out only one immiserated bank. Let us turn, however, to see what validity this utopian/scientific polarity may possess as a way of reading the transition from early to later nineteenth-century socialism.

Remembering Owen c.1870–1914 How far, then, do later nineteenth-century acknowledgements of Owen’s pioneering role shed light on the utopian/scientific categorization? The case presented here is that Owen’s legacy clearly remained relevant to socialists through the First World War, but that many conceded that developments since 36


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his death meant that this inheritance had to be understood in a new way and, for many, not in the terms suggested by Marx and Engels. The remem brance of Owen in the decades after his death mainly took the form of annual birthday celebrations, which were regular and well attended down to the end of the century. The socialist press of this period was also full of tributes to Owen’s impact. To take only a few instances: in 1901 the Labour Leader praised Owen as ‘the beloved apostle of the working classes although he was a Tory’, and insisted that he had been ‘the first to discover that pro duction and distribution for profit were the causes of the misery of the poor and the selfish luxury of the rich’.10 A discussion in the same year respecting the erection of a memorial to Owen noted that he had ‘conclusively proved that a rough and unruly class can, by altering their surroundings, have their character entirely changed’.11 Lecturing at Leicester in 1907, the rationalist John M. Robertson praised Owen’s ‘benevolent temper’ compared with the ‘ill-will and class animus of the Marxians and the Labour Party’.12 During the development of enthusiasm for Guild Socialism, too, various commen tators noted the ‘striking similarity’ between Guild ideas and those of Owen, with one asserting that ‘Owen’s proposals were akin to Syndicalism, as he intended the land and instruments to be owned by their users. The Trade Unions, as “national companies”, were to control industry very much as is contended by the Syndicalist of to-day.’13 And yet we should acknowledge contemporary criticisms, too. A review of Frank Podmore’s biography of Owen in 1906 noted that Owen was: a stupendous bore . . .what was evidently at the root of many of his deficiencies [was] that he had no touch of artistic genius . . . This absence of artistry explains why his voluminous writings are unreadable and unread; why his quadrilangular paradises, modelled on Lancashire cotton-mills, appear to us not only impossible, but detestable as modern ‘model dwellings’ for the working classes; why his ideal – for others – of simple material comfort, communities of well-fed, well-housed artizans living in compounds, seems inadequate and unattractive.14

Podmore himself, too, offered a critical judgement on Owen in concluding that he had failed: to celebrate the sterner virtuesâ•‚justice, fortitude, chastity, reverence. Under the Social System there would be, Owen and his followers held, no room for such virtues, no need for struggle and endurance, for heroism and fruitless 37


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self-surrender; but also no wide horizons, no insatiable hope or celestial ardours. To eat and drink and be clothed, and therewithal to be content – such is the Paradise to which he invites us.15

And, in another critical aside, in 1910, Walter F. Roch MP suggested that Owen ‘passed quickly from one thing to another, swayed by emotion rather than passion. He dreamt dreams but he saw no visions’ and was ‘one-fifth businessman and four-fifths mystic’.16 There were grander commemorative occasions in which it was Owen’s virtues that were recalled. The most important of these occurred a century ago on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of Owen’s death, when a large meeting was held in Lanark, in June 1908. The principal speakers were Keir Hardie and James Ramsay MacDonald. Large numbers of people arrived by special trains (the Glasgow train was late). Many of the men wore red ties, and the women red rosettes. Hardie said of Owen on this occasion that ‘nearly every great idea of advancement or progression in our own time had been inspired by him’. This ‘great and god-like man’, he said, ‘had appeared to the people with a message, and the message was that the business of the child was not to make profits, but to enjoy this life’. He added: The great merit of Robert Owen’s work consisted in the fact that whilst he was environed by an atmosphere of selfishness, he proclaimed that Altruism – not each for self but each for all – was the true law of life and progress. Robert Owen’s central thought had been this – that the business of teachers and statesmen and all who were able to influence the life of the people, was to assist each individual in developing his life along joyous lines.17

Ramsay MacDonald’s view was that they were celebrating the memory of Robert Owen because he was a great personality – a man who saw more clearly than any other of his time, what the permanent elements of human society were going to be. Owen was a man of a heart, a man of an aspiration, a man of the inner light, at a time when everybody was seeking to pile up wealth, trying to satisfy themselves with things that perish. Before Ruskin wrote, before Carlyle was in his cradle, Robert Owen was telling men that there was no wealth but life.18

Another meeting later in the same year described him as ‘the great pioneer’ in the fields of ‘rational education, factory legislation, trade unionism, co38


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operation, labour exchanges, work for the unemployed, the emancipation of women, penal reform and international peace’.19 If we consider the twenty or so years preceding this, we may note that from the socialist revival of the early 1880s onwards acknowledgements were made of the links between earlier and later forms. From the leaders of the movement we may cull only a few comments on Owen. The Social Democratic Federation’s controversial founder, H. M. Hyndman praised Owen for having produced ‘not only some of the most luminous thoughts on political economy ever met on paper’, but also an important ‘proposal for the formation of a Federation of the civilized powers of Europe’.20 He conceded that Owen had demonstrated that machinery produced a glut of commodities and consequent working-class unemployment, and praised him for having shown ‘the right path towards education and industrial organ ization for the young’, even terming the system of education at New Lanark ‘the most successful ever seen’.21 The Socialist League lecturer, famed designer and poet William Morris, though he evinced some sympathy for Owen, also condemned his ‘shortcoming’ as ‘the necessary one of the utopist, a total disregard of the political side of progress; he failed to see that his experiments, useful as they were from that point of view, could never develope [sic] out of the experimental state as long as the governors of Society forcibly uphold the so-called “rights of property”.’22 The leading Fabian Sidney Webb said that Owen’s ‘constant insistence on the corporate duty of the community to its individual members was really the forerunner of the successful “municipal Socialism” which our great cities have since taken up’.23 His fellow Fabian Graham Wallas insisted that ‘It is difficult to exaggerate the influence of Robert Owen on the more thoughtful working men during the first half of the century’. The Independent Labour Party activist and later Labour Party prime minister Ramsay MacDonald also referred to Owen on many occasions besides those already noted. To MacDonald, writing in 1919 in his very influential account, The Socialist Movement, socialism was to be built on public opinion, and: The idea of a revolution transforming the structure of Society by the will of a minority must seem as Utopian to it as the ideas of the Owenites and of all who sought to create an oasis of peace in the wilderness of the capitalist system. It believes in democracy, not only as a moral creed which alone is consistent with its views of humanity, but because it is the only practical creed. It knows that, revolutions or no revolutions, public consent is the basis 39


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of all social order and that the good builder makes his foundations sound before he puts up his storeys.

MacDonald thus agreed that it was correct to categorize as ‘utopian’ the Owenite phase of socialism. But he altered the way in which this terminology was deployed in a significant way. Owen had been ‘utopian’ because he had believed that ‘Man was assumed to be a fixed entity of desires and modes of action, and not an organism subject to historical change’. The utopian method was, therefore, ‘not organic progress but mechanical renovation’. It was a ‘pre-scientific phase, when Socialism added to a perfectly sound criticism of the present and a pretty clear insight into the future, methods of reconstruction which were inadequate and unsuitable to society’, and because it ‘saw social regeneration coming through the commune’, while ‘the new sees it coming through the state’.24 But elsewhere he saw Owen as having made a contribution here, too. For Owen had provided a ‘positive view of the state as a protector of the weak – and particularly our code of factory legislation; the co-operative movement is its direct fruit; public education and trade unionism owe it much.’25 Keir Hardie, too, writing with MacDonald in 1899, was willing to draw a line between the Independent Labour Party and its early nineteenth-century predecessors, insisting of the former that: British Socialism is not Utopian. It has nothing to do with the founding of ideal communities cut off from the general life of society, taking no part in the great reforming efforts of its time in politics, in social life, and in religion, finding peace in an exile from heroic human effort, and in a divorce from the historical growth of the nation. Even if the success of those communities were more indisputable than it is, they are alien to the spirit of British Socialism, which regards its mission to be the transformation of the whole social fabric.26

Here, then, we have a new definition of the later phase, but one quite different from, indeed often hostile to, the Marxian categories of analysis. This suggests that while earlier nineteenth-century socialism indeed needs to be sharply distinguished from its successors, the terms of this distinction for most mainstream socialists were not those offered by Marx and Engels. The differ ence lies chiefly in attitudes towards centralized political power, towards politics as a matter of principle and towards the state in particular, and towards an ‘organic’, evolutionary or developmental approach to both human 40


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nature and social development. The state and Darwin, then, divide the earlier from the later socialists, not revolutionism and class struggle; to most later socialists a minority revolution and dictatorship of the proletariat were, in MacDonald’s terms, ‘utopian’ because any other road than that of democracy was bound to end in ruin. And this plea for ‘public consent’ was clearly nearer to Owen’s vision than that of Marx.

The Legacy of Owenite Socialism: The Case of Alfred Russel Wallace It is worth giving particular attention to Owen’s influence upon one leading later Victorian writer, the naturalist and co-discoverer of the theory of natural selection, Alfred Russel Wallace. This is, first, because little has been written about him in relation to the socialist tradition and, second, because he illus trates the main theme of this essay, that later Victorian socialism in fact exhibits a considerable degree of continuity with Owenite themes, rather than anything like the break implied by the categories of ‘utopian’ and ‘scientific’, and that where such a breach does appear it is along dissimilar lines from those proposed in the original distinction, namely in relation, as seen above in reference to Ramsay Macdonald, to evolutionary theory and to the state. A connection with Robert Owen and Owenism runs through much of Wallace’s long life, starting in early adolescence. In My Life Wallace tells us that he had ‘always looked upon Owen as my first teacher in the philosophy of human nature and my first guide through the labyrinth of social science’, since his first encounter with Owenism at the John Street Institute near Tottenham Court Road in London.27 The initial effect of his encounter with Owenism was, in the first instance, to challenge, and then destroy, Wallace’s religious beliefs. Wallace was also profoundly influenced by the central prin ciple of the Owenite system, the notion that the character of every individual was, as Wallace put it: formed for and not by himself, first by heredity, which gives him his natural disposition with all its powers and tendencies, its good and bad qualities; and, secondly, by environment, including education and surroundings from earliest infancy, which always modifies the original character for better or for worse.28

Readers of Wallace’s Life will also recall its extended discussion of Owen’s mill and schools at New Lanark, much of which was taken from Owen’s 41


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own Life (1858) and W. L. Sargant’s Robert Owen and His Social Philosophy (1860). Wallace commented extensively on the kind treatment of the workers in Owen’s New Lanark mills, and Owen’s success in reducing hours of labour, improving conditions of work, and fostering child education. He was deeply impressed by the fact that Owen had managed to: transform a discontented, unhealthy, vicious, and wholly antagonistic population of 2500 persons to an enthusiastically favourable, contented, happy; healthy, and comparatively moral community, without ever having recourse to any legal punishment what ever, and without, so far as appears, discharging any individual for robbery, idleness, or neglect of duty; and all this was effected while increasing the efficiency of the whole manufacturing establishment, paying a liberal interest on the capital invested, and even producing a large annual surplus of profits which, in the four years 1809–13, averaged £40,000 a year . . .29

He later wrote, too, of New Lanark, that he knew ‘of no more wonderful example in history’.30 This application of socialist principles, however, Wallace recalled, was in reality only the ‘partial application of Owen’s principles of human nature’: Owen used always to declare that the beneficial results at which all visitors were so much astonished were only one-tenth part of what could and would be produced if his principles were fully applied. If the labour of such a com munity, or of groups of such communities, had been directed with equal skill to produce primarily the necessaries and comforts of life for its own inhabitants, with a surplus of such goods as they could produce most economically, in order by their sale in the surrounding district to be able to supply themselves with such native or foreign products as they required, then each worker would have been able to enjoy the benefits of change of occupation, always having some alternation of out-door as well as indoor work; the hours of labour might be greatly reduced, and all the refinements of life might have been procured and enjoyed by them.31

Wallace’s main criticism of Owen was that he had changed the manner in which his principles were applied: ‘The one great error Owen committed was giving up the New Lanark property and management, and spending his large fortune in the endeavour to found communities in various countries of chance assemblages of adults, which his own principles should have shown him were doomed to failure.’32 42


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In the second phase of Wallace’s intellectual development, which occupied most of his middle life, such scepticism about the possibility of great moral improvement of ‘chance assemblages’ of people produced an evident rejection of socialist solutions to poverty. But then his views underwent profound alteration once again, in large part through the influence of Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward 2000–1887 (1887). Wallace tells us that at length, in 1889, my views were changed once for all, and I have ever since been absolutely convinced, not only that socialism is thoroughly practicable, but that it is the only form of society worthy of civilized beings, and that it alone can secure for mankind continuous mental and moral advancement, together with that true happiness which arises from the full exercise of all their faculties for the purpose of satisfying all their rational needs, desires, and aspirations.33

He added elsewhere: Mr Bellamy has completely altered my views on this matter. He seems to me to have shown that real, not merely delusive liberty, together with full scope for individualism and complete home privacy, is compatible with the most thorough industrial socialism.34

Wallace often acknowledged this debt to Bellamy. He also gave publicity to Bellamy’s scheme for the means of effecting a transition from capitalism to socialism, which included a mixture of the nationalization of chief public services, such as railways, and the municipalization of others, like electricity, gas and water supply. Crucial to the transition was also to be the abolition of all inheritance of property by those not directly heirs of its owners, a principle Wallace had accepted many years earlier.35 He also accepted Bellamy’s principle of ‘coupons’, in which money which alone was capable of ‘represenÂ� ting productive work’ was the ‘only true standard of value and the best instrument of exchange’ – which was a wholly Owenite ideal as well.36 With this alteration in the currency mechanism, Wallace anticipated that those employed in government service would alone enjoy the advantage of having their wages exchangeable at government shops and for government services. Increasingly, those possessing the old gold and silver currency would find themselves at a disadvantage; the old currency would become devalued, and its possessors would increasingly enter the government service.37 This is nothing like Owen’s ‘Plan’, although it bears some resemblance to proposals 43


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by writers like John Gray in the 1820s and 1830s, who had been inspired by Owen and by some labour exchange proposals in the early 1830s. If a more statist approach to socialism demarcates Wallace’s later socialism from his earlier sympathies, his co-discovery, with Darwin, of the theory of natural selection also played a vital role in defining his socialist outlook. The starting-point of Wallace’s Bellamy phase was thus partly ‘to reply to the common objection against Socialism, that it would lead to a too rapid increase of population’.38 This defined the specific perspective which Wallace would adopt towards socialism in this period. He was clearly aware that the principles of natural selection were widely perceived as having a human and social application, and that this had been broadly (indeed was increasingly) construed as supporting the virtues of individual economic competition as the principal means of weeding out the human ‘fit’ from the ‘unfit’. This conclusion Wallace would resoundingly dismiss, but without rejecting the case for a necessary improvement in human type, and this, too, in the rela tively short term. The question was how to reconcile this with a desire for a more just and egalitarian society. To Wallace the ‘first scientific application of my conviction’ entailed the proclamation that socialism alone could provide the means for regulating both the size and the quality of the human population. Thus he was able to refute, or at least to evade, the ‘gloomy’ conclusion Darwin himself had drawn about the future of human evolution on the basis of the fact that ‘in our modern civilization natural selection had no play, and the fittest did not survive. Those who succeed in the race for wealth are by no means the best or the most intelligent, and it is notorious that our population is more largely renewed in each generation from the lower than from the middle and upper classes.’39 Wallace also thought that women would play a crucial role in the improved process of sexual selection in the future, choosing their mates with evolutionary progress in mind, at least some of the time. Hence, Wallace contended, ‘when the course of social evolution shall have led to a more rational organization of society, the problem will receive its final solution by the action of physiological and social agencies, and in perfect harmony with the highest interests of humanity.’40

Owen’s Ideal of ‘Community’ as an Enduring Concept Let us now turn to evaluate Owen’s legacy from a more contemporary view point. We have seen that historians often refer to the Owenite movement, 44


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by contrast with Marxism, as one of ‘communitarian’ socialism; that is to say, one in which the small-scale community is enjoined as providing a superior mode of life by contrast with either an exclusively urban or rural existence. After some initial flirtation with this ideal, particularly on Engels’s part, in the middle and later 1840s, Marx and Engels abandoned their sympathy for it thereafter, and it is difficult to imagine a day spent alternately engaging in hunting, fishing, herding cattle, and critical criticism, in the famous image of the German Ideology, in any of the later Marxist portrayals of the future communist society. What, then, are the resonances of the communitarian ideal today? Does it retain any relevance at all to the wider world or is this, too, a ‘utopian’ legacy now long surpassed? To many such an ideal is likely to be dismissed as archaic in a world in which half the population now lives in overcrowded cities. Moreover, the pressure of conformity, and the suppression of indi viduality entailed, which are associated with the original communitarian ideal, find scant appeal outside intentional communities, which are often religious, or suit those seeking voluntary subordination to some form of charismatic higher authority. The extreme magnification of these demands in totalitarian form has made us rightly wary of enforced sociability on an enlarged scale, and of the subordination of the individual to the communal as an ideological ethos. We must admit the possibility that it may well, indeed, have killed off the socialist idea in principle. Yet the problem of the scale of life was recognized by later nineteenth-century socialists as remain ing crucial to defining the quality of life. We should not, in this sense, insist that a communitarian response was simply abandoned after the socialist revival of the 1880s. Three brief examples indicate that it was not. First, we should recall that on its original formation in 1883 the Fellowship of the New Life, the parent organization of the Fabian Society, considered forming a utopian community, possibly along the lines of Owen’s New Harmony, in South America.41 The dominant member of the Fabian group at this time was Frank Podmore. Secondly, William Morris, commenting on Owen in 1889, noted that while ‘the living in small communities is not in theory an essential of this great change . . . I have little doubt that it would bring about such a way of living and abolish big cities, which . . . I think much to be desired’.42 Thirdly, and perhaps from a more unexpected source, and in a very different way, we have H. G. Wells’s extensive comment of 1905, describing the housing of the future. The universal landowner, the state, has contracted private companies to build public housing. Here Wells observed: 45


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Gregory Claeys

Isolated single houses for poor people . . . scarcely exist at all; the common form of residence is in a club building or college, and the rent paid covers not only the private apartments of the tenant, but the club subscription. The residential club is controlled by a committee representing the occupiers and the owners in variable proportions.

The commonest shape, Wells noted, was ‘in the form of a large quadrangle, containing a finely-kept grass plot, and a paved covered passage about it’, like an Oxford college, in the centre of which were ‘a sundial and four little beds of flowers; nearly a thousand feet in total’. Here the town where work took place was thirty minutes away by train. The quadrangle included kitchens and dining rooms, crèches and kindergartens, recreation rooms, a gym, a library and an infirmary. Movable partitions in bedrooms allow regrouping; there are no fireplaces; hot water is used for heating; and ‘better class houses had a dressing-room with a bath and so forth, connected with each bedroom.’43 To emphasize his theme, ‘A woman’s day in Utopia’, Wells stressed the fact that ‘a working woman’s life was infinitely easier and more refined’ in these improved circumstances than it was ‘in the horrible little independent houses’ of his time. To those, then, who had assumed that a parallelogram ideal could never appeal to later urban dwellers, Wells clearly offered a resolute ‘no’: the problem lay not in the design as such, nor the communitarian content, but in the degree of regimentation the scheme demanded, or alternatively, the degree of privacy and individuality it permitÂ�ted, which is the same point Wallace had made. Nor is this an image of parallelograms for paupers: this is a solidly bourgeois conception of collective life, a ‘decent life for common people . . . nothing more than what we have in our present world’, to use Wells’s words, ‘except a better arrangement’. What bearing, then, does this communitarian legacy have upon some of our present critical social problems? We should first consider the question of our degree of identity with and duty towards the public, which in a sense goes to the core of the original socialist vision of ‘the social system’ in which harmony and co-operation were to supersede competition. We live commonly now in what is increasingly regarded as a degraded public space, in which not only the canons of politeness and mutual respect, but the very concept of the res publica, or what Margaret Thatcher infamously dismissed as ‘society’, are under threat. Respecting our public services, every question of what is euphemistically called ‘reform’, turns on issues of cost and profitability rather than public service or human utility. Post Office closures, the abandonment 46


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of local medical services, the creeping sell-off of the National Health Service, the privatization of ‘public’ transport, the private funding even of state schools, all reflect a neo-liberal profit-oriented political philosophy in which human consequences, particularly for the poor, are never a central consideration. To its critics, this path, scouted by Thatcher but followed enthusiastically by successive neo-liberal prime ministers of both major parties, including the Blair and Brown governments, is an extraordinarily dangerous road down which to travel. Coupled with a marked growth in social inequality, which again promotes private-sector solutions for the needs of the well-to-do, and degrades the public sector as fit only for the poor (try an extended stay in an National Health Service ward), it markedly devalues our perception of the public sector as such.44 And it is not only services, but our sense of the common space we share, that is becoming degraded. A healthy society requires a healthy sense of respect for what makes its public space not merely inhabitable but pleasant. Mark the difference between traversing the litterstrewn streets of a British town after the Saturday-night debauch which has made many of our inner cities no-go areas for large numbers of the popuÂ�lation, by comparison with a Sunday morning in Paris, Amsterdam, Copenhagen or Berlin. Once our common space is lost, it is notoriously difficult to regain. Yet we recognize in Britain that we are indeed in danger of losing what the United States ceded over half a century ago in many of its cities, a sense of common life and shared space, surrendered in particular by white flight to the suburbs and the resulting concentration in ghettoes of an increasingly impoverished non-white population. Part of the cause, at least, of this atrophy of public-mindedness lies in the fact that successive generations of so-called ‘leaders’ have encouraged us to believe that greed and selfishness are good for us, both individually and collectively. The Owenite ideal, of course, was very different, and so too was the later nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century sense among socialists of the need to promote our sense of commonality by reinforcing what seems now so quaintly and archaically Victorian, our sense of public duty. Consider the Independent Labour Party anti-conscriptionist J. Bruce Glasier’s 1915 pronouncement that ‘the true roots of British greatness’ lay ‘in the love of freedom – personal and political – in the liking for con stitutionalism, and the sense of civic fellowship, together with the hatred of lawlessness, autocracy, and servility’.45 Recall H. G. Wells’s attempt in A Modern Utopia (1905) to define an ethos of public service around the order of the Samurai, an effort he would rebrand as ‘republicanism’. Reflect on 47


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Ramsay MacDonald’s insistence (in 1936) that socialism rested on ‘the comÂ�munity spirit, upon individual devotion to common service, upon the cohesion that is destroyed by class, the military spirit, and an economic system that breeds poverty and dependence’.46 Readers of Orwell’s The Lion and the Unicorn (1941), too, will recognize a kindred set of themes. We are all aware of how the most extreme forms of coercive communitarianism went tragically wrong in totalitarian systems, creating class hatred and classoriented violence on an unprecedented scale, inviting mass murder of the well-to-do, the educated and all political deviants. Yet the same principle of community and sociability can also provide a vital counterbalance to the corrosive qualities of excessive selfish individualism and hedonistic con sumerÂ�ism which threaten to prove the undoing of liberal capitalist societies. This clearly has a bearing upon the catastrophic environmental scenario we now face. The Owenite ideal, at bottom, was one of autarkic self-sufficiency and the exchange of quality of life for consumption of commodities. So long as this was offered as a straightforward choice to a relatively uneducated population hungry for consumer goods it was unlikely to prove an attractive proposition. Now, however, such a choice is no longer available: we must limit consumption or we will destroy our planet. This sense of public duty and community spirit, sometimes termed ‘republican’ and ‘communitarian’ with the liberal tradition, are essential to achieving this goal. A third aspect of the relation of Owenism to later nineteenth-century socialism respecting the scale of life concerns the ultimate form of worldgovernment to which we should aspire. We should recall here that Owen aimed at a form of anti-nationalist socialist cosmopolitanism in which all national barriers were to be superseded and one language alone would remain – yes, English. The overt chauvinism of such a proposal, despite its supposed federative safeguards, was matched by a variety of later nineteenth-century socialist proposals, not least those mooted by Marx and Engels, for super seding those ‘historyless’ smaller nations, like many of the Slavic peoples, or amalgamating much of the world into an expanded and glorified British empire, such as the Fabian George Bernard Shaw proposed in 1900. Against this trend a variety of later socialists insisted that a non-chauvinistic form of nationalism not only could but had to form the basis for international co-operation between nations. Nationalism and socialism, in other words, were not merely not antithetical, but were complementary: a nationalist aspiration to be free of subordination to larger and more powerful races and nations exhibited the same legitimate desire for freedom and autonomy which 48


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socialism upheld on behalf of the working class from an economic stand point. The post-colonial era and later twentieth-century history generally provide abundant evidence that individuals persistently and, indeed, increas ingly want national sovereignty to accord with ethnic, linguistic, religious and cultural identity. They also want to be integrated into viable forms of international government – witness the relative success of the European Union in this regard – but only when their independence is preserved. They do not want Russian, British, French, American or Chinese masters. They do not want to be compelled to speak someone else’s language, or to abandon their national identities. They do want to be differentiated from other nations in a positive but also a critical sense – what Scot wants to be identified as English? Or Canadian as American? – the list is endless. People’s legitimate aspirations for independence, the legacy of some of the romantic national isms of the earlier nineteenth century, of Mazzini, Kossuth, Parnell and others, must clearly be heeded, and integrated into a structure of inter national co-operation. Here Owen, Marx and many later socialist opponents of nationalism have clearly been proved wrong. They not only missed the strength and appeal of contemporary nationalism; they missed the positive value of forms of local identity which make it possible to focus and act locally and regionally while thinking globally. We do not here lose, collect ively, by encouraging the proliferation of such forms of identity. We are much more likely to lose by fomenting a single, procrustean, collective identity which fosters homogeneity and uniformity, whether it be forged by a capitalist consumer culture or any alternative. Diversity is an indication of strength rather than weakness. Getting the balance of individualism and collectivism right rather than enduring the extremes of either is the real issue. Here the anarchists had something to teach the more collectivist communitarian social ists, which is one reason why the most anarchistical communists of the late nineteenth century, notably William Morris, remain appealing today, when so many of their comrades – Hyndman, Blatchford, Bax, Hardie – are now long-forgotten names. This brings me to a fourth aspect of Owen’s communitarian vision, carried forward into the late nineteenth century, which not only retains a contem porary application but is in fact much more important than ever, and that is neo-Malthusianism. You may recall that Owen was – in his view quite necessarily – rather coy about how population growth was to be stabilized in the ideal community. We have seen that amongst late nineteenth-century socialists Alfred Russel Wallace was much more direct about the inevitability 49


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Gregory Claeys

of population control. The problem of demographic growth is of course vastly more pressing today than it was in the late nineteenth century. Yet we still face a formidable conspiracy of Christian zealots in particular, Protestant and Catholic alike, who insist that God alone possesses the right to prevent births from occurring. This problem is every bit as serious as, and deeply interÂ�twined with, that of global warming. Yet it receives negligible attention in the world’s press, and what limited efforts might be made to at least depress the rate of growth through both birth control and the provision of positive incentives to restrain births, are scarcely entertained by many nations. The result, predictably, is bound to be catastrophic. We do not, perhaps, like Owen, have to proclaim ourselves secularists in order to condemn the role that religion plays in exacerbating this problem. But neither does it hurt to do so, in an age when religious self-promotion has been lent ever greater credence by government and public opinion alike. If talking to God has confirmed two prominent leaders in their view that the Iraq war was correct, perhaps talking against God might bring a more desirable outcome on this issue. Let me conclude by returning to my starting-point: how then ought we to view the ‘utopian/scientific’ model today? In terms of the ways of assessing earlier versus later nineteenth-century socialism, what else should be added or subtracted to this model? Let me make two suggestions. The first is that, as we have seen in the instance of Alfred Russel Wallace, the impact of natural selection constitutes an important watershed in socialist thought. Owen grappled with Malthusianism, but in terms of the population problem, not eugenic, or as we would term it today, genetic engineering. All socialists after Darwin, until at least 1914, were forced to think in the latter terms, and many – the Webbs, Shaw, Wells – did so in depth and at length. As we have seen, an ‘organic’ perspective – society and the individual in evolution – was central to writers like MacDonald. Secondly, by the beginning of the twentieth century socialists began to win electoral victories and to prove that market regulation, and particularly the restraint of damaging speculative investment, could prove viable. In certain autocracies like Russia revolution still, with hindsight, appears to have been the only means by which fundamental change could have taken place. But in many others this was not the case. Socialism in Europe, in the form of the social-democratic welfare state, has been successful in part because it decoupled itself from the revolutionary compulsiveness of Marx, and recog nized that a compromise with liberalism had to occur both in terms of first 50


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principles – the acknowledgement of rights to autonomy, both individual and national – and the concession that political compromise, electoral loss, the folly of the ignorant masses, all had to be taken on board by socialists as well as others. This has meant recognizing, again as MacDonald reiterated, that the state was not something to be superseded, wished away or regarded as the epitome of evil, but treated as a mechanism, like the nation, to be used for socialist ends. The successes of social democracy, in this respect, are mostly post-totalitarian, and date from the 1950s onwards. They are not utopian successes in the sense of implementing a grand revelation, but result instead from painstaking attention to the detailed hammering out of a dual economy in which the public and private sectors each play a crucial strategic role. They are eutopian, in the sense in which the Scottish soci ologist Patrick Geddes used the term, to denote realizable local changes for the better. Socialism’s contribution to this formula is the recognition that a higher human life for the majority requires public control and manage ment, if not ownership, over key areas of activity affecting welfare: transport, medical care, the exploitation of key national resources, the planning of long-term environmental objectives, the restraint of war, and, as we have yet again been recently reminded, the regulation of the international financial system. In all of these areas we have seen a succession of governments from Thatcher to Brown committed to neo-liberal economic policies in this country, with the consequence that we have been repeatedly pillaged by rapacious corporations. At the moment this seems, still, to be a losing battle, for the plunder continues with reckless abandon. But ‘utopian’ socialism also represents, as we have seen, the principle that, over the long run, private profit cannot ever provide an adequate substitute for the public provision of well-being. That was Owen’s original premise, as stated in the Report to the County of Lanark. If we want to recapture that sense of the virtue of preserving that shared or collective dimension of our lives that Owen called ‘community’, we could certainly do worse than remember his message.

Notes I am grateful to Lorna Davidson for assistance with references, and to the Cooperative Union for its financial support. â•‡2 Graham Wallas, Men and Ideas (London, 1940), p. 65. â•‡3 See my ‘The revival of Robert Owen: recrafting a Victorian reputation, c.1870– 1900’, in Chushichi Tsuzuki, Naobumi Hijikata and Akira Kurimoto (eds), The â•‡ 1

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Emergence of Global Citizenship: Utopian Ideas, Co-operative Movements, and the Third Sector (Tokyo, 2005), pp. 29–44. â•‡4 J. F. C. Harrison, Robert Owen and the Owenites in Britain and America: The Quest for the New Moral World (London, 1969); Edward Royle, Robert Owen and the Commencement of the Millennium: A Study of the Harmony Community (Manchester, 1998). â•‡5 I cite here from my ‘The political ideas of the young Engels, 1842–45’, History of Political Thought, 6 (1985), 455–78. â•‡6 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto, ed. Gareth Stedman Jones (London, 2002), p. 254. â•‡7 Friedrich Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (Moscow, 2007 edition), pp. 76, 77, 94. â•‡8 Lenin, ‘On co-operation’ (originally in Pravda, 1923). â•‡9 J. A. Hobson, Democracy after the War (London, 1917), p. 119. 10 Labour Leader, 19 July 1901. 11 Justice, 13 April 1901. 12 Ibid., 5 January 1907. 13 The New Age, 6 August 1914, 15 April 1915. 14 Fabian News (August 1906), 34–5. 15 Frank Podmore, Robert Owen: A Biography (London, 1906), II, p. 649. 16 Walter F. Roch, ‘Robert Owen’, The Socialist Review: A Monthly Review of Modern Thought, 5 (1910), 335–40: 339. 17 Labour Leader, 12 June 1908; Carluke and Lanark Gazette, 13 June 1908. 18 Carluke and Lanark Gazette, 13 June 1908. 19 Labour Leader, 20 November 1908. 20 H. M. Hyndman, Commercial Crises of the Nineteenth Century (London, 1892), p. 85. We frequently encounter praise for Owen’s views on education elsewhere. 21 Ibid., p. 23; idem, The Social Reconstruction of England ([1884]), p. 14; idem, The Historical Basis of Socialism in England (London, 1883), p. 456. 22 William Morris, Political Writings: Contributions to Justice and Commonweal 1883–1890, ed. Nicholas Salmon (Bristol, 1994), p. 565. 23 Sidney Webb, English Progress towards Social Democracy (Fabian Tracts, no. 15, 1890), p. 10. 24 James Ramsay MacDonald, The Socialist Movement ([1911]), p. 100. 25 Ibid., p. 204. 26 J. Keir Hardie and J. R. MacDonald, ‘The Independent Labour Party programme’, The Nineteenth Century, 45 (1899), 20–38: 25. 27 A. R. Wallace, My Life (1908), p. 57. 28 Ibid., pp. 46–7. 29 Ibid., p. 48. 30 A. R. Wallace, The Remedy for Unemployment (London, [1909]), p. 22. 31 Wallace, My Life, pp. 55–6. 32 Ibid., p. 56. 52


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Robert Owen and Some Later Socialists 33

34

35

36

37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44

45 46

Ibid., pp. 326–7. Nevertheless, although Wallace (ibid., p. 319) claimed that Herbert Spencer propelled him towards individualism, he also noted that Spencer’s view of the land ‘made a permanent impression on me, and ultimately led to my becoming, almost against my will, President of the Land Nationalization Society’. New Nation (1891), quoted in Martin Fichman, An Elusive Victorian: The Evolution of Alfred Russel Wallace (Chicago, 2004), pp. 251–2. On Bellamy and his fol lowers see in particular Sylvia E. Bowman, Edward Bellamy Abroad: An American Prophet’s Influence (New York, 1962), which notes Wallace’s praise (pp. 111–12). and Arthur Lipow, Authoritarian Socialism in America: Edward Bellamy and the Nationalist Movement (Berkeley, 1982). A. R. Wallace, ‘If there were a socialist government – how should it begin?’, Clarion, 18 August 1905, 5. Ibid. On Owen’s view of the exchange mechanism, see my Machinery, Money and the Millennium: From Moral Economy to Socialism, 1815–1860 (Princeton, 1987), pp. 34–60. Wallace, ‘If there were a socialist government’, 5. The Humanitarian, ns 4 (April 1894), 315. A. R. Wallace, Studies Scientific and Social (London, 1900), I, 509. Ibid., pp. 509–10. Henry Pelling, The Origins of the Labour Party, 1880–1900 (Oxford, 1965), p. 33. Morris, Political Writings, p. 466. H. G. Wells, ‘A woman’s day in Utopia’, Daily Mail, 7 June 1905. Although, in the UK, both the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Assembly have expressed resistance to these trends. J. Bruce Glasier, The Peril of Conscription (London, 1915), p. 7. Ramsay MacDonald, At Home and Abroad: Essays (London, 1936), p. 222.

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3

The Great Experiment: New Lanark from Robert Owen to World Heritage Site Lorna Davidson and Jim Arnold

This chapter examines the lasting legacy and achievements of the quartercentury (1800–25) when Robert Owen was owner and manager of the New Lanark cotton mills in Scotland. This was the period when he was at his most focused, enterprising and successful, making a real difference to the lives of ordinary working people through his enlightened social and edu cational policies, despite opposition and even alarm, engendered by his un orthodox views, not least his denunciation of organized religion. Many initiatives which Owen pioneered – such as free infant education and free medical care – are now provided by the state, at least in the United Kingdom. As a result, it is New Lanark that is arguably Owen’s greatest legacy. Here the buildings can still be visited which were the physical expression of his ideas and aspirations for society, notably the Institution for the Formation of Character and the School for Children. Following the closure of the cotton mills in 1968, the population of New Lanark had dwindled and the neglected buildings were falling into dereliction. In 1974, Jim Arnold was appointed as Village Manager by a newly formed Trust, established to attempt the restoration and regeneration of the historic mill community. This was a challenging project and required the deployment of a mixture of business management skills, idealism and sheer persistence, not dissimilar to Robert Owen’s. New Lanark is now recognized as a site of outstanding universal value and was inscribed on UNESCO’s list of World Heritage Sites in 2001. The New Lanark Trust strives to keep the Owenite dream alive, supporting social enterprise, local employment, social housing, fair trade and using renewable energy. Above all, it maintains a strong commitment to education,


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Lorna Davidson and Jim Arnold

introducing as many people as possible to Owen’s ‘new view of society’ and his enduring belief in the transformative power of environment and education. The village of New Lanark was founded in 1785, in an age of innovation and enterprise, in the earliest period of the Industrial Revolution. Founded by a Scots entrepreneur and philanthropist, David Dale (1739–1806), New Lanark was a factory community designed for the spinning of cotton thread, utilizing Richard Arkwright’s water-frames, the most advanced technology available at the time. Built in the valley below the old market town of Lanark, an Ancient and Royal Burgh of Scotland, New Lanark’s location was dictated by the availability of water-power, and here the Falls of Clyde, long reÂ�nowned as a beauty spot, provided abundant natural energy to drive the waterwheels. Work began in 1785, and the first cotton mill started production in 1786. By 1793, four mills had been erected, and there were 1,334 people employed at New Lanark. The youngest workers were just six years old. In September 1799, David Dale’s eldest daughter Caroline married the Welsh-born Robert Owen who, with two Manchester-based partners, had purchased the New Lanark cotton mills. A few months later, on 1 January 1800, Robert and Caroline took up residence in New Lanark, where Owen was to be the managing partner of the business. He went on to carry out what he later described as the ‘the most important experiment for the happi ness of the human race that had yet been instituted at any time in any part of the world’.1 Under Owen’s enlightened management between 1800 and 1825 New Lanark was to gain a reputation as a model industrial comÂ�munity. To Dale’s mill buildings and millworkers’ housing, in addition to expanding the manufacturing capacity with the construction of a new Mechanics’ WorkÂ�shop, an iron foundry and extra buildings for spinning, Owen added important community buildings, specifically designed to further his wider social agenda. Notable among these were the Institution for the Formation of Character and the School for Children. During the first quarter of the nineteenth century, New Lanark illuminated the darkness of the Industrial Revolution Â�– as the very antithesis of ‘dark Satanic mills’. Although the main interest in terms of Owen’s legacy tends to focus on the philosophical aspects of the New Lanark community, we should not forget the impressive physical aspects of what was an enormous enterprise at the forefront of eighteenth-century technology. Industrialization on a grand scale was represented by the site. Revolution in economic organization was illustrated by its massive stone buildings and the very large workforce of 56


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New Lanark from Robert Owen to Heritage Site

around 2,000 people. Technological change was represented by the sophisti cated use of water-power and machines, and all the support activities which were required to sustain and develop what was, for a time, the largest factory in the world on a completely new and relatively isolated rural site. The village itself made a strong visual impact on visitors who, as evidenced by their accounts, were fully conscious of a very strong sense of place. Owen’s achievements were based on manufacturing success and wealth. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in Britain the cotton spinning industry was a revolutionary way of making money, and Owen was exceptionally talented as a manufacturer. It should not be forgotten that not every cotton business was a success. Many struggled and failed, but Owen was an astute and energetic businessman, and it was this economic success at New Lanark, and his willingness to fund social innovation and experimentation, that provided a solid foundation for his ambitions to change the new industrialized society. On first visiting New Lanark in 1798, Robert Owen characterized it unflatteringly as ‘a primitive Scotch manufacturing village’.2 Nevertheless, he saw it as the opportunity to put into practice an experiment he claimed to have long contemplated, as a response to the chaotic social conditions which prevailed in Britain as the Industrial Revolution gathered pace, and of which he had first-hand experience in Manchester as a young mill manager in charge of a workforce of some 500 people, many of them women and children, at Drinkwater’s Bank Top Mill. Rapid industrialization and un planned urbanization had resulted in appalling living and working conditions for many people. They were working long hours in factories, with no care or attention paid to their health, welfare or education. The social fabric was threatening to break down. When Owen became the managing partner of the New Lanark Mills, he set out quite consciously, therefore, to demonÂ�strate that society could become better, fairer and more harmonious. He put into practice radical economic, social and educational reforms which he believed would demonstrate to the wider world how such a society might be created. It is undeniable that, by the 1820s, New Lanark was widely regarded as a model community, and attracted thousands of visitors – sceptical, curious, admiring and incredulous – and twice as many people were applying for jobs there as they were able to take on. How did Robert Owen achieve this not inconsiderable feat? There are, of course, many complex contributing factors, but two extremely important ones were those of organization and education. 57


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The New Lanark community consisted at that time of about 2,000 ordinary working people, mostly from Lowland Scotland, but also from the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. A large number of these last were what we would today call ‘economic migrants’, forced by extreme poverty to seek a better life and new employment opportunities by leaving their homeland, to embark on a dangerous and uncertain journey into the un known. Many did not speak English or even Lowland Scots; their native language was Scots Gaelic and they had few of the skills required for cotton manufacturing. There were also hundreds of orphan or pauper children, who had been apprenticed to work in the cotton mills, where they were provided with board and lodging in lieu of wages. This was a community, then, of people thrown together by force of circumstances, who unexpectedly and un intentionally found themselves the subject of Robert Owen’s social experiment. Organization was a key factor in Owen’s strategy. He had an agenda to improve the standard of living and the quality of life for his millworkers; he was strongly opposed to child labour, believing that everyone had a right to education, but he had to have a profitable business to finance his radical plans; for if he did not succeed in running the company well, he would lose his chance of carrying out his great experiment. According to him, the manage ment of the business at the point when he took over was very lax, with pilfering and other sharp practices going on. He introduced a much stricter regime in the cotton mills, with timekeeping, stock-counting, production costs and so on carefully recorded and scrutinized. Drunkenness was tackled, with the ultimate sanction, dismissal, exercised only after three warnings. Sanctions were otherwise in the form of fines, which were paid into the Community Fund. Owen was also decidedly uncomplimentary about the way in which at least some of the population behaved, describing them as ‘lawless, – getting into debt, – burning their window shutters and inside doors, – and then removing in the night, – and committing all kinds of depredations’. Accord ingly, he drew up a list of nineteen Rules and Regulations for the Inhabitants, designed to help towards the creation of a healthy and harmonious com munity.3 Some of these rules were aimed at improved health and hygiene, such as those concerning the cleaning of windows and of common stairs, and refraining from throwing rubbish into the streets. Others were designed to assist the establishment of friendly and co-operative relationships, for example with parents taking responsibility for the behaviour of their children and everyone respecting each other’s property, as well as that of the company. 58


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Perhaps the most important of all was the exhortation to exercise religious tolerance and respect the religious opinions of others. Crucially, Owen wanted to encourage community responsibility, and he worked with a democratically elected village council to make progress towards his social revolution. New Lanark was divided into twelve ‘neighbour divisions’ from which the residents chose a representative to sit on the village jury. This, it should be noted, was long before universal suffrage was achieved. These elected representatives met monthly with Robert Owen or, if he was away, with his senior managers, to discuss village affairs, adjudicate in cases of neighbour disputes, and so on. They also formed a committee to oversee the attempts to clean up the town, earning them the nickname of the ‘Bug-Hunters’.4 Unsurprisingly, the initial reaction from the villagers was hostile. But Owen, at best regarded as strict but fair, was nothing if not quietly persevering, and the practical benefits provided in return for co-operation with this new regime were con Â�siderable. They included free medical care and medicines, cheap nutritious food and household goods, allotments, a sickness fund from which they had payments in time of illness or hardship, and a savings bank. Gradually he won them over, and by December 1813 when he succeeded in retaining ownership of the mills in the face of an attempt by his then business partners to buy him out, the villagers celebrated. As the Glasgow Herald of 10 April 1814 reported, ‘The houses were all illuminated at New Lanark on Friday night when the news came, and all has been jubilee and animation with them ever since.’ Following this triumph, and with the support of his new partners, who included Jeremy Bentham, Michael Gibbs and four members of the Society of Friends, William Allen, John Walker, Joseph Fox and Joseph Foster, he was able to embark on the next more idealistic and innovative part of his experiment, which relied on his unshakeable belief in the power of edu cation and environment to form character and create rational, well-adjusted citizens. By the end of 1815, he had completed the construction of what he called his New Institution for the Formation of Character, the first of two large new buildings, designed to provide generously provisioned edu cational and recreational facilities for the whole community. In doing so, Owen made a huge statement in favour of education. At that time, the cotton industry was booming. The last remaining building land on the hilly riverside site could have been used to erect another cotton mill and further increase the profit-making capacity of the business. Instead, it was devoted to community education in its broadest sense. Committed to phasing out 59


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the use of child labour, Owen campaigned against the pernicious effects of such a practice: ‘. . . turn your eyes to the feeble, pale, and wretched flax- or cotton-spinning children, who, at an early age are doomed all the year round to one unvarying occupation for fourteen or fifteen hours a day, going to their work in winter before it is light in the morning, and returning long after dark.’5 Now Owen was able to complete the implementation of his policy to ensure that no child under the age of ten was employed in the factory, and indeed he encouraged parents to leave their children at school until they were twelve. At the earliest opportunity, they were to be the subject of the new character-forming environment and his rational system of education. As soon as the children were able to walk, they were taken into what today we would call a crèche or workplace nursery. At the age of three they entered the Infant School, the first free Infant School in the world for the children of ordinary working families. At six, they progressed to the day schools, and even once they had started work in the cotton mills they could continue their education by attending evening classes which were open to any member of the community. To encourage attendance, Owen reduced the working hours to ten and a half per day. The classrooms were spacious, light and airy. The curriculum was wideranging and child-centred. No punishments were allowed – not even harsh words – and the teachers were specifically instructed to be kind and en couraging. The children were taught to read, write and do arithmetic, of course, but at least as much emphasis was placed on musical activities – choral singing, dancing and instrument playing – with natural history, geog raphy, history, drawing and needlework also playing a large part. Owen’s educational establishment at New Lanark attracted international attention, and is fortunately extremely well documented. The cash book for the Insti tution, which provides a detailed monthly expenditure account for the years 1816–25, has survived.6 It contains a wealth of information, including the names of the teachers and the school cleaners, their wages, lists of the equip ment purchased for the schools. Day to day items like slates, pencils, pens and ink are itemized, as well as the extensive collection of teaching materials, coloured pictures of animals, fossils, maps, and painted canvases on rollers. Items connected with the children’s health and welfare also feature, such as the making of dresses, as the children were provided with cotton tunics, which were washed and changed three times a week. There are costs for repairs to the bath pumps – ‘Usefully-constructed bathing machines’ were installed – and 400 children’s haircuts were secured at a cost of 4 guineas. 60


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Musical instruments feature frequently – bassoon reeds, violin strings, flutes, a clarinet, trumpet, drums etc. are all mentioned, as are printed song-sheets, and pumps for the dancing-teacher. Art materials, paints in an array of colours from Prussian blue to Chinese vermilion are there too, and every now and then a special item, including intriguing entries such as the ex hibition of a crocodile at 5 shillings, a payment to James Earl for exhibiting wild beasts to the children, and a performance on musical glasses. Concerts and balls were held regularly; dancing was considered by Owen to be a healthy, social and pleasurable form of exercise. One poster, advertising a concert and children’s ball in April 1821, has survived; this was a fundraising event, in aid of efforts to build a new school in a neighbouring village. The New Lanark instrumental band played a starring role, as did the dancing children, and as well as being a testament to the social and recreational life of the village, it demonstrates Owen’s desire to help improve educational facilities in the wider community. Apart from such documents, there are dozens of accounts left by visitors to New Lanark, from many different backgrounds and from many different countries. To mention but two, there are detailed descriptions of the schools in the travel journals of John Griscom, an American professor of chemistry and natural philosophy in the New York Institute, who visited in 1819, and Dorothy Wordsworth, sister of William. Griscom wrote: I found there a music school. Half a dozen or more little fellows had each a flute, and were piping it away in notes that did not preserve the strictest tunefulness. The next apartment we entered was a large room for reading, writing, and arithmetic. Some of the pupils in this room were pretty well advanced in age. From this we went into a large room above-stairs where there were fifty or sixty young people, both boys and girls, attending to the lessons of a dancing-master. These young students of the ‘merry mood’ were not equipped in all the gaiety of a fashionable ball-room; though there was a great diversity of costume. In fact, they were in much the same style as that in which they had left the manufactory, – some with shoes, and others bare foot.7

Dorothy Wordsworth was equally observant in 1822: I was too late for the singing, but not for the dancing, a curious and pretty exhibition. The dancing-master’s daughter, the leader of the performers, neatly dressed like a wealthy tradesman’s child. All had clean hands and faces – some 61


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with shoes and stockings – many without either – several in Mr Owen’s adopted dress after the Roman costume, and made of Tartan. The dancing would not have disgraced the Ambleside quality children at Mr Lishman’s Ball . . . The Geography lesson was now to be exhibited & it was surprising to hear with what readiness Boys of from seven to ten years old gave the names of rivers with uncouth names of distant seas and countries, at the pointing of a Wand over a large map of the world placed on a frame near the head of the room, the class standing in a semi-circle before it. The room is hung round with materials for study – paintings of beasts and birds, fossils and flowers. The flowers (with all their parts according to botanical arrangement) are painted on a great length of canvas, which is unrolled for exhibition, at the same time winding up again from the bottom. The walls of another apartment are hung with symbolic representations of the origin, genealogies and outspreading of Nations and People, beginning at the source of a great central River that sends out streams in all directions over a space of canvas, I am afraid to guess how many feet in length and breadth.8

In the 1820s, then, Owen’s New Lanark was generally hailed as a success. What were the key factors in this success? Unusually for an industrial philan thropist, Owen was not motivated by religion; indeed he was famously anticlerical. This, it need hardly be said, did not endear him to the Establish ment, and he was under continual fire from the local parish minister in Lanark, and others further afield, because of his unorthodox views. Underpinning everything he did was his unshakeable belief in the trans formative power of education, but much depended also on Owen’s business management skills. Successful communities – monasteries, for example – are generally very structured. This underpinning framework makes people feel secure, and supported; everyone has a role and gains confidence from this. Owen made his reputation as a successful cotton-mill manager, and is often accused of acting purely out of commercial self-interest, being astute enough to realize that an educated, well-fed and docile workforce would make for a more successful business. So was he an enlightened capitalist or a utopian socialist? If we consider the detail of what he actually did, and the scale of it, his idealism shines through. The liberal education he provided was just as likely to encourage people to leave the cotton mills behind, and indeed we do know of a few examples where this actually happened. Commercial success was not what drove him. It was a means to an end, and he was prepared to live modestly and to spend a fortune in pursuit of his dream. Paternalistic – yes; patient and persistent – yes; stubborn – yes; but hugely 62


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idealistic also, and never short of ambitious ideas. It was while he was in New Lanark that he wrote some of his most important works, notably the series of essays entitled A New View of Society. In his Address to the Inhabitants of New Lanark, the speech he made to the villagers on 1 January 1816, when the new Institution for the Formation of Character was officially opened, Owen said many remarkable things. He talked about the new opportunities that were to be offered to his community, and the resources that were to be committed to it. It was a long and wideranging address (mercifully punctuated by a musical interlude) covering education, religion, justice, health, industry, society, to mention just a few of its themes. He prefaced it by explaining the objects for which his new Institution had been founded and the intended effects of his New System: [First] The immediate comfort and benefit of all the inhabitants of the village of New Lanark. [Second] The welfare and advantage of the neighbourhood. [Third] Extensive ameliorations throughout the British dominions. [Fourth] The gradual improvement of every nation in the world.9 There are some wonderful quotations scattered through the address, but two stand out. The first is a very secular vision of the New Millennium, set in deliberate opposition to the religious visions which were prevalent at the time: What ideas individuals may attach to the term Millennium, I know not; but I know that society may be formed so as to exist without crime, without poverty, with health greatly improved, with little, if any misery, and with intelligence and happiness increased a hundredfold; and no obstacle whatsoever intervenes at this moment except ignorance to prevent such a state of society from becoming universal.10

The second is indicative of Owen’s huge humanity, and his awareness of the world beyond New Lanark: That charity and that kindness admit of no exception. They extend to every child of man, however he may have been taught, however he may have been trained. They consider not what country gave him birth, what may be his complexion, what his habits or his sentiments.11 63


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What Owen achieved in New Lanark went far beyond organizing and edu cating simply to improve the efficiency of his business. His approach shares many of the characteristics of what two centuries later, we call social enterprise, or corporate social responsibility. Arguably, it was utopian socialism in practice. General economic success for the developed world in the last couple of centuries has generated the surplus to allow the social and educational re forms introduced by Owen in New Lanark to become widely accepted and frequently implemented – free education for all, free healthcare, fair working conditions and shorter working hours, decent housing, unadulterated food, abolition of poverty. If you take just one theme you can follow how this process has worked. New Lanark had a world first in child nurseries, where children went to a dedicated building from the age at which they could walk. They were taught by a growing band of specialist teachers. There was no corporal punishment. Children were brought up in an atmosphere of love and kindness. There was equality of education between girls and boys. There was a revolutionary child-centred curriculum. This pattern of infant education has become fairly normal, both actual and aspirational, in many countries. In the United Kingdom it has become a main element in govern ment educational policy. By the 1990s there was no corporal punishment. Gender differences are consciously addressed. Nursery teachers are specially trained. Special efforts are made for single mothers. Owen’s system of edu cation pioneered at New Lanark represents one of the strongest roots of this developing movement, which has changed the way we operate our society. Interestingly he had a relatively mechanistic view of society, and thought of it as a machine which could be altered and adjusted. Thus did ‘social engineer ing’ become an especially purposeful activity and a systematic way of creating Owen’s ‘New Moral World’. This general way of examining the impact of Owenism leads into an interesting line of potential investigation about the future development of society and whether the specific example of New Lanark could continue to contribute to the development of social thought. Some of the Owenite activities carried on after Owen left the village after about 1825, and the ownership of the cotton mills passed to Charles and Henry Walker, the sons of one of Owen’s Quaker partners, John Walker. Under their management, the company continued to provide medical care and a Sickness Fund. They also continued to run the school until the state took over responsibility for education in the 1870s. We have the records of the village children being transferred to the new Board school which had 64


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been built on the edge of the historic village in 1884. From then the children linked into the standard state education system, which existed for quite a long time before it was able to replicate all the Owenite benefits. New Lanark itself remains fundamentally unchanged since the days of the original founders. If Robert Owen were able to return he would recog nize his buildings, and he would have no difficulty in finding his way through the village. The flagship buildings of the utopian experiment still stand, and from the windows of his Counting House he would be able to see them as before. Nursery Buildings was where the young pauper apprentices were accommodated alongside the other village families after Owen removed them from their dormitories in one of the mills, as part of the process of phasing out this particular system of child labour. The substantial Village store was constructed to provide quality goods and foodstuffs, available at low prices, while the profits from this trading enterprise were reinvested in the community, being used to defray the expenses of the education system. The impressive Institution for the Formation of Character, and its generous forecourt, which was originally set aside as a children’s playground, occupies, significantly, a central position in the village. In its companion building, the School for Children, overlooking the river, the original stone stairway can be climbed, the treads worn by thousands of footsteps, and the original Musicians’ Galleries with their delicate wrought-iron balustrades are still there too. But by the 1970s, the cotton mills had closed down. The village was shabby and semi-derelict with a declining population. People had moved away in search of work. The industrial area, including the mills, the Institution and the School, had been sold to a scrap metal company, and the grand old buildings were becoming seriously degraded. Was this beacon of utopian socialism to be demolished and forgotten? Deserted villages have a fascination. On Easter Sunday, 1974, Jim Arnold visited New Lanark. Following the closure of the cotton mills after nearly 200 years in March 1968, the population had dwindled to a handful, and the buildings were gradually falling into dereliction, though the riverside village retained its idyllic atmosphere, even in decay. Later that summer, Arnold was appointed as Village Manager by a newly formed Trust, set up to attempt the regeneration of the historic mill community. Arnold was acutely aware that he was following in a historic tradition. By coincidence he was twenty-nine years old – the same age as his most famous predecessor, Robert Owen, when he came to take up residence as village manager in 65


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1800, facing a very different challenge, but, interestingly, one which in some respects required a similar mix of skills and perseverance. The formation of the New Lanark Trust as an independent charity meant that the conservation effort was outside the state system and had no dedi cated source of funds. The state did not wish to allocate significant resources for this project, probably because it was a very large and expensive under taking, an industrial heritage site at a time when these were not at all fashionable, and also because Robert Owen was neither a member of the nobility nor a warrior. Generally the United Kingdom has found it easier to honour a hierarchy of nobility and aggression. Thus one tends to find that ancient castles, warrior kings, tribal chiefs and stately homes are easier to save for posterity than large-scale industrial sites where the common man is the key component. New Lanark in the 1970s was like many utopian projects: it had a built-in programme for failure. A long restoration and development struggle ensued – a struggle for funding, and for credibility. It was hard to convince a cynical society that this small and derelict indus trial village, in a rural part of southern Scotland, still had something important to say to the world, and that it could claim to represent a significant part of our international cultural heritage. Above all, it was decided that the village, if it could be saved, should not live on simply as a museum, a fossilized piece of the past. Born of a spirit of enterprise allied to a vision for the future of society, New Lanark should survive as a living, working community, where the values and principles of its founders were respected, and reinterpreted for the twenty-first century. Owen’s aforementioned aspirations for the next millennium remained an inspiration for the project. We did not want one of the best examples of a utopian site to end up as a heap of rubble, a demolished testament to a failed dream. The next quarter-century could be seen as equally significant a period in the history of the village as the twenty-five years of Owen’s regime. During this period, enormous amounts of work were carried out, and New Lanark became once again, a source of employment for hundreds of people, as in the first years of its existence. Teams of local workmen applied their skills and strength to the task of restoring the massive sandstone buildings. The project provided meaningful work and practical training at a time of high unÂ�employ ment, and gradually the vision of regenerating the community became less fanciful, more credible. The housing restoration came first, and new families moved into the former millworkers’ houses, internally refurbished to meet 66


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modern living standards, but preserving the character of these historic buildings, now granted statutory protection at the highest level available in Scotland, Category A Listing. The cotton mills, Institution and School were finally recovered by means of a Compulsory Purchase Order in 1983 from the scrap metal company which had bought them in 1970, and the final phase began. All the buildÂ�ings were gradually restored and brought back into use, adapted for sustainable new economic uses, and facilities were developed by which visitors could share the New Lanark experience, and learn of its special history through im aginaÂ�tive exhibitions and interpretation. New Lanark now boasts a hotel and Youth Hostel, as well as a Visitor Centre, while other buildings are occupied by a variety of modern enterprises. Well over 200 people are now employed in the community, and nearly 200 people live there, mostly in good-quality social rented housing. The river still provides energy, in the form of hydroelectricity, and the surrounding landscape is still beautiful and green. It is difficult to measure success, but the village has won virtually every major tourist and conservation award available to it. Also, in 1988 the Utopian Studies Society was founded when the village was host to a con ference organized by the International Communal Studies Association. There were intellectual milestones as well as physical achievement. Arguably the most significant, however, was the inscription of New Lanark as a World Heritage Site. The identification of sites of such universal importance that they are included in a world list has become the responsibility of the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), and the process is based on the 1972 Convention for the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage. The concept is to assist member states to identify and protect specified sites that make a significant contribution to the world. It took a little while to become operational, and administrative systems were pretty vestigial, but by the mid-1980s the first nominations were coming through and a world list was beginning to develop. New Lanark was officially designated as a World Heritage Site on 14 December 2001, at the meeting of the World Heritage Committee held in Helsinki, Finland. This placed New Lanark on the list of sites which ‘can be considered to be of outstanding universal value and as such worthy of special protection against the dangers which increasingly threaten them’. Helsinki resounded to the cheer of at least one member of the Utopian Studies Society and a toast was drunk to the memory of Robert Owen. Had 67


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he been present he would have been rich and generous enough to have addressed the whole assembly and to have bought them all champagne. The basis of New Lanark’s inscription is unusual for an industrial heritage site in that it includes a recognition of Owen’s influence. It is inscribed on the basis that it is, first, an important interchange of human values on de velÂ�opments in architecture, or technology, monumental arts, town planning or landscape design; second, an outstanding example of a type of building, or architectural or technological ensemble or landscape which illustrates a significant stage in human history; and finally, directly or tangibly associated with events or living traditions, with ideas or with beliefs, with artistic and literary works of outstanding universal significance. The first two are recognition of the site’s universal physical significance in terms of the Industrial Revolution and the development of factory com munities, and the third recognizes ‘Owenism, Utopianism, cooperation, communitarianism, industrial capitalism, concepts of the sublime landscape and models for modern conservation partnerships . . .’.12 This cultural element is relatively unusual and is certainly not included in other industrial sites. There are no World Heritage Sites with any sign of utopian socialist influence, other than perhaps Westminster and an associ ation with the growth of democracy. Sites relating to the Diggers, or the English Revolution, or St Peter’s Fields, or the Chartists, or William Morris, or other similar individuals or places are not included on the World Heritage List. New Lanark is the only World Heritage Site which even begins to approach a celebration of utopian socialism and the values of communi tarianism. World Heritage status represents a significant leap forward for New Lanark, and for the public understanding of the concept of utopia, and what it means for us as a society. New Lanark is still a small village in rural Scotland, but now it welcomes visitors from all over the world, to share in the beginning of understanding a dream of utopia. It provides a physical example of what, for most people in our society, is an extremely difficult intellectual concept. It is helpful that it is a dramatic site, because the concepts and challenges are also dramatic. It is helpful that the site has retained its historic integrity, has not been despoiled by later development, and is relatively isolated in a surrounding of natural woodland. You can see as clearly as possible the interface between a historic utopian and the location which made him famous. Much of the site interpretation focuses on this issue, because it is the element which makes New Lanark so different. You can encounter the ‘spirits’ of Annie McLeod, a young mill-girl from 1820 68


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and Harmony from the year 2200, linking the past to the future of our society. We hope that it stimulates thought and even makes a few converts. The village continues to shine as a beacon of light for the ideals of utopian study and World Heritage status carries this concept to a new level of ‘uni versal and outstanding value to humanity’. A new generation with new opportunities has grown up since 1974, taking for granted many things which Owen pioneered – such as free infant edu cation and free medical care – and which are now provided by the state, at least in the United Kingdom. We strive, however, to keep the utopian dream alive, supporting social enterprise, social housing, local employment and fair trade. New Lanark Trading Ltd and New Lanark Hotels Ltd, both wholly owned subsidiaries of the New Lanark Trust, continue the village’s tradition of commerce, while our Village Group, and Management Committee of New Lanark Homes, are the twenty-first-century successors of Robert Owen’s village jury (if not now nicknamed the Bug-Hunters!). In addition, we respect and care for the natural environment which first gave impetus to the New Lanark project, continuing to use the clean, green renewable energy by util izing the original water-power systems to produce hydro-electricity on site. Above all, we maintain a strong commitment to education, and in particular to introducing as many people as possible to Owen’s ‘new view of society’. New Lanark bears witness to the most successful period of Robert Owen’s long life, and it continues to inspire admiration and amazement. The legacy is tangible. Visiting New Lanark, you can walk in Robert Owen’s footsteps, pass through the doorway of the Institution for the Formation of Character, or the village store, stand in the room where he made his Address to the Inhabitants of New Lanark on New Year’s Day, 1816. You can walk by the River Clyde as it plunges down through the gorge which provided both the water-power and the sandstone for this amazing enterprise. To quote again from the World Heritage nomination document: New Lanark is a unique reminder that the creation of wealth does not auto matically imply the degradation of its producers. The village offers a cultural response to the challenges presented by industrial society, and was the test-bed for ideas that sought to reform humanity. Today the village provides physical evidence of Owen’s model for a New Moral World.

Can we truly say New Lanark is Robert Owen’s greatest legacy? Visit it and judge for yourself. 69


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Notes SWRO, 4, p. 112. Ibid., p. 99. â•‡3 Robert Owen, The New Existence of Man upon Earth, 5 (1854), Appendix. â•‡4 One Formerly a Teacher at New Lanark, Robert Owen at New Lanark (Manchester, 1839). â•‡5 SWRO, 1, p. 273. â•‡6 Edinburgh University Special Collections, Cash Book of the New Lanark Institution, 1816–25. â•‡7 John Griscom, The Contrast: Or Scotland as It Was in the Year 1745, and Scotland in the Year 1819 (London, 1825), pp. 253–4. â•‡8 Dorothy Wordsworth, Journals of My Second Tour in Scotland, ed. Jiro Nagasawa (Tokyo, 1989), p. 156. â•‡9 SWRO, 1, p. 120. 10 Ibid., p. 131. 11 Ibid., p. 136. 12 Nomination of New Lanark for Inclusion in the World Heritage List (Edinburgh, 2000). â•‡ 1 â•‡2

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4

Robert Owen and Education

Francis J. O’ Hagan

Introduction The educational and social theories of Robert Owen emerged very distinct ively from his own direct experiences and from the practical improvements over which he presided as a factory owner and philanthropist. Although he developed in an extended series of writings an elaborate and reformist understanding of education of considerable importance to the progress of popular schooling, his social experiments at the village of New Lanark represented to both Owen and to the world at large observing his efforts the cornerstone of his educational thought. It is therefore repeatedly to New Lanark that the attention of the historian must turn in order to evaluate Owen’s contribution to educational theory and practice. Realizing from apparently quite early in his life that he was living through a revolutionary epoch, where the old certainties of the past were being swept away by the forces of unprecedented economic, technological and social change, Owen devoted much of his creative energy – as well as considerable proportions of a growing personal fortune – to the implementation at New Lanark of an ambitious programme of social and educational innovation designed to harness the increasing energies of industry and commerce to the improvement of the living conditions of the masses. As his schemes developed, and his reputation soared internationally, Owen was prompted by his successes to go still further, arguing that a reorganized society, with cradle-to-grave education for all at its heart, could inaugurate a new age of egalitarian prosperity and progress for the whole human race, the ultimate


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Francis J. O’Hagan

potential of which was beyond imagining. Throughout all of his many ambitious schemes, Owen insisted – in terms familiar from classical En lightenÂ�ment theory – that the life of the mind and the content of the individual character were shaped decisively by experience and environment. This fundamental assumption of course accorded potentially great inter ventionary power to education, especially when this was applied to the decisive period of early childhood. It helped place the promotion of popular education at the heart of a programme of political and social renewal and an overarching vision of the development of civil society. While little of the underlying empiricist philosophy was original, Owen was certainly one of the first educationalists to recognize its social and political possibilities as a theory of character formation and to attempt to found local, com munally based educational initiatives upon its central premises. Resourced from the wealth and prosperity generated by the alignment of theory and practice, Owen came to believe that in the virtuous circle of New Lanark he had demonstrated the merits of a completely new conception of the relationship between education, work and society. This breakthrough, many of his followers subsequently contended, represented Owen’s most signifi cant contribution to the material advance of working people, furnishing progressive education in the United Kingdom and beyond with a blueprint for social transformation.

Owen’s Early Education Owen himself appears to have been sent unusually early to school (perhaps as young as four years), and while the education available at his local school, Newtown Hall, was by all accounts basic, its influence on Owen seems to have been vital in two respects. First, it convinced him of the value of children attending school per se at a time when the education of the young was still in many quarters viewed sceptically. Secondly, it introduced him first-hand to the then increasingly fashionable model of learning and teaching sub sequently 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 senior pupils passed on their learning by rote to their 72


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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 the age of eight. We can perhaps 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 many ways formed a template for many of his later approaches to education.1 His early literary, religious and social education also developed auto didactically beyond the confines of the classroom, and he noted that as a youth ‘ . . . I was fond of and had a strong passion for reading everything which fell in my way.’2 In the light of this early enthusiasm for reading, it is curious that the later curricular reforms at New Lanark implemented by Owen exhibited a strong disdain for the use of books. Donnachie makes the observation that this possibly reflected impatience over the time it actually took to read books, a trait common in busy, self-made individuals. Alter natively, it may represent a fundamental suspicion in Owen’s make-up of any subject matter or received authority that did not accord directly with his own first-hand experience.3 The deep roots of this scepticism in all probability lay in the fact that for Owen, from his earliest years and despite his undoubted talent for learning, education both formal and informal was unavoidably accompanied by the experience of work. The rhythms of intellectual and physical labour in textile retailers and cotton workshops from childhood to early manhood formed the backdrop to all of his learning and self-teaching. This in turn conditioned sustained reflection upon the relationship of education to the principles of work, employment and leisure that was as a consequence to remain a constant theme both of his writings and of his later experiments in the education of children and adults. Even when precocious economic success as a cotton producer elevated him in his early twenties through the ranks of Manchester commerce, exposing him to the currents of radical Enlightenment thought then fuelling debate among the industrial elites whose circles he had succeeded in entering, Owen seems always to have been impatient of ideas and book learning pursued for their own sake. He preferred instead to deliberate questions where the practical application of abstract principles contained the prospect of meaningful social change and the extension of economic prosperity. It was precisely just such a combination of motives that appears to have first stimulated the young Owen’s interest in the commercial and community experiments being 73


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conducted by the Scottish cotton magnate David Dale at his model village of New Lanark on the banks of the River Clyde in Scotland.

The New Lanark Reforms When Owen came to New Lanark in 1800 as co-owner, manager and sonin-law of its founder, he was placed in charge of the largest cotton mills complex in Scotland with a labour force of around 2,000 people. This thriving business had been created over a sixteen-year period by David Dale, and was already considered to be ‘ . . . one of the most humanely conducted factories in the Empire’.4 Owen’s debt to Dale was perhaps greater than he would imply in his later writings and particularly in his late autobiography, The Life of Robert Owen (Written by Himself ).5 While it is evident that he initially formed a very mixed opinion of the village and its inhabitants, it is equally clear that Owen swiftly internalized some of the defining features of Dale’s model of community and went on to replicate and adapt them as his own ideas developed. Owen echoed the perception of other visitors to New Lanark in immediately recognizing the distinctively benevolent regime under which Dale managed his apprentices, including the care taken to provide for their education as children. This included the teaching of literacy, numeracy and religious instruction, the employment of a significant number of experienced peripatetic teachers and the organization of a formal timetable of classes, including some scope for recreational activities such as music and dance. In addition, the commitment to the schooling of the young was emÂ�bedded in wider attempts by Dale to provide the community with basic welfare services and moral direction, in the spirit of the Dissenting Christian ity from which Dale’s own personal values sprang. Owen seems immediately to have judged that the employment of children at the unduly young age of eight was a real weakness in Dale’s educational policies, regardless of their other merits. By refusing to employ any child under the age of ten, and by improving the conditions for adult workers, Owen swiftly set out to introduce change into the structures established by his father-in-law. This proved a more intractable task than he at first imagined. The difficult first decade of Owen’s tenure, complicated by the adverse effects on trading conditions occasioned by the Napoleonic Wars, was further exacerbated by the declining health of Dale and the inveterate scepticism of Owen’s Manchester business partners, who looked askance on many of his expensive 74


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philanthropic ventures. Owen’s educational plans for New Lanark as a result progressed only very slowly, until an ownership crisis in 1812 at last pro vided him with the opportunity to reconstitute the partnership controlling the cotton-production enterprise, establishing within it a contractual com mitment to high-quality educational and social welfare provision as an integral feature of the development plan for the business itself. From the 1812 watershed onwards, Owen at last felt sufficiently empowered by his new partnership agreement to move forward with his major programme of educational reform, symbolized in the village by the renovation of the school and, even more importantly, by the inauguration of an entirely new concept in community education, the Institution for the Formation of Character. This building, taken over from premises Dale seems to have intended as a multipurpose village amenity, came to represent all that was truly ground breaking in Owen’s prolonged educational experiment, evolving into a lasting monument to the distinctive philosophy of education practised at New Lanark. Although it is sometimes difficult to know from the records which of the educational innovations were introduced through the school and which through the Institute, their effects swiftly became obvious to the population of the village and to the increasing numbers of international visitors drawn to the site by its reputation for educational radicalism. Chief among the changes overseen by Owen was a shift in classroom learning away from formal instruction and towards the direct engagement of the mind of the pupil with the external environment. In this pedagogical reorientation lay the apparent eschewal of books, much commented upon by observers, and the dramatically increased emphasis on classroom familiarity with pictures, charts, plants, animals and inanimate man-made objects, around which exploratory interactive discussion took place. Many visitors to the New Lanark schoolrooms were struck by the general openness to talk and discussion in evidence, their surprise proportionate to the contrast with the infamously coercive methods favoured in most of the schools of the period. Owen knew that the radicalism of his educational goals, and the moral feelings around which it revolved, would require a redefinition of the role of the teacher if this essential climate of conviviality were to flourish in his classrooms. In some respects, the initial expectations placed upon his teaching staff were as a result more concerned with conduct and manners rather than academic qualifications. Owen needed younger, more flexible teachers than was com mon in Scotland if his understanding of the classroom as a place of genuine 75


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rational inquiry was to be realized. New Lanark teachers were required to be more resourceful than their counterparts in the surrounding parish system, committed to outdoor education, for example, and continually open to the unexpected in their dealings with young children. This was a particularly acute issue in the area of pupil discipline, where some of the methods encouraged by Owen seemed to invite the forms of misbehaviour on which the established system came down so harshly. Pro ponents of the relatively enlightened monitorial method – by now led by the educationalist Joseph Lancaster – had tried to mitigate the often violent practices of the parish classrooms by the introduction of their trademark schedule of rewards and penalties, moving away from excessive physical chastisement to a more complex reinforcement routine of praise and ad monishÂ�ment. Owen, however, grew vehemently opposed to the underlying psychology of this approach, arguing that rewards and penalties simply bred in children a prudential calculation incompatible with the enthusiastic embrace of education for its own sake. Recalling as an adult the atmosphere of the New Lanark classrooms of his youth, Owen’s son, Robert Dale Owen, stressed the centrality of this principle to the whole ethos of the school. Rewards, Robert Dale argued, were rejected because of their dangerous tendency to breed in their recipients ‘pride, vanity and inordinate ambition.’ Penalties were equally unacceptable because of their effect of ‘debasing the character, and destroying the energies of the individual’.6 In their place, Owen boldly asserted that ‘every child will always be treated kindly, what ever his natural character, physical or mental, may be’.7 Misbehaviour, he argued, was the product of miseducation, and the words and actions of tolerant, compassionate teachers were much more likely to produce amenable children than any measures, physical or emotional, taken against them. Referring in his autobiography to the first teachers he had hired, James Buchanan and Molly Young, Owen recalled: ‘The first instruction which I gave them was, that they were on no account ever to beat any one of the children, or to threaten them in any manner in word or action, or to use abusive terms.’ When a response to inappropriate behaviour became necessary, it was to be offered, Owen insisted, ‘in the spirit of kindness and of charity, as from the more experienced to the less experienced’ avoiding any hint of retribution likely to induce feelings of guilt or humiliation.8 The rationale for this fresh approach to the motivation of the young stemmed from Owen’s fundamental belief that the distasteful, offensive or violent behaviour for which sections of the impoverished working classes were rightly feared in 76


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his society originated in a cycle of intergenerational deprivation and despair from which only education held the prospect of release: ‘The infants and children of every generation have been the mental slaves of the preceding generations . . . they have been compelled to become – what their fathers had been previously compelled to be – slaves to the most gross and in consistent errors.’9 We are fortunate to possess, in the form of Robert Dale Owen’s short memoir of 1824, An Outline of the System of Education at New Lanark, an illuminating guide to the curriculum of the New Lanark school and Institution in the period of Owen’s greatest autonomy as their owner and manager. Steadfastly opposing the dominant teaching strategies of the parishes and the Lancastrians, with their reliance upon the memorization of what his magnum opus, A New View of Society, termed ‘precept upon precept, line upon line’, Owen made the central driver of his curriculum a special syn thesis of applied knowledge and spontaneous discovery.10 To some cursory observers, the impression created was of an essentially utilitarian approach to practical learning, embedded in the vocational needs of a manufacturing community. It is clear, however, from Robert Dale’s account and from Owen’s own pronouncements that the economic foundation of the New Lanark community in no way restricted the curriculum to a functional understanding of educated competence. In a later work of 1841, A DevelopÂ� ment of the Principles and Plans on which to Establish Self Supporting Home Colonies, Owen itemized the subjects, skills and – most importantly – dispositions that should inform the schooling of the young in the ideal society. As well as emphasizing ‘Reading, writing and accounts’, Principles and Plans also lists ‘mechanics and chemistry’ and ‘A practical knowledge of agriculture and domestic economy’ as important subjects of study. Even the stress on ‘knowledge of some one useful manufacture, trade, or occupation’ is high lighted for its contribution to self-fulfilment as well as to employability, undertaken by the pupil ‘for the improvement of his mental and physical powers.’ Technical mastery is carefully subordinate in Owen’s thought to what he here terms ‘knowledge of himself and of human nature, to form him into a rational being, and render him charitable, kind, and benevolent to all his fellow-creatures’.11 This integrated understanding of the purposes of education shaped decisively the day-to-day content of learning and teaching at New Lanark. The natural and social sciences enjoyed a particular prominence in the New Lanark curriculum, almost as if their position at the cutting edge of 77


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‘modern’ rationality resonated especially aptly with the larger social and intellectual objectives of the school. It was to Buchanan and Young’s cele brated lessons in natural history and geography that visitors were most often invited by Owen, allowing him to showcase the discovery methods of these disciplines in ways that echoed the increasingly scientific procedures by which they were beginning to be pursued in the wider community of scholarship. Much class time was as a result devoted to the handling of maps, almost as if the cartographic mentality had become somehow emblem atic for Owen of the new empiricism by which proper education was now to be characterized and which placed inherited lore and dogmatic assertion very firmly below the fruits of guided but independent scientific scrutiny in the hierarchy of truths. This approach to geography was, for Owen, vital to the defeat of prejudice and to the promotion of the insight that no cultural or social system, whether at home or abroad, was to be regarded as immut able or beyond the reach of human dominion, provided the relationship of place to behaviour was properly understood. In an intriguing adaptation, Owen also applied the ‘cartographic’ method to the teaching of history. Historical facts were arranged in a chronological sequence, so that events recorded in them could be studied in conjunction with the geographical locations, resources and conditions against which they took place. Behind this ‘Streams of Time’ approach lay yet again Owen’s perception of the role of environment in the shaping of behaviour and the corresponding need for education to accord more significance that in previous eras to the con straints placed by time and circumstance on the destinies of human societies. ‘The minds of the children are thus opened’, noted Robert Dale: ‘and they are prevented from contracting narrow, exclusive notions, which might lead them to regard those only as proper objects of sympathy and interest, who may live in the same country with themselves.’12 The social harmony and renewed sense of the common good for which Owen wished New Lanark as a whole to be acclaimed were most publicly expressed in the celebration at both school and Institute of the arts of music and dance. As well as di verging from the censorious gender divisions prevalent in the surrounding parish schools, which rarely would have countenanced such contact between boys and girls, the prominence of music and dance at New Lanark was a potent metaphor for Owen in conveying his passionate understanding of the contribution of education to the cultivation of the good life. In music and dance, individual talent and self-expression were affirmed, but always inseparably from co-operation with the group. In the children’s dancing, 78


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Robert Dale pointed out, ‘Their own improvement is not their only source of enjoyment. That of their companions they appear to witness with pleasure, unmixed with any envious feeling whatever.’13 Dance and music also figured prominently in the educational programme planned for the Institution for the Formation of Character which had a major role to play in the implemen tation of Owen’s vision of a new view of society.

A New View of Society In his most influential and extensive piece of writing, the four essays which constitute A New View of Society (1813–16), Owen advocated the reform of mankind through a planned scheme of education, and his utopian plan has come to be regarded as a general treatise on education which sets out and promotes Owen’s visionary hopes of a society completely transformed by education. As has been discussed above, his social experiments at the village of New Lanark represented both to Owen and to the world at large observing his efforts the cornerstone of his educational thought, and it is in A New View of Society that we can decipher Owen’s blueprint for his utopian society underpinned by social amelioration through a programme of education for all. It is important to emphasize the interconnection between education, the concept of the improvement of society at large and the social, economic and political problems which were facing the British government during the first two decades of the nineteenth century. The central idea of the first essay in A New View of Society is that ‘the character of man is made for him not by him’ and it is the focus on the importance of experience and environment or ‘circumstances’ that shape the life of the mind and the content of the individual character which was central to Owen’s vision. Indeed the alternative title of A New View of Society is Essays on the Formation of the Human Character, and it deals mainly with general principles about character and environment, the importance of proper education and the advantages of humane treatment of people in the work place. Owen formulated his humanitarian, social and educational ideas, advo cated and promoted them universally in A New View of Society and used New Lanark as a test-bed for his theories. Although Owen may not trad itionally have been recognized as a prominent figure in the history of edu cational thought, he has earned a place there not only because he made 79


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education a ‘mass issue’ but also because his schemes for education were essentially pragmatic: ‘. . . children can be trained to acquire any language, sentiments, belief, or any bodily habits and manners, not contrary to human nature, even to make them, to a greater extent, either imbecile or energetic characters.’14 It was precisely because Owen had practical experience of indus trial conditions and also had a practical plan contained in the document entitled Report to the Committee for the Relief of the Manufacturing Poor (1817) that he and his ideas were taken so seriously at a time when the government and the ruling classes in Britain had real concerns about the social problems related to the rising number of poor and unemployed in Britain. The second essay in A New View of Society also seeks to examine further the causes of the ‘circumstances’ currently constraining the human capacity to grow in rationality and conditioning the fundamentally punitive culture in which the very poor and the very young find themselves trapped. For Owen, the errors of the present moral order are inherited and replicated in precisely the manner predicted by the empiricist template. When, in April 1812, at a dinner in Glasgow in honour of the education ist, Joseph Lancaster, Owen made his first public statement that ‘we can materially command those circumstances which influence character’, it is clear from the context that he was referring to the effects of education on a community.15 Similarly, the famous passage in the first essay of A New View of Society referred to the influence of the environment on a community: Any general character, from the best to the worst, from the most ignorant to the most enlightened, may be given to any community, even to the world at large, by the application of proper means; which means are to a great extent at the command and under the control of those who have influence in the affairs of men.16

These words have an obvious resonance with an understanding of citizenship that looks both backwards and forwards. During the nineteenth century in Britain, it became increasingly recognized by employers, churchmen, edu cationÂ�ists and politicians that the Industrial Revolution had created, what Owen referred to as, a ‘ferocity of character’ among the labouring classes, and Owen was particularly determined to moderate this. To Owen, en lightened reform and mechanisms of social control were not mutually exclusive. They could in fact be complementary. One way to mitigate the 80


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‘ferocity of character’ was to change the forms of industrial schooling so that the younger generation would be brought up in new ways. In Owen’s view, the problems of mass production and mass schooling were essentially the same. They were concerned with balancing productive efficiency with forms of social regulation from which all would derive material security and moral fulfilment. At the heart of Owen’s educational programme therefore was the determination to create a disciplined, ‘docile’ population for factory, home and the shared spaces of social circulation. Initially, Owen saw the problem in broadly Aristotelian terms, simply as one of establishing habits suitable for social and factory life, but increasingly – and in a departure from the Aristotelian conception of the polis analogous to Adam Smith’s – he also came to believe that it was necessary to establish a certain mental outlook on the part of the children in particular and the workers in general in order to achieve this. His experiments or innovations in education are a response to this challenge. Owen believed that if children could understand their place in the world through, for example, history or geography lessons, they would be better prepared to appreciate and understand their role in the world as, in his words, ‘workpersons’ or ‘domestics’. This is evident in sentiments such as: The children are, without exception, passive and wonderfully contrived com pounds; which, by an accurate and previous subsequent attention, founded on a correct knowledge of the subject, may be formed collectively to have any human character. And although these compounds, like all the other works of nature, possess endless varieties, yet they partake of that plastic quality, which by perseverance and judicious management, may be ultimately moulded into the very image of rational wishes and desires.17

Heavily influenced by the writings of William Godwin (1756–1836) when he described young children as being ‘passive and wonderfully contrived compounds’ and as containing a ‘plastic quality’ which could be moulded at will, Owen’s theory earned him considerable support since he was arguing that education would solve the social problems which were causing alarm to Lord Liverpool’s Tory government at that time. The central design of the third essay of A New View of Society was to set out the moral and developmental implications of the collection’s perspective on the acquisition of enlightened rationality and to examine further the role of education within this. With his New Lanark experience once again 81


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providing the context for his reflections, Owen turns his attention to themes such as infancy, family, recreation and sociality in an effort to capture the full, lived possibilities of his vision of reformed community seen in some thing approaching its totality. To this end, the child had to be educated as far as possible in a rational environment away from the harmful influence of unenlightened parents. This education should begin as early as possible – as soon as the child could walk. In considering the part played by infancy in his scheme, Owen’s purpose was to reiterate that the formation of char acter is a process embedded in the most fundamental ties of family and community interdependence. It must be evident to those who have been in the practice of observing children with attention, that much of good or evil is taught to or acquired by a child at a very early period of its life; that much of temper or disposition is correctly or incorrectly formed before he attains his second year . . .18

The training or education of a suitably qualified teaching force was prominent in Owen’s plans also. When, in 1816, Owen published the full version of A New View of Society, it proclaimed (among much else) that ‘. . . the best state will be that which shall possess the best national system of education’. By this time Owen had concluded that the whole platform of popular edu cational reform depended upon the preparation of a better-educated teaching force, confidently equipped with knowledge of the natural and human sciences and morally committed to the tenets of the new rational pedagogy, and he spoke scathingly about the standard of those people charged with the responsibility of educating the new generation: At present there are not any individuals in the kingdom who have been trained to instruct the rising generation as it is for the interest and happiness of all that it should be instructed. The training of those who are to form the future man, becomes a consideration of the utmost magnitude; for, on due reflection, it will appear, that instruction to the young must be, of necessity, the only foundation upon which the superstructure of society can be raised.19

In this, as well as other respects, notably infant education, Owen anticipated and inspired the crucially important and significant work of David Stow who, in 1827, having converted a house and garden in Glasgow’s Drygate into a school for a hundred scholars, founded the Glasgow Educational Society and, in 1836, laid the foundation stone of the first Normal School 82


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in Dundas Vale, Glasgow, the first teacher training college in Scotland. Owen’s intention in the fourth essay of A New View of Society was to bring to its culmination a theme present throughout the work: galvanizing the decision-makers and opinion-formers among his readership in order to secure the sorts of changes in government policy that would enable the expansion across Britain of the social and educational innovations intro duced at New Lanark and urgently needed by the whole country. In the fourth essay therefore Owen stated that education was a means to national moral regeneration and his aim was to develop collectivists as opposed to individualists. A New View of Society was essentially a manifesto by which Owen sought to circulate his ideas for social and educational reform among influential political and cultural elites likely to promote the expansion of his achieve ments at New Lanark to wider British society; but, like much of Owen’s writing, it was not without its critics. The great English social reformer, Francis Place (1771–1854), who offered Owen guidance and support in the drafting of A New View of Society, none the less remained incredulous that Owen could sincerely believe that the views of character formation on which his educational schemes rested were entirely original and that ‘on this supposed discovery he founded his system’.20 Ian Donnachie has suggested that Place, together with his friend James Mill, with whom Owen had also become acquainted at this time, helped edit A New View of Society, lending it a lucidity of thought often absent from Owen’s later publications.21 The essayist, William Hazlitt (1778–1830) attacked Owen’s rhetorical obsession with the ‘new’ – from new views to New Lanark: ‘It is not new. It is not coeval, whatever the author and proprietor may think, with the New Lanark mills, but it is as old as the royal borough of Lanark, or as the county of Lanark itself.’22 Hazlitt also criticized Owen’s outlook as being fundamentally incompatible with educated rationality even if it often tricked itself out in the clothing of reason, and he states in his essay of 1822, ‘On People with One Idea’ ‘Mr Owen is a man remarkable for one idea’: It is that of himself and the Lanark cotton-mills. He carries this idea backwards and forwards with him from Glasgow to London, without allowing anything for attrition, and expects to find it in the same state of purity and perfection in the latter place as at the former. He acquires a wonderful velocity and impenetrability in his undaunted transit. Resistance to him is vain, while the whirling motion of the mail-coach remains in his head.23 83


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A New View of Society remains Owen’s clearest declaration of principles and the blueprint for his schemes for the education of his workpeople as pro claimed at the opening of the Institution for the Formation of Character in 1816. According to the virtually unanimous testimony of all who visited New Lanark, Owen’s educational objectives were realized. The children were content, well-mannered, unconstrained and healthy. Drunkenness was almost unknown and illegitimacy occurred extremely rarely. There was a good relation ship between Owen and his workers, and the business was a great commercial success. As Butt says of Owen: ‘. . . business efficiency and good morals went hand in hand!’24

Early Education Owen’s writing emphasized the importance of having a deep understanding of children’s emotional states and the importance of early education which was suited to the growth and development of the child’s mind and body. The child attended nursery school from two to six years old, followed by elementary school from six to ten or twelve, with adult education after that. As was the case in other Owenite institutions, practical considerations were of paramount importance. Owen recognized that while the children of two years and over were being cared for in school, then their mothers ‘would be enabled to earn a better maintenance and support’ for them and they would have ‘less care and anxiety about them’. Famously, New Lanark had the first nursery school in the world and a crèche for working mothers. The New Lanark infant school consisted of one room on the ground floor of the Institution for the Formation of Character, and a playground laid out in front of it where it was intended that the children would spend most of their time. Owen did not advocate the use of books with the very young children but, instead, they were to have freedom to play and run about, and were encouraged to learn to live peacefully with one another, and to be kind and polite. The appointments of James Buchanan, a former cotton weaver, and the seventeen-year-old Molly Young as teachers in the infant school appear to have been based largely on their kindly disposition and good character, personal traits reminiscent of those so highly recom mended by the ancient Roman rhetorician, Quintilian (AD 35–96) whose main aim in education was to mould the student’s character as well as to develop his mind. 84


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Influenced by Rousseau in the importance of educating the senses and the importance of early experience, Owen recommended that music teachÂ�ing was to begin in the nursery so that the child would learn to distinguish sounds and develop his or her musical talents and in line with Owen’s insist ence that natural surroundings were more important than books, Buchanan followed a programme for the amusement of the children based on singing, dancing and an appreciation of natural objects. The fact that he was en couraged by Owen to take the children for short walks so that their attention would be drawn to the beauty and uses of nature is also indicative of Rousseau’s influence. Children under the age of ten were not allowed to work in the mills and, instead, what would be considered in modern educational theory and practice for the early stages of childhood as a progressive education was provided for them. In the elementary stage of the school, the children attended for five and a half hours per day, lessons lasted no longer that forty-five minutes and the boys and girls, numbering around 300 were educated together. No corporal punishment was allowed, and lessons were to be interesting and enjoyable. Owen himself supervised the curriculum which included nature study, history, geography and drawing as well as reading, writing and arith metic, and in which music and dancing played an important part. The children were supplied with a special tunic to wear to school. This was made of white cotton and was ankle-length for the girls and knee-length for the boys. The tunics were changed three times a week. The children were kept clean and neat; ‘bathing-machines’ were installed, and the account books for the Institution record a payment for 400 children’s haircuts. The famous picture of a dancing class was of one in the upper rooms of the Institution which was open for evening classes, balls, lectures and a weekly concert. The galleried room was also used for religious services. The upper rooms have a double row of windows and are light and airy in line with Owen’s belief in the importance of a pleasant environment for work and recreation. During his lifetime, it was hardly surprising that the Owenites com mented persistently on Owen’s role as the pioneer of infant education, which they saw as a necessary preliminary to an advance towards a new society. The tone of their comments can be judged from an example of a letter to Owen, written in 1854 when he was planning to use a ‘panorama’ the following year to demonstrate how the human mind could be formed from birth: 85


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How extremely necessary it is that the epoch which commenced infant teaching as a science should be represented in the panorama; therefore your Colony of New Lanark, exhibiting the infant school teaching, begun by yourself, surrounded with those superior conditions, as far as the state of things and of times could permit, should be the starting point . . .25

Owen’s Legacy Owen’s fundamental belief and philosophy that a controlled environment was the formative influence on character has had an enduring legacy and there can be no doubt that his influence on education both during the period of his lifetime and since has been considerable. This legacy is evident in a number of areas of education including adult education, early education and citizenship education. The Institution for the Formation of Character was designed as what could be accurately described as a community education centre for the people of New Lanark who numbered around 2,500 at that time, and it serves to illustrate Owen’s belief not only in the importance of education but in the importance of the benefits of leisure and recreation too. It could therefore be seen as the predecessor of adult education and leisure classes with the emphasis on self-improvement through reading, and learning new skills in an environment conducive to personal and social amelioration. The spec tacular nature of the experiment at New Lanark, the advocacy of a nonviolent and widely acceptable method of social change, and Owen’s repeated emphasis on the importance of education in character formation all con tributed to a focussing of attention on this aspect of his achievement. Owen’s role in the founding of nursery education has never been properly acknowledged, mainly because his groundbreaking methods were initially altered beyond recognition by some of his own followers and then assimi lated to a national system of infant education in many respects remote from his original values. The re-emergence of a progressive pre-five educational ethic in the later nineteenth century in the English-speaking world then turned to Froebel and Pestalozzi for inspiration, largely sidestepping Owen’s example. Browning points out, however, that many of the methods, particularly the object lessons, set out in the Glasgow Infant School Instructor were based on those of the infant school in New Lanark and that David Stow 86


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(1793–1864) was inspired by Owen and subsequently spread his ideas through the Infant School Society, which was founded in Glasgow in 1825. More globally, Owen’s educational methods reached London and later South Africa, where the Buchanan family set up infant schools, and through other Owenites to the United States and Canada. In this way many of the prin ciples that underpinned Owen’s schemes for education influenced not only the foundation of schools in Owenite communities but more especially the whole infant school movement. When the British biologist and diarist, T. H. Huxley, not generally known for his support of Owen, was invited to take the chair at a centenary cele bration of Owen in 1871, he said appropriately of Owen and his crucially important and lasting legacy to early education: I think that everyone who is compelled to look closely into the problem of popular education, must be led to Owen’s conclusions that the infants’ school is, so to speak, the key of the position. Robert Owen discerned this great fact, and had the courage and patience to work out his theory into a practical reality. That is his claim – if he had no other – to the enduring gratitude of the people.26

In an assessment of Owen’s contribution to the history of education, Huxley stated that it was due to Owen’s preliminary propaganda and example that infant schools became an accepted part of the national system in the Education Act (1870).27 The epitaph on the Owen Memorial in Kensal Green Cemetery, London reads: He organised infants’ schools. He secured the reduction of the hours of labour for women and children in factories. He was a liberal supporter of the earliest efforts to obtain national education. He laboured to promote international arbitration. He was one of the foremost Britons who taught men to aspire to a higher social state by reconciling the interests of capital and labour. He spent his life and a large fortune in seeking to improve his fellowmen by giving them education, self-reliance, and moral worth. His life was sanctified by human affection and lofty effort.

With his emphasis on the importance of early experience, Owen’s thinking predates some of the most influential thinkers and exponents of educational 87


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psychology such as Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), Jean Piaget (1896–1980) and B. F. Skinner (1904–90), the educationist and sociologist Emile Durkheim (1858–1917), who saw the role of education as methodical social ization and stressed its function as a preparation for adulthood with a strong emphasis on the importance of nurture rather than nature, and later the sociologist Karl Mannheim (1883–1947) and his seminal work on the con cept of utopia. In what would appear to be an ideological paradox Owen has been adopted and praised by commentators from both ends of the political spectrum. He was first championed and hailed as a socialist hero by the Fabian Society in the early years of the twentieth century as they searched for an authentic voice of British socialism in contrast to the German, Karl Marx (1818–83). It is not difficult to decipher the common threads and see the connections, since among the main themes of Marx’s writings were conflict between indi vidual and group interests, a new society-centred model of man, state control of education and social planning. In addition to that, Owen’s qualification for admission to the socialist pantheon was strengthened by the fact that his mills at New Lanark represented an alternative model to the actual dark satanic mills elsewhere that disfigured lives and landscape, and he stood for co-operatives rather than existing capitalist hierarchies. Whereas the Dunfermline-born Victorian philanthropist, Andrew Carnegie (1835–1919), made his vast fortunes and his philanthropic gestures followed, Owen’s fortune-making and philanthropy, like that of John D. Rockefeller (1839– 1937), were virtually simultaneous. Ironically, and perhaps for this reason, Owen has been described both as the ‘Father of Socialism’ and at the same time as the ‘Father of Scientific Management’ as a result of his social experiment at New Lanark, which was also of course a huge financial success and a model of entrepreneurial expert ise. For this reason, among others, his nineteenth-century utopia provides a useful case study for education for global citizenship in the contemporary world as well as a model for effective industrial management. In the twenty-first century, visitors from all over the world are still inter ested in the social and educational experiment that Owen carried out at New Lanark. There is a strong case, therefore, for promoting New Lanark as a venue for field studies for school pupils, students, teachers and educators in general and those with an interest in education in citizenship. It is an interesting fact that the citizenship agenda can be used by different groups for different purposes, and Faulks provides a useful insight into the current 88


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interest in citizenship when he makes the observation that radicals and con servatives alike feel able to utilize the language of citizenship in support of their policy prescriptions.28 Be that as it may, today the community of New Lanark still stands as testament to one man’s vision of creating a better society, and a unique experiment in social engineering through education which was undoubtedly visionary and far ahead of its time. It is hardly surprising that when Owen died in 1858 at the age of eighty-seven, he was in the middle of negotiating the establishment of a new school system in the town of his birth, Newtown, testimony to his lifelong commitment to the promotion and advocacy of mass education.

Notes 1

2 3 4 5 6

7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

23

Frank Podmore, Robert Owen: A Biography (London, 1906), pp. 4–12; Ian Donnachie, Robert Owen: Social Visionary (Edinburgh, 2005), pp. 6–8. Donnachie, Robert Owen: Social Visionary, p. 8. Ibid., pp. 8–9. Margaret Cole, Robert Owen of New Lanark (London, 1953), p. 44. SWRO, 4, pp. 109–11. Robert Dale Owen, An Outline of the System of Education at New Lanark (Glasgow, 1824), p. 11. Robert Owen’s Journal, 7 February 1852. SWRO, 4, pp. 193–4. SWRO, 1, p. 49. Ibid., p. 63. Ibid., pp. 399–400. Owen, Outline of the System, pp. 47–8. Ibid., p. 73. SWRO, 1, p. 35. Ibid., p. 8. Ibid., p. 33. Ibid., p. 17. Ibid., p. 57. Ibid., p. 93. Francis Place Papers, London, BL (1813), Add. 27,791, f. 268. Donnachie, Robert Owen: Social Visionary, pp. 116–17. William Hazlitt, ‘A New View of Society’ (1816), in Selected Writings, 4: Political Essays, ed. D. Wu (London, 1998), p. 92. William Hazlitt, ‘On people with one idea’ (1822), in Selected Writings, 6: Table Talk, ed. D. Wu (London, 1998), pp. 56–7. 89


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Francis J. O’Hagan 24

25

26

27

28

John Butt, ‘Robert Owen as a businessman’, in idem (ed.), Robert Owen: Prince of Cotton Spinners (Newton Abbot, 1971), pp. 168–214: p. 195. Letter from Robert Pemberton, 27 November 1854, Co-operative Union, no. 2305. See also no. 1083 (letter from Lord Wallscourt, 1839) and other examples in Harold Silver, Robert Owen on Education (London, 1969), pp. 31–2. Report of the Proceedings, p. 5 in Harold Silver, ‘Owen’s reputation as an educationist’, in Sidney Pollard and John Salt (eds), Robert Owen: Prophet of the Poor (London, 1971), pp. 65–83: pp. 73–4. Marjorie Browning, ‘Owen as an educator’, in John Butt (ed.), Robert Owen: Prince of Cotton Spinners (Newton Abbot, 1971), pp. 52–75: p. 73. Keith Faulks, Citizenship (London and New York, 2000), p. 1.

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5

Robert Owen and Religion

Robert A. Davis

In recent decades, the role of the institutions and practices of religious belief in general, and the Christian faith specifically, in the processes of British economic and political modernization has been significantly reappraised. From the writings of Raphael Samuel, Lyndal Roper and the History Work shop in the 1970s and 1980s, to the quite contrasting Tory revisionism of Jonathan Clark in the 1980s and 1990s, and on into the recent cultural historicism of Jon Mee and Martin Priestman, the powerful influence of the often contradictory currents of Christian thought and values in the shaping of social and political attitudes across the British Isles in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries has been widely reassessed.1 Adjust ments to an earlier model of historical progress – broadly associated with the secularization hypothesis and often underpinned by generically Marxist materialist perspectives on economic and social change – have redefined both popular and elite expressions of religious practice in ways which allow us to see representative figures from the high industrial period such as Robert Owen in much more nuanced and subtle ways. Previously characterized – most especially by his Owenite followers and disciples – as an archetypal champion of the onward advance of Enlightenment and post-religious rationality, the vibrant thought and lifelong activism of Robert Owen can now be seen to possess an infinitely more sophisticated relation to the religious convictions and sentiment which continued to permeate the society in which he lived and worked throughout his long and eventful career.2 The scope for such a revised judgement of his interaction with the language and habits of religious adherence of course implies no attempt


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retrospectively to conscript Owen to any doubtful tradition of anonymous or ‘non-dogmatic’ Christianity, still less to an amorphous heritage of sup posed British ‘Christian Socialism’. As his closest followers correctly recog nized, Owen was fundamentally a materialist, a deist inclining as he grew older more and more certainly towards atheism, and an outspoken contro versialist who expended considerable quantities of his intellectual energy attacking in often the most public and adversarial terms the central dogmas and metaphysical assumptions of the Christian faith (as the paradigm and most familiar manifestation of revealed religion in his time and society). Placing this seemingly uncompromising commitment in a broader historical and cultural context in no way diminishes its polemical edge, but it does help us to understand Owen’s remarkably recurrent – even obsessive – interest in religion as part of a larger pattern of shifting ideas and values in British intellectual life of the period, where faith and unbelief are seen to interact in creative and unpredictable ways – secularism borrowing the prophetic registers of millenarian religious expectation, for example, or evangelical Christianity attempting to argue its case through the methods of the new experimental sciences. Interpreted in these more flexible terms, Robert Owen can be seen as a genuinely transitional figure both in the histories of faith and in the development of a confident, authentically non-religious analytic temper in British public and political life. He stands between the urban Dissenting radicalism of the 1790s London of William Godwin, Francis Place and William Blake (with its ancient roots in the unfinished Puritan revolution of the preceding century), and the more reserved yet equally revolutionary scientific materialism of figures such as Charles Darwin, Herbert Spencer and James Frazer – many of whose later ideas seemed to signal the inauguration of the new era of reason that Owen had striven for decades to proclaim.3 At the very end of his career, and to the lasting embarrassment of many of his friends and biographers, Owen appeared to abandon his life long materialism by joining the Spiritualist Church and making extravagant claims for the veracity of personal survival beyond death and comÂ�muni cation with the minds of the departed. As this essay will show, set in its cultural and intellectual context, Owen’s late embrace of Spiritualism is less an aberration or a symptom of senescence and more a perfectly rational – if misguided – outworking of his unswerving attachment to science, imagination and human progress. Elsewhere in this volume, Geoffrey Powell has characterized some of the youthful Owen’s engagements with religion, most especially his brief 92


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experience of one of the waves of evangelical renewal that swept the pro vincial Wales of his childhood in the form of a charismatic Methodist mission. In a style typical of his later self-hagiography, Owen’s reconstruction of this memory in his autobiography is contrived to serve the grander narrative pattern of his progressive liberation from the obscurantism and factionalism of religious attachment, leading to his somewhat priggish self-portrayal as a precociously gifted child equipped to see through the metaphysical deceits of religion whilst retrieving from its benighted adherents its worthwhile residue of ethical insight. Powell and others are wisely sceptical of this version of events, pointing to the relatively orthodox piety of Owen’s family and upbringing in the Established Church in Wales and the persistence of an at least notional Christian observance into the years of his teenage apprentice ships in England.4 The Life of Robert Owen, Written by Himself typifies the difficulties attendant upon every effort to reproduce the pedigree of Owen’s opposition to religion, plagued as they are by the author’s self-aggrandizing evasiveness in documenting his academic influences and exacerbated by his mature (if eccentric) ideological hostility to book learning and received opinion. Whether his suspicion of orthodox religion genuinely did germinate in his Welsh childhood, or, as seems more likely, formed in response to his participation as a young man in the intellectual pursuits of the freethinking commercial classes of the city of Manchester in the 1790s, the record we possess of it in both the autobiography and in his early lectures and publi cations locates it firmly in the mainstream of the Enlightenment critique of religious faith by the principles of applied rationality. Scarcely naming a single text, the early chapters of the autobiography tell us that his ‘readings’ ‘compelled’ the youthful Owen ‘to feel strongly at ten years of age that there must be something fundamentally wrong in all religion’, while his shortlived exposure to the Methodist revival sagely forewarned him, he tells us, of the ‘deadly hatred’ of ‘contending faiths’.5 Cautious though we may rightly be towards these expressions of the older Owen’s hindsight, there is no justifiÂ�cation for dismissing his self-narration entirely, if only because his conÂ�clusions sit squarely within the tradition of classical Enlightenment scepticism to which he was most definitely exposed in the libraries of the commercial circles in which he moved as a young man, most especially that of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, to which he was admitted in 1792 at the age of twenty-one. The young Owen’s generally anticlerical and freethinking response to religion echoes a by then well93


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respected Enlightenment tradition of anti-religious critique associated with venerated philosophical luminaries such as Spinoza, Voltaire, Diderot, Helvétius and, in Britain, David Hume and William Godwin.6 The precise mechanisms by which these specific ideas were communicated to Owen is less important than their role in the creation of a general climate of opinion, which lent them a particular academic credibility even where the governing institutions of Church and society remained implacably arrayed against them. Almost certainly, Owen’s familiarity with this body of thought came in the hybrid forms typical of the British artisan classes of the period, denied entry to a formal classical and university education. While there is strong circumstantial evidence that he gained access to early translations of thinkers such as Helvétius, becoming through this acquaintance for a time an avid disciple of William Godwin, a more important source for his education in Enlightenment rationalism would almost certainly have been the lectures and discussion groups of the Manchester Society itself.7 Here dialogue focused less upon the subversive, dangerous extremes of Enlightenment atheism and more upon the fashionable rational compromise of the period known as deism. The exponents of deism had since the late seventeenth century and the close of the Wars of Religion defended its allencompassing philosophical moderation as the rational successor to the divisive superstition and punitive dogmatism of orthodox Christianity. In place of the unreliable, pessimistic fideism of the so-called ‘revealed religions’ – most particularly biblical Christianity – with their inexorable elevation of the inscrutable authority of sacred text and sacred persons, deism pro posed a ‘natural religion’ of rational observation and scientific deduction. Requiring no intervention of the deity into human history, the deists argued for the evidence of divine purpose in the very design and fabric of the natural order, most clearly exhibited in the moral and intellectual capacities of human beings themselves. Dispensing on the basis of this recognition with creeds and hierarchies and miracles, deism appeared to offer an incontrovertible foundation for religious belief in the principles of reason alone, one on the basis of which humanity could be released from the fatalism of sin and raised to its rightful position of moral excellence as the finest handiwork of the supreme being and architect of the universe.8 By the end of the eighteenth century, deism had come under sustained attack from two contrasting sources: on one side, there had emerged a more aggressive philosophical atheism, associated with David Hume and Immanuel Kant, contemptuous of the supposed evidence of divine design; on the 94


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other, a popular evangelical piety had burgeoned, fully at odds with En lightenÂ�ment materialism and convinced (correctly as history would suggest) that the deistic outlook was but an interim and insidious stage on the journey to unbelief. Despite these potent philosophical and theological challenges to it, deism retained a popular appeal in freethinking networks throughout the period of Owen’s activism and important echoes of it are present in his thought in many of his writings and declarations on religion. His early, and in some ways most digestible, synthesis of Enlightenment social and educational theory, A New View of Society of 1813–16, may read in places like a compendium of unattributed Enlightenment commonplaces on individual psychology and collective social organization, but its argu ments appear generally cautious in the discussion of religion, reflective in part of the deistic ambience in which some of its key ideas were formed. There is, however, another important reason for the relative reticence of A New View in its treatment of religion, indicative of one of Owen’s recurrent dilemmas in the ongoing handling of the faith question. Careful conÂ�sider ation of the intended audience of A New View, together with its declared purpose to solicit active support for the promotion of a new model of indus trial education and community living, entailed for strategic reasons that the author’s growing and instinctive antipathy towards religious belief be restrained. Any support he was likely to receive for the creation of new types of community would require, he knew, the endorsement of leading figures in Church and state. For this reason, it is necessary to sift the text of A New View with some discernment for evidence of Owen’s evolving understanding of religion and its role in both the old and the anticipated social orders with which the text is concerned. When it is approached in this way, it can be seen that the moral psych ology of A New View is profoundly irreconcilable with orthodox Christianity. For political and diplomatic reasons, Owen proves at first reluctant in the four essays which make up the text to name his adversary explicitly, but it is clear upon inspection of the first essay especially that it is nothing less than the Christian doctrine of free will that Owen intends to dispel, through the application of the classical Enlightenment understanding of empiricist psychology and its resultant theory of environmental determinism. If the character of man is, as Owen insists throughout A New View, ineluctably the product of society and circumstance, then there is no meaningful role for free will in the shaping of human destiny. The principle of free will, or the assumption that individuals possess a God-given responsibility for their 95


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choices and actions and can be rewarded or punished for their behaviour accordingly, lies at the root, Owen suggests, of the corrupt systems of edu cation and government of his day, particularly as these bear down upon the seemingly reprobate conduct of the poor who are thereby always held culpable for their every misfortune. Owen’s opposition to the concept of free will – which he refers to indirectly as a ‘ridiculous and absurd mystery’ – and to the social and ecclesiastical institutions founded upon it, is part of his wider effort to provide an alternative explanation for the pervasive presence of poverty and misery and an alternative remedy for their removal from society.9 The depth of hostility evinced towards free will in the first essay, particularly, is part of a wider anti-religious slant in A New View, which, however obliquely expressed, is more central to Owen’s overall thought than most commentators have hitherto admitted. The juxtaposition of reason and truth against ‘falsehood and deception’ emphasizes that for Owen the exercise of a properly applied critical rationality exposes the philo sophical incoherence of free will as the grounding of human behaviour and encourages in its place the embrace of a fresh way forward for raising the ethical standards of the whole of society.10 Of course the central focus of A New View is Owen’s remarkable experi ment in social and educational philanthropy at his model cotton village of New Lanark in Scotland. As commercial manager and community leader of the New Lanark enterprise, Owen had found himself dealing with a generally pious Scottish Calvinist working population and a generally sus picious and inquisitorial Church establishment worried about the intended improvements of a freethinking incomer. Owen’s reforms at New Lanark undoubtedly raised tensions with the leadership of the Church of Scotland, occasioning sporadic outbreaks of conflict with the local presbytery and with local newspapers which on various occasions his more diplomatic and conventional business partners had to be speedily called upon to resolve. Some of this history is reflected subtly in the lengthy discussions of the New Lanark experiment in A New View. Accentuating the understated yet un doubtedly pervasive anti-Christian sentiment that runs throughout the four essays, Owen is scathing, for example, about the hypocrisies of the Christian Sabbath, which he boldly condemns for its entirely ineffective contribution to working-class rest as well as for its production of ‘superstitious gloom and tyranny over the mind’.11 In its place, Owen advocates what he argues is a much richer philosophy of recreation securely integrated into the textures of working and domestic life. Instead of a desiccated Calvinist 96


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sabbatarianism, he recommends regular participation in recreational and self-improving activities set within the established rhythms of work and rest. The wider rationale for the renewal of society as foreshadowed in his New Lanark innovations – the promotion of what he tellingly refers to as a ‘system without mystery’ – is to be realized, Owen urges in A New View, only by government accepting its responsibility to provide a structure of national education covering all classes and stations of the country’s children.12 Famously, of course, the central concern of A New View is educational reform – a signature Enlightenment theme – but this goal is also pursued through the text with an implicit hostility to the continuing influence of religious authority in the governance and shaping of schools. The aversion extends even to reprimands of fellow progressives in the field of educational reform such as Andrew Bell and Samuel Whitbread, chastised by Owen for the obviously Christian rationales of their initiatives in popular edu cation. It then culminates in some of Owen’s most daring yet artful critic isms so far of orthodox Christian doctrine, on the basis of its fundamental incompatibility with the empiricist truths of character formation and en vironmental determinism – elements seen by Owen as the philosophical cornerstone of a new system of successful and rational instruction: Let us then in this spirit openly declare to the Church, that a national un exclusive plan of education for the poor will, without the shadow of doubt, destroy all the errors which are attached to the various systems; and that, when this plan shall be fully established, not one of the tenets which is in opposition to facts can long be upheld.13

The increasingly impatient mood of these statements is echoed in several of Owen’s other, more occasional utterances on religion from the period of his New Lanark tenure. Perhaps exasperated by his repeated skirmishes with the authorities of the Lanark Presbytery of the Church of Scotland, some of Owen’s popular pronouncements on religion in 1816 and 1817 focus on the relatively obvious target of intolerance and sectarianism – once again, favourite themes of contemporary anticlerical literature. At the formal open ing in the village in 1816 of his celebrated Institution for the Formation of Character, Owen boldly seized the opportunity to dedicate the building to the pursuit of truth, a ‘pure and undefiled religion’, and in resistance to the errors of religious indoctrination, the effects of which, he stated, reproduce 97


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only ‘ignorance and misery’.14 Riding one of the several waves of fame attendant upon the novelty of his educational and social reforms, Owen gave one of his early important addresses in London the following year on the subject of the ‘New state of society’, again taking advantage of the public platform given to him to identify his plans for the creation of a national netÂ�work of model industrial villages quite expressly with principled opposÂ�ition to ‘religious intolerance, or sectarian feelings of division and separation’: Therefore, unless the world is now prepared to dismiss all its erroneous religious notions, and to feel the justice and necessity of publicly acknowledging the most unlimited freedom, it will be futile to erect villages of union and mutual cooperation . . . Any religion that creates one particle of feeling short of this is false; and must prove a curse to the whole human race!15

At this juncture in his public career, Owen confined most of his louder expressions of anti-religious sentiment to the perceived abuses of religion, rather than to the propositional or theological content of religious doctrine itself. There were, as we have seen, pragmatic reasons for this moderation and it helped sustain support for his schemes amongst radical political sympathizers in the capital and elsewhere still firmly attached to the traditions of Christian Nonconformist and Unitarian devotion. It was clear to discerning readers of his most important works, particularly A New View, that there ran through Owen’s thought a vital seam of anti-religious feeling much more constitutively at odds with dogmatic Christianity than his often highly qualified public comments appeared to suggest. But this was not sufficiently prominent by itself to scandalize his supporters or seriously impede his social and educational undertakings. Nevertheless, it may well have been his increasing frustration with both the inertia of the nation’s political and ecclesiastical elites, and his ongoing low-intensity contests with the authorities of the Church of Scotland, which steadily pushed Owen towards greater and more overt radicalism in his critique of religion. A definite turning-point came in the mid-1820s, as his exasperation with the apparent failure of his schemes beyond the confines of New Lanark caused Owen’s gaze to rove westwards, towards America, in pursuit of a new theatre for the realization of his social and educational dreams. The eventual climax of this dramatic change of outlook was the failed and costly endeavour of the Owenite New Harmony settlement in 98


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Indiana. The New Harmony venture was accompanied, however, by one of Owen’s most dramatic forays into religious polemic: a remarkable public debate in the United States with a renowned evangelical controversialist named Alexander Campbell. Campbell had emerged in the 1820s from immigrant Irish-Scots origins as a skilled opponent of the waves of sceptics and freethinking intellectuals who had eagerly spearheaded the western expansion of the United States in furtherance of what they saw as the Enlightenment values of the Con stitution and in support of a roundly secular view of the destiny of the new Republic. Formed initially in independent evangelical preaching circles in Virginia, Campbell eventually attracted a huge following amongst Calvinists and Baptists all across the nation, around which he soon generated what came to be known as the Second Great AwakeningÂ�Â�– a major, mass- move ment Pentecostal revival that was to play a decisive role in stemming the tide of American secularism and in shaping the politics and consciousness of the antebellum period, from the New England states to the expanding western frontier.16 Owen first came to Campbell’s attention when the newspaper of Owen’s fledgeling community project, the New Harmony Gazette, published the text of an 1826 Independence Day oration given by Owen entitled ‘A declar ation of mental independence’. This was a speech composed in the now familiar Owenite register of public exhortation, announcing to the citizens of New Harmony the dawn of a new age of ‘FULL FREEDOM TO THE HUMAN MIND’ and attacking a ‘trinity of the most monstrous evils that could be combined to inflict mental and physical evil upon the whole race’: the private ownership of property, the institution of marriage and religion.17 It seemed clear from this manifesto of his new community that Owen had finally broken with his enforced habit of temporizing with the sensitivities and patronage of believers. The text of the declaration in fact crystallizes two themes that were to prove enduring in many of his subsequent assaults upon conventional religious faith: that all religion is inherently divisive and that all religion is evil. Conscious of Owen’s growing renown with the East Coast American elites, Campbell issued him with a challenge to defend the propositions contained in the declaration against Campbell’s own account of the reasonableness and reliability of the Christian revelation. Owen cordially accepted the challenge and the result was an astonishing and de finÂ�ing debate between the two protagonists held in Cincinnati, Ohio, in April 1829. 99


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It came as some surprise to Owen’s admirers, then and subsequently, to realize that Owen for the most part came off worst in the debates with Campbell.18 Campbell was himself a redoubtable orator, educated at Glasgow University and steeped in the traditions of Enlightenment rhetoric. He was also an erudite biblical linguist, accomplished theologian and graceful inter locutor. Owen was clearly taken aback by Campbell’s skills and was driven to concede at one point that his opponent had succeeded in placing the best possible gloss on Christian belief. But Owen’s relative failure in the Cincinnati debate was attributable less to Campbell’s philosophical abilities, formidable though these were, and more to the constricted and rhetorically frozen pseudo-academic postures Owen chose to assume in their exchanges. Beginning promisingly enough with a written summary of five classically enlightened propositions on themes such as the unreliability of scriptural testimony, the irrationalism of supernatural explanations and the self-evidently destructive divisiveness of doctrinally estranged religious denominÂ�ations, Owen when invited to defend these points quite puzzlingly chose instead to use the public platform afforded him to issue yet another of his interminable statements on the nature of man and the truths of empiricist psychology, set out in what he called his twelve laws of nature. When a clearly bewildered Campbell finally induced Owen to return to the crux of their dispute, there was a moment of real possibility, when Owen reiterated his claim that all ‘systems of religion . . . are derived from the wildest vagaries of fancy . . . the air-built fabrics of imagination’.19 Far from facilitating the redemptive powers of the millennium, Owen repeated, the disunion, ignorance and violence of religious faith stood as obstacles to the radical renewal of society by the light of human reason. Much more might have been made of this insight, for its subsequent recurrence in Owen’s treatment of religion – where the language of millenarian transformation is, as it were, secularized and rationalized and turned against faith – testifies to its disclosure of some thing critical in his ambivalent response to the religious temper. But in much of the remainder of the debate with Campbell, Owen reverted imperi ously to the one-sided reiteration of his curiously dogmatic twelve laws, to the consternation and disappointment of most of his listeners. Despite its comparative failure from Owen’s point of view as an intellectual spectacle – paralleling the wider disillusionment of the whole American adventure – the Campbell debate did mark a turning-point in Owen’s career as a public campaigner against orthodox religious belief. In the first place, it saw him shed the last of his inhibitions of public propriety as a declared 100


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antagonist of religious faith. Secondly it highlighted a significant develop ment in his overall approach to religion, specifically his much more targeted and sustained attack on the fundamental philosophical assumptions of the religious worldview. Thirdly, it marked another significant stage in his reworking of the discourse and inflections of religious testimony in the formulation of his vision of social and economic transformation. As early as the remodelling of New Lanark, Owen had determined that the ecu menical church linked to the Institution for the Formation of Character would ‘be devoid of forms, ceremonies and mysteries; for those constitute the errors of all the existing systems, and of all those that have hitherto created anger, and produced violence and bloodshed throughout society’. In their place, he argued, there would emerge a ‘new religion’, which would ‘possess whatever is valuable . . . and exclude whatever is erroneous’, so that ‘in due time, a religion of this character, freed from every inconsistency, shall be promulgated’.20 The concern even at this early phase was less with the outright abolition of religion and much more with its renovation. The enemy was not the human religious impulse as such, but its perversion by Christian (and other) dogmatic systems. The peculiarities of this position are in part attributable to the residual influence of deism in Owen’s surrounding culture, which continued to command the support of much educated opinion otherwise scornful of conventional belief. This factor does not by itself explain, however, the later development of Owen’s thought, where the vocabulary of religious commit ment, attitudinal conversion and prophetic expectation becomes ever more emphatic – even in places histrionic – just as the underlying social and political analysis becomes increasingly materialist and deterministic. The first major public expression of this shift in tone came in 1830 in the wake of the Campbell debacle and took the form of two important public lectures given by Owen in London, which were almost immediately set down as pamphlets and entitled The New Religion. The two lectures show Owen occupying a position much more congenial to his temperament than the debating forum of the Cincinnati episode. Here he is afforded the canvas to elaborate uninterrupted before an attentive audience (his preferred format) a searching critical analysis of religious practice and to counterpose to this an alternative mode of open inquiry through which humanity might hope to attain more secure and reliable knowledge of itself and the cosmos. At the heart of the first lecture is an audacious taxonomy of four religious personality-types, on the first three of which, Owen alleges, organized religion 101


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as hitherto experienced has historically conspired to work its various forms of oppression. The first type is the honest believer, sincere in his beliefs but too uninformed to question what he has been taught. The second type is the hypocritical non-believer, indifferent to the claims of religion but content to acquiesce in any advantages it affords him. The third is the individualistic non-believer – akin to what later nineteenth-century thinkers would term the nihilist – dismissive of all belief but including in his radical scepticism a contempt even for the confirmed laws of nature. The fourth member of the grouping is by far the most interesting: it is, according to Owen, the new, enlightened non-believer who has been educated out of his lingering attachment to faith only to be released into a more exalted understanding of ‘the eternal unchanging laws of the universe . . . and who, by a careful study of these facts, [can] deduce from them the religion of nature’.21 Owen’s intriguing notion of a ‘religion of nature’ is to be carefully dis tinguished from the Romantic metaphysics of the sublime, or the fashionable appetite for pantheistic exaltations of the natural world – dominant aesthetic dispositions in the arts and letters of Owen’s surrounding culture in the early nineteenth century. Nor is it to be confused with a simple nostalgia for deism. The language employed for its description retains certain memories of the deist compromise, but Owen is clear in stating his dissatisfaction with movements such as deism, Unitarianism and pantheism for their failure to rid humanity of an unseemly obeisance to the inscrutable and the un known (‘mystery’). Although there is some risk of anachronism in the judge ment, it is perhaps not wholly misleading to describe Owen’s ‘religion of nature’ as articulated in The New Religion as something akin to a devotion to science, with science understood as the exclusive ground of both authentic knowledge and as the source of a unique spiritual inspiration attendant on its sense of ongoing, boundless discovery – what Owen alludes to in the second lecture, as ‘the advance of science . . . which makes the opposition to this religion of Nature the more glaring . . .’; and ‘a rational mode of proceeding . . . all that is requisite to ensure a superior state of human exist ence’.22 It transpires that all that Owen wishes to retain of the traditional concept of religion in this much bolder phase of his thinking is essentially its longing for human betterment, even if this longing is seen by him to be left entirely unfulfilled by the dogmas and institutions of organized religion as currently constituted. The instinctive human yearning for peace, justice and equality will achieve ‘heavenly results’, he argues, not through observance of the creeds of the Christian Churches, but 102


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only through a knowledge of the religion of nature, the only religion that ever has been or can be true. And this religion, when it shall be developed in the world . . . will be found to make every man love his neighbour as himself, and to have like charity for others that he feels others, to be just, ought to have for him!!23

There emerges from the ‘resolutions’ of the two New Religion lectures a representatively Owenite perspective on the future of religious faith. It com bines a deepening commitment to a fundamentally scientific appreciation of human knowledge with an increasingly radical conception of social justice and a passionately idealistic belief in the capacity of reformed mass education to bring about a society naturally receptive to both. The power of this syn thesis was not lost on Owen, nor was its by now flagrant incompatibility with orthodox belief concealed from him or his critics. Owen’s analysis of religion as a result entered a new phase of assertiveness and vehemence, channelled through the growing flood of journal publications, pamphlets and public presentations through which he communicated his ideas to an expanding and increasingly well-organized body of followers. The fact that this stage of Owen’s general programme of agitation and propaganda on behalf of his new system came increasingly to resemble an evangelical crusade has been used by some commentators to diminish its significance for the overall coherence of his social and political thought.24 Others have viewed it more forensically, finding in it the key to the roots of his radicalism in the traditions of Nonconformist egalitarianism to which he was more or less constantly exposed from childhood onwards.25 Both positions may shed valuable light on the developing pattern of Owen’s ideas, but it is also equally important to recognize the degree to which the imagery of religious expect ation, and the core principles of religious renewal, excited Owen’s imagination precisely because he could see them as at one and the same time irreducibly sincere and comprehensively mistaken. Adopting the inflections of religious revival was no mere theatrical gesture for Owen, nor was it a simply a con venient source of shared metaphor through which he could communicate with an audience. Religious expectation was so dangerous and so misguided, he insisted, not because of its distance from the truth, but because of its proximity to it. Hence in his Editorial to the first number of his journal New Moral World in November 1834, he at last felt confident enough to declare, 103


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The rubicon between the Old Immoral and the New Moral Worlds is finally passed . . . This . . . is the great Advent of the world, the second coming of Christ, – for Truth and Christ are one and the same. The first coming of Christ was a partial development of Truth to the few . . . The second coming of Christ will make Truth known to many . . . The time is therefore arrived when the foretold millennium is about to commence.26

The remarkable statement that ‘Truth and Christ are one and the same’ is not simply playing to the Christian gallery. It is part of Owen’s visionary conviction that humanity has thrown up at various moments of historical crisis figures capable of seeing through the deceits of the age and restoring human beings to the proper pursuit of reason. That the Christian Church had promptly annexed Jesus Christ’s simple gospel of rationality, equality and solidarity was yet another of the historical commonplaces of the En lightenÂ�ment response to the phenomenon of Christianity. But it is employed here by Owen quite deliberately, to point towards a dimension of religious experiÂ�ence that is infinitely more concerned with truth than it is with Christ. The apocalyptic tone of the passage certainly serves to intensify the endemic Owenite preoccupation with the crisis of history – a transformative opportun ity that Owen genuinely seemed to believe the advent of technological civil ization now presented. The millennium envisaged, however, is not the one foretold by the Pentecostals, but the new age of reason and progress towards which all of Owen’s mature endeavours had been directed and which he held to be emergent from an entirely material convergence of social, economic and intellectual forces. Owen’s major compendium of collected addresses, essays, public lectures and speculations, the immense Book of the New Moral World, published in seven parts between 1842 and 1844, articulated probably his most advanced understanding of what he now routinely referred to as ‘the Religion of Truth’. Use of the phrase ‘new moral world’ had also by this period become wide spread in Owen’s writings and speeches, forming, among other things, the title of his journal and the name of a peculiar publication which yet again highlighted the resonance of his most sophisticated and intrepid ideas with the hallowed genres of faith. This was the admittedly eccentric Catechism of the New Moral World of 1833 (subsequently published in an early number the journal), which in its didactic, question-and-answer format blasphem ously parodied one of the standard instruments of Christian religious instruction.27 The express purpose of the Catechism (aside, surely, from its 104


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calculated shock value) was to summarize from first principles the total Owenite anthropology, from the empiricist understanding of the potential of man’s character, through the illegitimacy of most existing forms of law, property and government, to the irrationality and despotism of the insti tutions of religious belief, ‘founded in opposition to nature’s laws’.28 The trinity of law, private property and religion had by this juncture in Owen’s thought acquired an almost Manichaean aura, calling forth from his apolo getics some of his fiercest denunciations, inveterately expressed in a splenetic tone highly reminiscent of biblical prophecy and Dissenting protest. It can indeed be seen in retrospect that the great consolidation of his mature polit ical and social writings represented in the several volumes of The Book of the New Moral World, in which that strange title from the journal and the Catechism recurs, is much more abidingly preoccupied with the perennial question of religion than the subsequent reputation of Owen and his move ment would sometimes suggest. Before the irresistible light of the ‘Religion of Truth’, states The Book of the New Moral World, ‘All other religions . . . will speedily cease to exist, and ere long, will be known only as being recorded among the strange events which occurred during the history of the irrational period of human existence.’29 Previous theologies will be exposed as ‘a disease’, ‘based on falsehood, or errors of the imagination respecting the natural qualities of human nature, and therefore all its proceedings far worse than useless’.30 Recapitulating from his earlier work his resounding indictments of the institutions of faith, The Book calls yet again for the abolition of ‘the Priesthood of all sects’ and the abandonment of all ‘errors of instruction’ responsible for the negative portrayal of humanity as fallen or sinful.31 The complicity of the insti tutional churches with sectarianism, superstition, war, poverty and even self-hatred and insanity, is repeatedly cited throughout The Book as sufficient grounds for their wholesale rejection and for the refusal of any kind of renegotiation of their relationship with civil society. Again, Owen echoes the uncompromising rhetoric of the early Protestant and Dissenting reformers in his resolute refusal to settle for anything less that the complete eradication of the influence of corrupt ecclesiastical teachings from the minds of human beings and from the fabric of society. Long stretches of The Book of the New Moral World inventory the abuses perpetrated by the churches and their continuing resistance to the spread of progress and freedom, in almost every instance attributing this recalcitrance not merely to some notional betrayal of the pure, original vision of their founder, but to a much more congenital 105


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moral and philosophical failure of religion to comprehend the truths of human nature and the untapped potential of the human spirit properly understood. As well as restating and extending an anti-religious and anti-Christian agenda ingrained in the textures of Owen’s radicalism almost from its in ception, The Book of the New Moral World is also fundamentally concerned – much more so than any previous Owenite undertaking – with the eluci dation of an extended, detailed rationale for the much-vaunted ‘Religion of Truth’ and its potentially liberating role in human affairs. The Religion of Truth is to be differentiated from its specious precursors, according to Owen, on two main grounds. In the first place, it is practical: As true religion consists, only, in the acquisition of the knowledge of truth, and its consistent application to practice . . . the attainment of a distinct perception of the immediate causes of good and evil among men will be the first step to a knowledge of true religion . . . True religion consists not in words, but in actions . . . in deeds which produce immediate progressive improvement and happiness among all people and nations.32

At the heart of this pragmatism there lies both a reproach to the perceived moral collapse of Christianity in its botched response to the challenges of the Industrial Revolution, and also a classic Owenite view of social change: that the merits of any ethical system are to be determined by the difference it makes to the conditions in which human beings live and struggle. The primary purpose of philosophy, we might say, is to change and not describe the world. This was a reproof levelled repeatedly by Owen at the inadequacies of the Christian faith: that its obsession with destiny and damnation had blinded it to the appalling circumstances in which most of its adherents toiled, signalling not just an abandonment of the simple teachings of its founder, but a more profound misconception of the well-being of humanity, complicit with the worst injustices of industrial capitalism. True religion, by contrast, in attending to what self-evidently would make the masses happy, could offer, in effect, a replenished humanism capable of redressing the damaging inequalities of the age. The second main ground upon which Owen defended in The Book of the New Moral World the superiority of ‘True Religion’, over against its ‘false’ alternatives, was at once more subtle and more openly speculative than the first. It is only really in this later phase of his career that Owen begins to 106


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explain something of his own metaphysics. It is done hesitantly and care fully, wary of the traps into which he believed figures such as Coleridge had fallen, but it emerges nevertheless as a species of idealism, with close cognates in the German metaphysics of the period (especially Hegel’s) and with anticiÂ�pations of later developments in English and American thought. It rests upon a premise well established in post-Kantian philosophy and rich in a vocabulary conducive to Owen’s style of reasoning from first principles: That all facts yet known to man indicate that there is an external or an internal cause of all existences, by the fact of their existence; that this all-pervading cause of motion and change in the universe, is that Incomprehensible Power which the nations of the world call by some name which they hold in reverence, and to which all the actions of the universe are referred.33

Discussion of the proper, most rational means by which to approach this Incomprehensible Power consumes significant stretches of the writing in The Book of the New Moral World. The rehearsal of standard Enlightenment views of the limits of the knowable – and the absurdity of attempting to contain the ‘unknowable’ within the credal formulae of established religion – is present throughout the epistemology Owen then offers for any attempted bracketing of ‘the Power’. It suggests in quite familiar terms that the concept equates with his earlier construction of ‘Nature’ and that its main role ought to be to induce in humanity both a certain humility before the boundlessness of truth and a hunger for further knowledge and understanding of that truth. In other passages, however, Owen leans more directly towards a genuinely vitalist view of the Incomprehensible Power, to some extent fore shadowing the impact of the philosophies of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche from the later decades of the nineteenth century, and identifying it more boldly with some primordial force or spirit animating the cosmos: [Man] must view it with feelings of wonder and awe, too sublime for any human words to express by any sound, or form, or ceremony; for any words or ceremony must diminish the purity of the feelings, and bring back the flight of thought attempting to reach illimitable space, and to grasp eternity of time, in which, composition, decomposition, and recomposition, universally proceed, without ceasing, producing never-ending varieties of movements, life, and mind.34 107


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If these are the principal features of the True Religion, it is hard to see how they can be made immediately practical! Exploration of the meaning and purposes of the Power rapidly assumes, Owen seems to realize, its own internal dynamic, difficult to contain within the co-ordinates of even the most capacious empiricism and testing the limits of the materialist under standing of reality. This is not to say that these elusive elements of The Book of the New Moral World represent some sort of pious recantation by an atheist abruptly brought up short by the grand mysteries of the universe. It is important to continue to hold in view Owen’s principled insistence that human conduct in response to the irreducible reality of the Power should remain rational and inquiring and certainly not succumb blindly to the muffling allure of mystery and priestcraft: ‘Everyone should be so trained and educated as to become his own best priest,’ he adds mischievously.35 The rational agnosticism to which Owen gestures in these observations offers no opening for the return of divinity in anything like the accepted senses of that term. It is therefore perhaps more illuminating finally to interpret the definition Owen offers as a condition of knowledge as well as a boundary to it. In this regard it resembles the religion of nature from earlier in his work, understood in broadly scientific terms. Ever attracted to the unimaginable potential of the future, and the capabilities with which it could invest an emancipated humanity, Owen offers the Power to his readers not as a barrier but as an invitation, incentivizing the onward pursuit of knowledge of the cosmos and humanity’s place within it. ‘From the past history of the human race’, Owen concludes, ‘it is evident that the facts are yet unknown to man which define what that Incomprehensible Power is.’36 It is the onward advance of human reason which this judgement implies that offers the surest measure of Owen’s obstinate naturalism. It ought then to be clear from this overall assessment that the final un expected turn in the trajectory of Owen’s lengthy and adventurous career – his 1854 admission into the ranks of the Spiritualist Church in the closing years of his life – was not, as some of his admirers have suggested, an un foreseen and reprehensible lapse of his otherwise commendably determined rationality. It is to be seen neither as palinode nor mental aberration, but as a perfectly predictable epilogue to the sustained engagement with religion and reason visible throughout the totality of his work and activism. Despite its name, the late nineteenth-century Spiritualist movement in America and Britain bore little resemblance to a ‘Church’. Its combination of drawingroom theatre, pseudo-scientific theory, ectoplasmic manifestations, cold 108


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reading and photography placed it at some considerable distance from even the most inclusive accounts of religious orthodoxy. Indeed the trappings of the movement, and the educated middle- class clientele typically drawn to it, positioned it much closer to science than to faith and led to serious discussion of its claims less in the theological than in the scientific press.37 It was to these dimensions of the phenomenon that Owen was initially attracted, fascinated by Spiritualism’s seeming disclosure of a realm beyond the accepted bounds of scientific discovery yet apparently fully amenable to disclosure by the scientific method. His eventual embrace of Spiritualism as a personal philosophy – which, perhaps predictably, saw Owen assuming an executive role in the organization and claiming that its agreed principles had been dictated to him from the beyond – was in many respects entirely consistent with important vectors in his intellectual biography as these have been described throughout this essay. As we have seen, despite his declared rationalism, there was a markedly religious inflection to many of Owen’s utterances throughout his public career and an unmistakably prophetic tenor to his critique of the moral shortcomings of industrial society. Radical Christian revivalism of one kind or another was never far from his inspir ation, even if he demonstrably rejected the claims of confessional faith more or less unfailingly throughout his adult life. To its sincerest initiates, Spiritual ism was, as we have suggested, the ultimate ‘rational religion’: a strictly materialist creed offering ‘scientific’ evidence for the existence of an afterlife that required no revealed truths or divisive sacred scriptures to guarantee it. Its appeal to Owen lay exactly in its apparently public, unimpeachable scientific credentials of testability and verifiability, as assuredly as the vindi cation of the larger Owenite system had lain all along, he repeatedly averred, in the incontestable achievements of his major social projects. Understanding the place of Spiritualism in Owen’s life and thought in this way underlines further the centrality of the matter of religion to the steady unfolding of his intellectual and moral vision. If the religious land scape of his day epitomized for Owen all that was errant and misdirected in human affairs, then the sustained practice of contending with religion – exposing it, undoing it, correcting it, appropriating it and eventually re placing it with an enlarged version of rationality – supplied much of the raw energy of his campaigning fervour. When we recognize that the final response of Owen to the place of religion in the human imagination is in certain key respects uncannily reminiscent of the creeds he claimed to have eschewed, we do no more than acknowledge, as would have Owen himself, 109


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that belief and unbelief contend for ever over that which matters most in human existence.

Notes Jim Obelkevich, Lyndal Roper and Raphael Samuel (eds), Disciplines of Faith: Studies in Religion, Politics and Patriarchy (London, 1987); J. C. D. Clark, Samuel Johnson: Literature, Religion, and English Cultural Politics from the Restoration to Romanticism (Cambridge, 1994); Jon Mee, Romanticism, Enthusiasm and Regulation: Poetics and the Policing of Culture in the Romantic Period (Oxford, 2003); Martin Priestman, Romantic Atheism: Poetry and Freethought, 1780–1830 (Cambridge, 1999). â•‡2 Eileen Yeo, ‘Robert Owen and Radical culture’, in Sidney Pollard and John Salt (eds), Robert Owen: Prophet of the Poor (London, 1971), pp. 84–114. â•‡3 Daniel E. White, Early Romanticism and Religious Dissent (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 87–119. â•‡4 Ian Donnachie, Robert Owen: Social Visionary (Edinburgh, 2005), pp. 22–9. â•‡5 Robert Owen, The Life of Robert Owen, Written by Himself, in SWRO, 4, pp. 54, 56. â•‡6 Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750 (Oxford, 2001), pp. 329–445. â•‡7 Harold Silver, The Concept of Popular Education (London, 1965), pp. 79–86. â•‡8 James A. Herrick, The Radical Rhetoric of the English Deists: The Discourse of Skepticism, 1680–1750 (Columbia, SC, 1997). â•‡9 SWRO, 1, p. 36. 10 Ibid., p. 57. 11 Ibid., p. 59. 12 Ibid., p. 85. 13 Ibid., p. 90. 14 Ibid., p. 140. 15 Ibid., pp. 207–8. 16 Douglas Foster et al., The Encyclopedia of the Stone–Campbell Movement (Grand Rapids, 2005). 17 SWRO, 2, p. 51. 18 Richard J. Cherok, Debating for God: Alexander Campbell’s Challenge to in AnteÂ� bellum America (Abilene, TX, 2008), pp. 53–77. 19 Alexander Campbell and Robert Owen, The Evidences of Christianity: A Debate Between Robert Owen of New Lanark, Scotland, and Alexander Campbell, President of Bethany College, Virginia (St Louis, 1906), pp. 105–6. 20 Robert Owen, ‘A New Religion’, Niles Register, 24 May 1823; reprinted from the Limerick Chronicle, 27 January 1823. 21 SWRO, 2, p. 170. â•‡ 1

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Robert Owen and Religion 22 23 24

25

26

27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37

Ibid., pp. 192, 194. Ibid., p. 186. Anja Finger, ‘The pains and pleasures of opium, religion and modernity: a new view of Robert Owen’, in Michael R. Ott (ed.), The Future of Religion: Toward a Reconciled Society (Leiden, 2007), pp. 147–67. Claire Puglisi Kaczmarek, ‘Religion rationnelle et éducation selon Robert Owen’, Etudes écossaises, 11 (2008), http://etudesecossaises.revues.org/index65.html (last accessed 13 February 2010). Cited in J. F. C. Harrison, Utopianism and Education: Robert Owen and the Owenites (New York, 1968), p. 24. SWRO, 2, pp. 325–37. Ibid., p. 327. SWRO, 3, p. 111. Ibid., p. 154. Ibid., p. 172. Ibid., pp. 209–10. Ibid., p. 200. Ibid., p. 229. Ibid., p. 230. Ibid., p. 234. Elana Gomel, ‘“Spirits in the material world”: spiritualism and identity in the fin de siècle’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 35 (2007), 189–213.

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6

Owen and the Owenites: consumer and consumption in the new moral world Noel Thompson

Until recently most on the Left have found the idea of personal consumption problematic. Even in the age of relative affluence that followed post-war austerity in Britain, writers such as Richard Crossman considered that, driven by a rising tide of corporate advertising, it was jeopardizing both the capacity to deliver high-quality public services and the nation’s economic performance. Thus Britain’s relative economic decline could be explained by a propensity to consume that squeezed capital investment, in marked contrast to the Soviet bloc, where high levels of public investment had allowed rates of economic growth which would ensure that, in terms of economic development, western capitalism would be overhauled in the relatively near future. And this, of course, had geopolitical significance as third world countries drew their own lessons about the appropriate model to embrace. Of course there were dissentient voices. Anthony Crosland’s The Future of Socialism articulated a more consumer-friendly position, but it was really in the late 1980s and early 1990s that British democratic socialism became more sympathetic to the notion of private consumption and more sensitive to the aspirations and voting power of the affluent private consumer. Whether for reasons of electoral advantage or from real ideological commitment, or a combination of the two, there was a willingness to embrace, or at least accommodate, individual consumers and their aspirations and the culture of contentment to which increasing personal consumption is integral. There is an abundance of material that could be used to illustrate this ideological shift but for the purposes of this essay a brief elucidation of one aspect of it is sufficient: namely the political economy of post-Fordist


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socialism; associated in Britain with writers such as Paul Hirst, in the United States with, amongst others, Charles Sabel and Michael Piore and in Australia with John Mathews.1 This will give some idea of what was being offered by some on the Left, in terms of their conceptualization of private conÂ�sump tion, in the dog days of the twentieth century. As post-Fordist socialists saw it, Fordism laid the basis for the achieve ments of twentieth-century capitalism with substantial productivity gains generated by an organization of production which permitted long runs of standardized products aimed at a mass market. This involved the application of Taylorist scientific management to an extended subdivision of labour, together with a technology that required an uninterrupted output of basic products for its efficient and profitable application. By the 1970s it was believed by post-Fordist socialists that such product ivity gains had been well-nigh exhausted. In particular, Fordism had produced an attenuation of initiative and creativity in an alienated workforce that was correspondingly ill adapted to innovation and change. Moreover, consumer palates had become jaded with the kind of products furnished by Fordist production methods. More specifically, a desire for the cheap and standard ized was giving way to a craving for the customized and, so, a differenÂ�tiated was replacing a mass demand. And it was this crisis of Fordism that was paving the way for a reconfigured and rejuvenated social democracy. For, as these writers saw it, the emergence of customized consumption and differ entiated demand was producing a new, post-Fordist mode of production characterized by what they termed ‘flexible specialization’. Flexible specialization was defined as ‘a strategy of permanent innovation: an accommodation to ceaseless change, rather than an effort to control it’.2 It was an organization of production based on flexible, multi-use equipment, skilled workers and the creation, through politics, of an industrial com munity that restricted the forms of competition to those favouring innovation. Thus it was about competition through quality, not the paring of labour costs. And, therefore, it was argued, flexible specialization made for highskill, high-value-added, craft forms of production. Flexible specialization also demanded ‘greater task versatility, skills and decision-making abilities’ on the part of production workers because of the frequency of product changes.3 Post-Fordist socialists therefore believed it laid the basis for the elimination of the division between the conception and execution of tasks; it created the possibility of greater worker autonomy; it facilitated the use of team-working that involved task rotation and, more generally, it 114


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necessitated the introduction of democratically determined work practices. So, with differentiated demand, came the possibility of realizing recogÂ�nizably socialist objectives. Moreover the flexible specialization that characterized a post-Fordist organÂ�ization of production put labour centre stage. As such, it became the pivotal factor of production. Where Fordism had looked to deskilled auto mata, flexible specialization made for a polyvalent labour force subject to constant retraining and skill enhancement. Where Fordism envisaged a separ ation between conception (the prerogative of management) and execution (the remit of the workforce), flexible specialization saw both as located in the same person or persons – the worker. Post-Fordist socialists therefore saw the consumer as creating forces that would make for the rebirth of the artisan, no longer wielding hand-held tools but the power of the computer; no longer the figment of a utopian nostalgia or a socialist imagination such as that of William Morris but a palpable entity surfing the incoming tide of history. And with labour’s new status would come a greater autonomy and independence and, ultimately, the erosion of the authoritarian hierarchies that had previously characterized Fordist production. Post-Fordist socialists could therefore portray discriminating consumers of customized, high-value-added, quality products as constituting a new revolutionary vanguard. For such writers it was the discriminating, hedon istic, utility-maximizing consumer, not the horny-handed son or daughter of toil who would effect revolutionary changes in the social mode of pro duction. Nowhere was the spirit of this new consumer-driven socialism more fervently expressed than in the pages of Marxism Today, which embraced this new order by launching its own credit card and range of designer products, giving the impression, as one commentator put it, that where you stood on consumption had ‘become the litmus test of the whole issue of socialist renewal’.4 By the early 1990s that was probably the case. For post-Fordist socialists, the workers of the world need no longer unite, they could go shopping instead and the revolution would follow swiftly in the wake of their shopping trolleys. Joyful creative labour and customized abundance – Morris’s News from Nowhere materialized. It is not necessary to dwell on the putative basis, or the inadequacies of this view of things. For its importance here lies not in its substance but in what it signified. While it may have represented one of the more avant-garde forms in which democratic socialists sought to embed the aspirations of the private consumer and private consumption in their political economies, the 115


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crucial point is that it was illustrative of a more general, late twentiethcentury ideological trend; one that saw a growing unpreparedness on the Left to challenge an increasingly hegemonic culture of privately purchased material contentment, for fear of the political consequences that might have; an unwillingness that made the Left, amongst other things, antipathetic to the notion of raising personal or corporate direct taxation and that saw it embrace both a consumerist discourse in relation to the provision of public services and the ethos of consumerism in relation to their delivery. Thus public-service users were equated to consumers and like them should be given choice and a right of exit. Consequently, public-service providers must see service users as customers.5 In line with this, where efficiency dictated, they should use private providers to satisfy demand, and private capital, by way of Private–Public Partnerships and Private Finance Initiatives, to furnish the infrastructure necessary for service delivery. In the wake of this, the traditional notion of a distinctive public-service ethos was largely jettisoned. As one recent commentator has put it, contemporary ‘public service delivery’ regimes ‘are designed to minimise reliance on an intrinsic ethos of public service’.6 New Labour were particularly culpable but, more generally, the Left have connived at substituting the rhetoric of consumerism and the market, for the language of public service and public provision. Within universities too there has been a marked tendency to embrace a discourse that renders students as customers with modules and degree schemes delivered, not taught, and students not educated but imbued with the transferable skills that enhance their marketability and add to the talent flow of high-grade human capital. As to research, human understanding and enlightenment has given way to impact; a term increasingly understood in terms of additions to the gross domestic product, with higher education now subsumed into a Department of Business, Innovation and Skills. So faced with a Left, large elements of which have bought into the new consumerism and have been prepared to accept the commoditization of everything; faced with a Left significant elements of which are suspicious of the fiscal consequences of delivering quality public services and a social infrastructure fit to meet the intensifying demands that will be made of it in the twenty-first century – not least by a rapidly growing and ageing popu lation; with a credit crunch now narrated in terms of public-sector profligacy rather than the incompetence, ill-considered greed and general moral bank ruptcy of the financial sector; where might the Left look for inspiration? 116


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Here, in so far as the Left still retains a sense of its ideological roots, there might be some utility in it reflecting upon these. For an indictment of acquisi tiveÂ�ness a rereading of R. H. Tawney; for a sense of the human costs of a restless and relentless competitiveness, a retrieval of the work of William Morris and John Ruskin; for an appreciation of the diseconomies of an un trammelled and unregulated capitalism, the Fabian Essays and, as an antidote to those who would privilege the consumer and consumerism, it is worth considering what early nineteenth-century socialist political economists such as Robert Owen and the Owenites had to offer. For, like many contemporary commentators, early nineteenth-century socialist commentators often con sidered the period in which they lived as one that was creating the possibility of abundance and, with that, unparalleled opportunities for the material transÂ�formation of people’s lives. As one writer put it in the Co-operative Magazine for October 1827, Britain had, by that date, ‘passed a boundary never before reached in the history of man: passed the regions of poverty arising from necessity and entered a realm of material abundance’; attaining ‘the means to ensure the wealth of nations, that object so long sought for by legislators and political economists.’7 So how did early nineteenth-century socialist writers like Owen react to their own age of affluence and what relevance does it have, if any, to the present predicament of the Left as regards the issue of private as against public consumption? Here, for the most part, the advent of a potential abundance and the possibilities it opened up, were something to be em braced. As one writer put it, ‘in wealth itself, however superabundant, there is nothing injurious.’8 The mechanization of industrial processes and the general expansion of productive activity had created, as Owen in particular recognized, potential for a significant addition to the sum total of human happiness. And that was something that could only be applauded. Yet what one certainly does not have from Owen, and other early nineteenthcentury socialists, is an uncritical celebration of the joys and virtues of private consumption. Thus, much contemporary consumption was seen as designed to establish or confirm social distinctions. Or, as one writer put it, ‘drawing a line of distinction between possessors and their fellow creatures’. Such consumption created ‘a circle of false pride and antipathy, within which sympathy is chilled and friendship destroyed’. Its objective was to provoke envy, to confirm social division and to indulge in self-advertisement. It was in this regard that ‘time and talent [were] sacrificed for . . . unsocial objects; objects disgraceful to humanity’.9 117


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Such concerns related to the motives for consumption rather than, specific ally, the objects consumed. That said there was in much early nineteenthcentury socialist writing a concern with the latter. In particular, there was a belief in the moral, social and political degeneracy induced by luxury which had its roots in the civic republican tradition of the eighteenth century. Thus luxury ‘bred oppressive and disturbing vices’; it was productive of ‘infirmity of body and mind’; it was the cause and consequence of idleness and it induced an intelÂ�lectual apathy both on the part of the sybaritic rich and on that of those who, impoverished by the luxury consumption of others, were denied the means of educating themselves and their children. As one writer put it, ‘the mental power of mankind is destroyed in one case by luxury and frivolous pursuits and in the other by want.’10 The unnecessary, artificial stimulation of wants was also something to be eschewed. William Godwin, with reference to the proliferation of what he termed ‘adventitious wants’, wrote in The Enquirer, 1797, that every man who invents a new luxury adds so much to the quantity of labour entailed on the lower orders of society . . . If a rich man employs the poor . . . in erecting palaces . . . in laying out his parks, and modelling his pleasure grounds, he will be found, when rightly considered, their enemy. He is adding to the weight of oppression and the vast accumulation of labour by which they are already sunk beneath the level of brutes.11

And many early nineteenth-century socialist writers saw things in a similar way and were alive to the social disutilities and human costs that multiplying material demands could impose. In particular, many pointed to the funda mental mismatch between the utility of individual consumption and the social disutility of the mind-numbing and back-breaking labour that the provision of luxuries required. Moreover, as many socialist political economists, such as Owen, saw it, market-mediated consumption in the old, ‘immoral’ world was also attended by social, moral and what could be termed mental diseconomies. In par ticular, the interaction of buyers and seller, consumer and producer in a competitive context engendered and rewarded unethical behaviour and discouraged and penalized those who acted, or tried to act, in a virtuous manner. As Owen saw it, The necessity which the present system inflicts on all, to endeavour to sell their own labour dear, and to buy the labour of others cheap contaminates and debases the character throughout all the departments of life. In fact, no one 118


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who has studied human nature, will ever expect to find a pure mind, or real virtue in society, as long as the business of life is one continued attempt to buy cheap and sell dear, by the intervention of money, which is daily altering in value.12

Commerce ‘produce[d] falsehood [and] cunning’; it made hypocrites of buyers and sellers’; it involved humanity in a ‘universal traffic of deception’. In these respects ‘the individual system of buying and selling’ also ‘train[ed] the human race to acquire the inferior mind of a pedlar and a dealer’.13 In consequence buying and selling under existing economic and social arrangements made for social antagonism between the buyers and sellers of labour and between the buyers and sellers of commodities in general. In Owen’s view it served to ‘engender a perpetual covetous warfare among the whole of the human race, each one seeking to take advantage of the ignorance or weakness of others’; or again, it ‘produce[d]. . .competition, and opposition of feeling between buyers and sellers individually’.14 Moreover, the existing system of private consumption, buying and selling was inherently wasteful. Of merchants and retailers Owen wrote, with that sensitivity to the likely impact of his sentiments on others which character ized him throughout his life, it is evident to every one that you do not create a particle of wealth for society; but that, without any adequate compensation to it, or real benefit to yourselves, you consume, in support of useless, showy establishments a large portion of that wealth which others produce.

Such individuals were ‘a dead weight upon society’ who ‘by the fanciful expensive establishments you have thought it beneficial to form’ rendered ‘[themselves] useless and extravagant consumers of wealth’.15 Of course in the context of a co-operative community such arrangements would cease, with money-mediated exchanges rendered defunct. Where exÂ�changes did take place between communities this would be on the ‘basis of labour for labour’, and of course Owen sought to operationalize this in the old immoral world through labour exchanges such as those created in Manchester and Birmingham in the early 1830s.16 Either way the imÂ�moral ity, social division and intellectual atrophy occasioned by market-mediated private consumption would be eliminated. So how, then, was consumption to be dealt with in the context of a socialÂ�ist community or socialist commonwealth? How would and could the 119


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dangers attached to consumption in the old immoral world be circumvented in a new age of abundance? There is, in some of the socialist literature of the period, a distinctly ascetic vein that sees a solution in terms of frugality and the strict limitation of desire. Such a view is apparent, for example, in a pamphlet of the Ham Common Concordists who sought to establish a co-operative community on Ham Common, in Surrey, in the early 1840s. As their prospectus put it, custom, having burthened us with a multitude of artificial wants, it will be the business of the members to divest themselves of all those to whom they have been subject. Economy, no less than the conditions for the development of man’s highest nature, calls for the utmost simplicity in food, raiment, furniture, dwellings and other outward means and so inmates on all occasions must endeavour assiduously to reduce the number of their adventitious wants. Their drink will be water and their food vegetables and fruits, and they will eat their food chiefly uncooked by fire . . . their clothing will be that best adapted to man, without reference to fashion and caprice: and of one common texture.

Communitarians would ‘sleep on mattresses without down or feathers, and they will rise and retire early’. As to ‘personal ablutions’, these would ‘be done completely, healthfully, and joyously by means of a shower or plunging bath direct from a pure spring’. And as to food, all would ‘eat from one board, spread with due regard to simplicity and purity’. Concordists would, in the words of the prospectus also ‘enjoy simple meals to leave the intellect clear’.17 Most early nineteenth-century socialist writers would have eschewed such extremes of frugality and self-denial. Rather they believed that consumption should be focused on ‘the development of man’s highest nature’. That is, it should be rational and it should be ethical. So, for Owen, communities should produce, ‘a full supply of those things which are necessary and the most beneficial for human nature’.18 That which was ‘best for human nature . . . [being] agreed upon at the formation of the establishment’.19 Individual consumption would therefore be mediated by social, or more accurately comÂ�munitarian, judgements as to its utility. These would be reflected in the way in which the productive capacity of communities would be organized and the manner in which they would evolve. As Owen put it in his 1834 Proposals for a Change of System in the British Empire, ‘the articles of the 120


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greatest necessity and utility . . . [would] be first made, afterÂ�wards the less useful or merely ornamental’.20 What was to be avoided was the production and thence the consumption of the ‘frivolous’ and the ‘fantastical’. There was to be ‘no waste of labor, materials or skill attending to or producing what is useless or pernicious. All things will be estimated by their intrinsic worth, nothing will be esteemed merely for its cost and scarcity, and fashions of any kind will have no existence.’21 Consumption was to be rational consumption. Communitarians would enjoy ‘healthy, enlightened, superior . . . pleasures’. Communities would ‘minister to the comfort and gratification of rational beings’. They would make available ‘every thing that can contribute to the improvement of men’. As to the consumption of leisure time this would be given over to ‘rational recreation and social enjoyment’ with communities furnishing ‘ample leisure for intelÂ�lectual improvement and social intercourse’.22 It would be communities as communities that would determine the pattern of individual consumption. They would judge what it was acceptable and what it was less, or unacceptable to consume. The criteria they applied would be essentially utilitarian, relating to the maximization of social utility from available scarce resources. Moreover, even with the advent of abund ance, Owen envisaged that ethical judgements with a bearing on private consumption would still be made; though it is clear, as noted below, that the favourable impact on character of inhabiting a community would ensure that individual consumer choice could increasingly be relied on to be both rational and socially enlightened. The objective of most early nineteenth-century communitarian socialists was not so much to constrain as to educate desire through the formation of human character. For Owen, ‘No one can doubt that it is for the interest of mankind that abundance of the most useful and intrinsically valuable products should be created with the least labor and the greatest benefit to the producers and consumers’ but also that ‘every individual should be trained to be capable of enjoying in the highest degree the use of these productions’.23 In part the actual occupations of communitarians by being ‘greatly more favourable to health and intelligence’ would militate against a desire for the ‘frivolous’, the ‘fantastical’ and the ‘pernicious’.24 But the pervasive influence of a comÂ�munitarian ethos would also have a salutary impact. With the education of desire, with the elimination of a demand for ‘un social objects’, with the superior arrangements for production which would 121


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characterize co-operative communities, would come an end to unnecessary labour. And with that would arise an expanded opportunity and appetite for the consumption of leisure time. Indeed, for many early nineteenthcentury socialists increased consumption would, quintessentially, assume this form. Rational recreation was therefore to be one of the most important forms in which individuals would engage in what one writer termed, ‘the right enjoyment of riches’.25 For Owen, ‘the operatives, or actual producers of wealth’, would ‘be employed a reasonable time per day in producing wealth for society, and afterwards in . . . [sic] recruiting their health and spirits by rational recreation and social enjoyment’; these two being seen as integrally related.26 Consistently with this, the education department within an Owenite community would be given the responsibility of ‘devising the best means of recreation’, while the community itself would invest in social infra structure favourable to rational pursuits, designed also to enlighten and to furnish opportunity for ‘intellectual improvement and social intercourse’.27 Indeed a commitment to rational recreation was to be integral to the physical infrastructure and even the topography of communities. A Description of an Architectural Model for a community, published in 1830, made mention of its ‘quadrangle . . . [being] laid out in shrubberies, flower gardens and pleasure grounds, scientifically arranged so that the gratifications of the gardens may be combined with new accessions of information, and the means of inculcating precepts of order at every step’. In John Thimbleby’s Monadelphia there would be ‘a colonnade where the astronomer can display to his audience the wonders of the heavens; the naturalist, those of the earth; and the composer delight the sense with the effects of music’.28 As to Owen, his imagined community would have ‘Assembly and Concert Rooms, Libraries and Reading Rooms, Museums, Laboratories, Artists Rooms [and] Lecture Rooms’.29 In terms of its social infrastructure what we have therefore is expenditure that will facilitate and promote a consumption of leisure time that involves self-development not self-indulgence, self-understanding not self-advertise ment, and a use of resources that would encourage the cerebral and the social. If such pleasures were about fun, they were also critically about the realization and expression of the community’s values. One might add here that if all this was to be predicated upon a personal consumption subjected to a rational constraint, this was to be comple mented by, and indeed lay the basis for, a kind of social opulence. Thus a 122


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visitor to the co-operative community imaginatively constructed by John Minter Morgan in his 1831 work, The Revolt of the Bees, remarks upon ‘the full supply of everything essential, not only to the comfortable but even luxurious subsistence’ of its inhabitants. The visitor noted too ‘the beauty of your walks, the fertility of your gardens and parks; the convenient and elegant accommodations of every description; and, above all, the extent and magnificence of your buildings, notwithstanding the very temperate labour, or rather employment, of the inhabitants’. In like manner the visitor described the rooms of the community as lofty with circular ceilings. In each [are] suspended two magnificent chandeliers of exquisitely cut glass, which in winter [are] lighted with gas, producing a splendid effect; the panels of the rooms [are] fawn colour with gold beading and the curtains of a rich crimson, tastefully disposed in festoons with a deep fringe. The roof [is] entirely oak, and carved in imitation of the richest Gothic fretwork. There are wines and liqueurs of various kinds . . . though they [are] but seldom asked for . . . the earthenware [is] brought to such perfection as to be superior to that of the Chinese . . . Between the windows [are] slabs of the finest marble, supported by bronze figures: upon these marbles [are] placed large vessels of gold, filled with spring water and at every corner of the room [is] a marble figure holding a Roman lamp suspended by a chain.30

So no physically and morally bracing asceticism here: no featherless mattresses and ice-cold plunges. One senses that the Ham Common Concordists might have felt a little out of place in such an establishment. What we have, in fact, is something that approximates more nearly to the elegance and luxury of an English country house than the austere Concordist regime of an English public school.31 We have, in effect, the celebration of material abundance but, crucially, it is a celebration of social not individual consumption. Private restraint lays the basis for social opulence. If there is a culture of contentment here it is a collectivist and not an individual one. By definition, therefore, it does not involve the consumption of unsocial objects. In this context too labour is not driven by the market-mediated im peratives unleashed by private consumers intent on the satisfaction of adventitious wants. Rather labour is determined and sanctioned by the community as a whole. It is a consequence of a communitarian estimation of the social utility of consumption against the social and individual disutility of the labour involved in furnishing what is to be consumed. Consumption ceases to be the expression of an individual’s purchasing 123


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power. It ceases to be a personal statement of need. It is stripped of its potential to divide. Rather, consumption of this kind expresses the social objectives and thence the social solidarity of the community. As envisaged here consumption also becomes an expression of its artistic, intellectual, architectural, in short its creative achievements. It becomes an articulation and a celebration of its values in both an economic and, more profoundly, in a moral sense. What the community produces to consume is what it deems to be of worth. Its consumption reflects its very raison d’être: of what it is and what it aspires to be. Now, returning to the earlier question of what, in its present predica ment, early nineteenth-century socialist political economy can offer the Left this vision is something which surely should have resonance. It is one that eschews the potentially alienating asceticism of the Concordists, but also the consumer-driven discourse and aspirations of post-Fordist socialists and New Labour. Its prescriptive, didactic and, on occasion, paternalistic character may of course grate on modern, liberal sensibilities. It certainly commits the modern heresy of abrogating, in significant measure, consumer sovereignty. It may imply the worthlessness of the aspirations of Essex man and, for that matter, Essex woman, and therefore be anathema to those whose primary objective it is to win elections rather than transform society. But it is, for all that, a vision that would lead its adherents to challenge a hegemonic culture of personal contentment that renders existing levels of direct personal and corporate taxation sacrosanct. It is a vision that calls into question the privileged role of the individual consumer and more generally the individual consumer as the rational arbiter of how a society’s resources can best be utilized. It forces us to think about the distinction between social and unsocial objects of desire. It raises the possibility of educating material desires not simply conniving at them. And it is a vision, in particular, that embraces the notion that social conÂ�sumption can have virtue, or virtues, to which private consumption cannot pretend. It also reminds us that the nature and magnitude of our social consumption says much about the society of which we are a part: its values, its priorities, its aspirations. But above all it is a vision that argues that consumption can be, indeed should be, rather more about the democratic identification and satisfaction of needs and rather less about their determinÂ�ation by the extent of individual purchasing power. To take such a view is, of course, to seek to reignite the kind of debate which characterized left political economy in the golden age of capitalism. 124


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Then, too, abundance was seen as a threat as much as an opportunity. In terms of the private consumption it permitted, it threatened the kind of social solidarity and political sensibilities which were seen as a prerequisite for the transformative historic role of a politically conscious working class. Herbert Marcuse and the Frankfurt School fulminated against the ener vating impact of an affluence advertised in a manner that engendered a whoring after false material gods. The creation of false needs eroded the capacity to think in transcendent terms. Per contra they ‘perpetuate[d] toil, aggressiveness, misery and injustice’ and their satisfaction led to ‘euphoria in unhappiness’, ‘repressive satisfaction’ and ‘modes of satisfaction that soothe and prolong . . . stupefaction’.32 Capitalism could now offer the nirvana of material excess and with that came a political quietism that took ‘care of the need for liberation by satisfying the needs which make servitude palatable and perhaps even unnoticeable’. For ‘if individuals are satisfied to the point of happiness with the goods and services handed down to them . . . why should they insist on different institutions for a different production of different goods?’33 In this regard Marcuse, like Owen and early nineteenthcentury Owenites, excoriated the material satisfactions that involved ‘freedom from using the brain’.34 More recently other writers have raised similar concerns to Owen and the Owenites in relation to private consumption. Specifically, Juliet Schor has highlighted the failure of many consumers to recognize the social and other diseconomies attached to the production of particular goods and services, also pointing to the impoverishment of self which can result from the relent less pursuit of material goods.35 And, in addressing these threats she, like the Owenites, has stressed the need for an education of desire: an education that conveys the values of simplicity, moderation and a recognition of the social, environmental and personal costs involved in catering for certain types of demand. There is, too, in her work a clear articulation of the threat which un trammelled personal consumption poses to public provision and, in political terms, to a willingness to pay the taxes which public provision requires. In consequence social consumption – ‘education, social services, public safety, recreation and culture are being squeezed.’36 Of course those who advance such ideas must run the risk of being termed intrusive, patronizing and elitist. This was a danger highlighted in particular in Crosland’s rejection of a Fabian socialism that elevated abstinence and a good filing system above the kind of consumption that mitigated or 125


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eliminated drudgery and opened up the possibility of liberty and gaiety in private life. Crossman might rail against the corrosive influence of a consumerdurable revolution that eroded the possibility of emulating the collective achievements, in terms of growth rates and technical successes, that distin guished the ascetic authoritarianism of the Soviet Union, but for Crosland there was no necessary incompatibility between hedonism and social dem ocracy. On the contrary, without some obeisance to the former the latter would assume that lacklustre and monotone character by which it was frequently characterized by its critics. So those who would make a bonfire of contemporary vanities, if they need no longer fear the fate of Savonarola, must none the less have the moral courage to confront the accusation of propounding a killjoy paternalism. In the aftermath of the 1930s and post-war austerity Crosland was right to trumpet the liberating potential of what a new material affluence could offer. But, for many in the industrialized West and East, we may now have passed well beyond this point to one where it is necessary to recognize what personal consumption has become and what it does. Like Godwin, Owen and the Owenites, we must understand the kind of damage it can inflict on ourselves, on others, on the environment. We must recognize that it has become for many less about satisfaction and more and more about power. That it all too often underpins the creation, or recre ation and bolstering of social stratification. That the act of consumption can involve the assertion or denial of certain ethical principles and thence express conflicting visions of what constitutes the good society. That its prioritization is one of the key drivers of the consensus on tax cuts and curbs on public expenditure. And it is in this last regard that Owen and the Owenites have surely something to teach, or perhaps more accurately, remind us of: that private restraint is a necessary precondition for social opulence. For some on the social democratic left such a statement may be unpalatable. But for others it will surely resonate with our present predicament, where soaring con sumption and attendant global warming threaten a mass extinction of species not seen since the Permian period 250 million years ago.

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Notes See, for example, Paul Hirst, Associative Democracy, New Forms of Economics and Social Governance (London 1994); John A. Mathews, Tools of Change, New Technology and the Democratisation of Work (Sydney, 1989); and Michael J. Piore and Charles F. Sabel, The Second Industrial Divide: Possibilities for Prosperity (New York, 1984). â•‡2 Piore and Sabel, Second Industrial Divide, p. 191. â•‡3 Bryn Jones, ‘Flexible automation and factory politics: the United Kingdom in comparative perspective’, in Paul Hirst and Jonathan Zeitlin (eds), Reversing Industrial Decline? Industrial Structure and Policy in Britain and her Competitors (Oxford, 1988), pp. 95–119: p. 99. â•‡4 John Saville, ‘Marxism Today: an anatomy’, Socialist Register, 26 (1990), 35–59: 36. â•‡5 For the ideological roots and a review of some of the literature on this see Noel Thompson, ‘From Hayek to New Labour: the changing ideology of public service provision’, in Pauline Dibben et al. (eds), Modernising Work in Public Services: Redefining Roles and Relationships in Britain’s Changing Workplace (Basingstoke, 2007), pp. 11–28. â•‡6 Catherine Needham, ‘A declining public sector ethos’, in Pauline Dibben et al. (eds), Modernising Work in Public Services: Redefining Roles and Relationships in Britain’s Changing Workplace (Basingstoke, 2007), pp. 75–88: p. 87. â•‡7 Co-operative Magazine, 2 October 1827, p. 436. â•‡8 Anon., An Essay in Answer to the Question (London, 1834), p. 12. â•‡9 Ibid., p. 43. 10 Ibid., p. 46; anon., Community of Icarie (London, 1847), p. 2; J. Hamilton, Owenism Rendered Consistent with Our Civil and Religious Institutions (London, 1825), p. 9. 11 Godwin, ‘Of riches and poverty’, in The Enquirer: Reflections on Education, Manners and Literature (London, 1797), pp. 177–8. 12 SWRO, 2, p. 111. 13 Ibid., pp. 241, 333, 363. 14 Ibid., pp. 240, 333. 15 Ibid., p. 140. 16 On these see, for example, W. H. Oliver, ‘The labour exchange phase of the co-operative movement’, Oxford Economic Papers, 10 (1958), 355–67. 17 Anon., A Prospectus for the Establishment of a Concordium (London, 1841), pp. 5, 7. 18 SWRO, 2, p. 22. 19 Ibid., p. 246. 20 Ibid, p. 248. 21 Ibid., p. 70. 22 Ibid., pp. 73, 234, 241, 364. â•‡1

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Ibid., p. 77. Ibid., pp. 70, 238. 25 Hamilton, Owenism Rendered Consistent, p. 25. 26 SWRO, 2, p. 234. 27 Ibid., p. 71. 28 S. Whitwell, Description of an Architectural Model for a Community (London, 1830), p. 16; John Thimbleby, Monadelphia: or, The Formation of a New System of Society (Barnet, 1832), pp. 20–1. 29 SWRO, 1, p. 375. 30 John Minter Morgan, The Revolt of the Bees, 5th edition (London, 1831), p. 397. One wonders if this is the first example of that socialist flirtation with the Gothic that is more fully developed later in the century in the work, amongst others, of William Morris. 31 Owen himself when in New Harmony was unhappy about ‘the distillation of whiskey, and all ardent spirits’. He wrote that it would ‘give me the greatest satisfaction to put an end to [their] manufacture’. But he realized that given existing habits and predilections this would be ‘impracticable for the present’ (SWRO, 1, pp. 46–7). 32 Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (London, 1972), p. 19. 33 Ibid., pp. 32, 52–3. 34 Ibid., p. 189. 35 Juliet Schor, The Overspent American: Upscaling, Downshifting and the New Consumer (New York, 1998), p. 109. 36 Juliet Schor, Do Americans Shop Too Much? (Boston, 2000), p. 12. 23 24

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7

Robert Owen as a British Politician and Parliamentarian1 Margaret Escott

In his incomplete and sometimes confused autobiography, Owen depicted his life as one of two distinct periods, separated by the death in 1820 of his friend and occasional patron Edward Augustus, Duke of Kent; and by his own unsuccessful candidature at the general election that year at Linlithgow Burghs, of which Lanark was a part.2 This observation and the importance it shows that Owen, as a ‘social father’ attached to aristo cratic patronage and success in mainstream electoral politics is significant and the inspiration for this chapter. When Ralph Miliband discussed Owen’s politics in 1954, he highlighted differences between his political views and social doctrines and their effect on his relationships with socialist groups and thought.3 Chushichi Tsuzuki, commemorating the bicentenary in 1971 of Owen’s birth, drew on Owen’s correspondence with the Lincolnshire landowner and City stockbroker Thomas Allsop to portray the evolution of his thoughts on revolution in 1848 and comment on his place in post-1832 British and Irish politics – including his candidature for Marylebone at the 1847 general election.4 This election features again in the present study, which, taking a pragmatic approach, reviews Owen’s involvement in British parliamentary and electoral politics as a lobbyist and a putative and bona fide parliamentary candidate. Owen’s publications were issued and reissued, often contemporÂ�aneously, as addresses, broad sheets, pamphlets, serial periodicals, tracts and books, whose availability in multiple formats overlapped according to the political dictates of the time; for Owen realized that the space and position a newspaper allocated to his writings and achievements mattered, and he was not from choice


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a socialist ideologue removed from the hustle and bustle of parliamentary life. Vic Gatrell, John Butt and later historians have suggested that Owen’s ceaseless campaign to urge his ideas on the governments and ruling classes of Britain and then the world commenced between 1812 and 1814.5 To assert himself and attract new backers during the acrimonious break-up of his 1810 business partnership, which threatened his liquidity and the sur vival of his methods, in 1812 he published A Statement Regarding the New Lanark Establishment anonymously in Edinburgh and chapters of A New View of Society in his own name in London, where in 1813 he befriended the philosophical anarchist and religious sceptic William Godwin, who later criticized his theories.6 A New View of Society, or Essays on the Principle of the Formation of the Human Character by a ‘Lanarkshire justice of the peace’ delineated Owen’s opinions on education, production, the workplace, local, national and international communities, and the innovative ‘monitoring’ systems tested in the workplace and schools at New Lanark, the pioneering textile mill complex founded by his father-in-law David Dale. As the senior managing partner, Owen arranged a buy-out there early in 1814 and made the Baptist physician and benefactor Joseph Fox, the 1844–5 mayor of London Michael Gibbs, the Quakers William Allen, Joseph Foster and John Walker, and the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham his business partners.7 Over the next decade his model industrial township attracted over 2,000 visitors annually, lending credibility to his management theories and proposals for infant education and the alleviation of poverty. Unlike most Scottish manu facturers, Owen dismissed Adam Smith’s theories concerning the division of labour. Yet he perceived the utility to manufacturing communities, as an ultimate boost to production, of the cradle-to-the-grave, life-cycle specific models of parochial management, promulgated since the late eighteenth century by Smith’s disciples – both noetics and others. His belief that a firm hand, philanthropy, ‘parish’ schools and provident parochial or community banks would obviate the need for poor relief was not unique; but his practical mode of publicizing it through New Lanark was unusual at the time in Britain and gave him occasional entry as a gentleman to the highest political circles in London, where Walker made his town house in Bedford Square available to him.8 Owen had signed loyalist addresses in 1792 and 1795 with other Man chester cotton spinners and manufacturers anxious to promote internal peace in order to safeguard wartime production.9 Manchester also gave him 130


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experience of local government, as a member of the board of health (1796–9), and of public speaking at the Literary and Philosophical Society, a middle-class club dominated by philanthropic manufacturers and professional men, including eminent Dissenters and future MPs. Similarly, he attended grand functions and petitioning meetings in Glasgow, where, commencing his career as a self publicist and parliamentary lobbyist in 1803, he voiced his fellow manufacturers’ opposition to the proposed increase in tariffs on raw cotton imports in Observations on the Cotton Trade and the Late Duties on the Importation of Cotton Wool, published to coincide with the deliberations of the Commons select committee on cotton weavers and their petitions.10 His friend and early biographer Lloyd Jones dismissed the tract, which was not well received, as one of the ‘experiments’ to which Owen was prone; and it did not yield the expected invitation to testify before the committee.11 The presence of his name in the records of the House of Lords from 1810 to 1812 bears little political significance; for it was in that House’s capacity as the appellate court of the Scottish court of session, in a case determined in 1812 involving the New Lanark Twist Company. Owen was a typical entrepreneur safeguarding his property, mineral, water and general access rights.12 When the Glasgow cotton manufacturers met in 1815 to petition for the renewal of bounties under the (expiring) Flax and Cotton Act, Owen claimed that over-rapid industrialization to generate quick profits had harmed society; most disagreed.13 Interrupting his revision of A New View of Society, he advertised and drafted Observations on the Effects of the Manufacturing System, published it with a dedication to the British legislature and distrib uted it to MPs. He also pressed for an extension of the elder Sir Robert Peel’s 1802 Act for the preservation of the health and morals of apprentices and suggested amendments which the MP introduced as a private member’s bill on 6 June 1815. Known as the ‘first ten hours bill’, its intention was to reduce the hours children worked in factories and provide for their edu cation, so extending current good practice. The bill was printed for con sultation, but killed by adjournment on 13 June, early in its committee stage, making way for government legislation (enacted on 11 July) continuing the flax and cotton bounties.14 The issue of child labour was shunted in 1816 to a select committee chaired by Peel, to which petitions, including New Lanark’s, were referred. Owen gathered evidence from factories countrywide and testified regularly before it. Witnesses hostile to state interference, for example Adam Bogle, a partner in the Glasgow manufactories of Sir Henry 131


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Monteith of Carstairs, countered and tried to undermine his evidence. The committee’s reports (there were two) were inconclusive, but both acknow ledged Owen’s personal achievements and contribution.15 His testimony was reprinted, referred and re-referred contemporaneously to several select committees that session and the next and those of 1818–19, 1830–3, 1842 and 1848 on factory legislation. It was quoted at length in the report of the 1833 factory commissioners. Exaggerating, Owen recalled in his auto biography that for two sessions he became a slave to ‘Peel’s bill’, which many manufacturers vehemently opposed as injurious to trade and the workers.16 His open letter to Lord Liverpool and petitions from New Lanark urged the government to sanction the 1818 bill, which was almost killed by adjourn ment on 28 April, and twice committed, reported and ingrossed before it left the House of Commons on the 30th. In the Lords, where additional evidence was sought, it languished and became a casualty on 10 June of the dissolution.17 The 1819 bill was introduced in the Upper House in February, considered by the Commons, 22–6 June, and received royal assent on 2 July. Owen, like the poet Coleridge, supported it in a new tract and petitioned personally and through New Lanark, urging its enactment intact. The measure had lost the support of Owen’s erstwhile ally the leading Scottish Whig, the eighth Earl of Lauderdale, a political turncoat, and his petition was probably not heeded.18 The Lords heard only millworkers as witnesses and made the measure specific to cotton. Previous reports and evidence (including Owen’s) were an afterthought requested by the Commons on 21 June.19 Worse, when following a fire at one of Owen’s mills Peel legislated to amend the July Act so that operatives similarly affected could work night shifts ‘till the accident was made good’, hard-earned concessions including fixed meal breaks were forfeited, making the measure enacted on 23 December 1819 generally retrogressive.20 From 1816, drawing support from MPs and peers familiar with New Lanark and his pioneering work on infant education, Owen promoted schemes ostensibly based on the New Lanark model to alleviate poverty and the post-war economic downturn. He wanted them sanctioned in legislaÂ�tion but received only philanthropic backing. Publicizing his opinions on manu facturing and child labour, in July 1816 he reissued his inaugural address at the opening of the New Lanark Institution to favourable press reviews from London, Derbyshire and the south-west – the most depressed textile districts. The Examiner complained that Owen alone puffed his unproved scheme.21 After some procrastination, a meeting at the London Tavern on 132


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29 July chaired by the Duke of York revived the Association for the Relief of the Manufacturing Poor (dormant since 1812). Its committee included Owen, and they were directed to investigate his plan.22 For Owen 1817 was a nadir made worse by his misplaced self-confidence, his overproductive pen and his decision to engage the leading extra-parliamentary demagogues of the day in debate. In February the Commons select committee on mendi cancy in the capital chaired by the future Speaker Charles Manners-Sutton, allowed him very little time to testify, stating that his plans were better suited to a committee on poverty. As he painfully recalled, he was summoned before that chaired by William Sturges Bourne, kept waiting for two days and sent away unheard. The committee (carefully selected on 21 February) knew that Owen had prepared and costed plans for his communities (the parallelograms) and sought their authorization for a pilot scheme.23 To vindi cate himself and counter this setback, which the failure of the Lords’ select committee on poverty to summon him soon compounded (they heard his rival manufacturers Kirkman Finlay and George Philips), Owen published his draft report to the Association for the Relief of the Manufacturing and Labouring Poor, with a covering letter to its committee. It was featured on 9 April by the Morning Chronicle and The Times, which deemed it as ‘irredu cible to practice at least on a scale commensurate with the public necessities’ as the agriculturist John Christian Curwen’s scheme. It dominated the back page of the tri-weekly Caledonian Mercury on the 14th. Synopses in pro vincial weeklies overdramatized it through paraphrasing and selective quotation.24 The Derby Mercury made a feature of ‘Mr Owen’s substitute for the poor laws’ and described his projected communities in detail; the Hull Packet entitled its report ‘The manufacturing and labouring poor’, placed it below an article on the ‘Manchester conspirators’ and highlighted Owen’s potentially ‘Ultra Tory’ statement: The use of mechanization must be greatly diminished; or, millions of human beings must be starved to permit its existence to the present extent; or advantageous occupation must be found for the poor and unemployed working classes, to whose labour mechanization must be rendered subservient, instead of being applied as at present to supersede it.25

Drawing on the Philanthropist, which its proprietor Allen directed to carry the report in full, the Leeds Mercury preferred serialization to premature abridgement, mentioned Owen’s other publications, and concluded its 133


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coverage on 24 May with a twelve-point summary endorsing his plan.26 The Political Examiner’s promised comparison of Curwen and Owen’s schemes barely commented on Owen’s, which was soon translated into French and ran to several editions. This, of course, failed to impress government ministers, who had no time for Owen’s suggestions that the lower orders could thus be re-moralized, poor rates reduced and pauperism gradually abolished; they privately dismissed him as a leveller and visionary.27 Owen defended himself in The Times, addressed a meeting crammed with his supporters at the George and Vulture on 24 July and ensured that its proceedings and his intended testimony to Sturges Bourne’s committee appeared in the London papers.28 An editorial in the Caledonian Mercury acknowledging his ‘good intentions’ commented caustically: Other reformers have generally confined their efforts to the political institutions of society; their schemes have generally been directed to the removal of such accidental blemishes as may have proceeded from the defective laws or policy of Governments. But Mr Owen goes to the root of the mischief at once; for he proposes to reform the human heart . . . [his plans] ought to be discouraged as speedily as possible, because their tendency is to divert our attention from what is useful and practical to what is idle and speculative, and therefore useless.29

Before launching his periodical A New State of Society (the plan dominated early issues), Owen bombarded the press with favourable reports and fool hardily promoted his ideas at the City of London Tavern on 14 and 21 August. Outdebated by the Radical Henry Hunt and the political economist Colonel Robert Torrens, he was caricatured and criticized by Whigs and Tories alike and denied an investigative committee by the City alderman and radical MP Thomas Waithman, who carried an amendment attributing distress to increased taxation and the progressive advance of poor rates. Goaded by an insinuation in the ultra-radical Black Dwarf of the 20th, that government assisted him as a means of controlling the poor and stifling reform and opposition measures, Owen had stated his opposition to reform in the short term and fear of revolution. He trusted neither the Liverpool ministry nor the Opposition to implement his plans, and dismissed the Whigs, ‘with the exception of Lord Granville and a few others’, as ‘mere theorists’ and ‘quite inadequate if in office’ to the task of ‘removing the distress of the country’.30 Were his sympathies Canningite?31 Clarifying, he portrayed class, religious and party divisions as contrary to the general good 134


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of his projected communities and provided a tabulated analysis of religious sects and current political parties – Violent Ministerialists, Moderate Minis terialists, Violent Whigs, Moderate Whigs, Violent Reformers, Moderate Reformers, Independent or of no party, placing himself with the last.32 His tenets were demonstrably different from those of the radical reformers of the Hampden Club and speakers at the 1817 and 1818 Palace Yard meetings, and so, but only hitherto, were his tactics. Hunt and William Cobbett, for example, repeatedly addressed government ministers, Parliament and George IV as regent, professing loyalty, and campaigned against Whig reformers at City and parliamentary elections as popular candidates with crowd appeal; Owen, ever affable, well-mannered and demonstrably successful and generous, was neither with nor against government, but for what he perceived as the good of all. However, he ignored the realities of political power and the weakness of his connections. For example, in May 1818 he wrote publicly to the archbishop of Canterbury who had commented favourably on his 1817 plans for the poor, suggesting that new churches scheduled for erection under the government finance scheme should be dual-purpose constructions and serve additionally as schools. It riled the archbishop and provoked the hostile outcry Owen’s Tory critics sought, shortly before the 1818 dis solution.33 Owen unveiled his Plan to Improve the Condition of the Lower Classes at a select meeting at Freemasons’ Hall on 26 June 1819. Another on 26 July, chaired by the Duke of Kent, controversially agreed to test it. It was also discussed at Thomas Coke of Norfolk’s recent ‘sheep shearing’, and the Whig MP for Southampton Sir William de Crespigny and the banker John Smith planned to request its referral to a select committee (29 June and 2 July).34 Kent cautioned that ‘ministers, having chosen to draw the sword’, Owen needed a better parliamentary champion than de Crespigny.35 None appeared. On 16 December 1819, during the emergency session after the Peterloo massacre, de Crespigny’s motion was rejected by 141 votes to 16. Government opposition was evident in the choice of the patronage secretary Stephen Lushington and the Home Office under-secretary Henry Clive as majority tellers. De Crespigny had phrased his motion to ‘catch’ supporters of any part of Owen’s plan and spoke of a possible legislative outcome that would increase local autonomy and reverse the elitism inherent in Sturges Bourne’s Select Vestries Act, namely: a bill to enable parishes, at a general (not a select) meeting, to make a permanent rate on the property, and to take up money on the security of such rate, for 135


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the purpose of raising an establishment on Mr Owen’s plan. To enable two, three, or four small parishes to unite for that purpose, each parish to have an interest in, and to derive a benefit from the establishment, in proÂ�portion to its amount of rate or contribution. The rates so mortgaged to be applied quarterly in the discharge of the interest, and the reduction of the principal money so borrowed, until the same be discharged. To enable lords of manors, and the parishioners, to sell and convey waste and commonable lands for such purpose with such other clauses as the wisdom of parliament may devise.

Lord Archibald Hamilton, and John Maxwell (the MPs for Lanarkshire and Renfrewshire) suggested an inquiry, and Waithman, John Smith, Daniel Whittle Harvey and David Ricardo supported them, but Ricardo also opined that Owen’s plans were not founded on just principles of political economy and calculated to produce infinite mischief to the community. Brougham agreed that Owen’s rejection of Malthusian population theories made the plan untenable and counterproductive; but the sections on child labour and education could be adapted to the general good and merited investigation. Responding (to Brougham), the chancellor of the exchequer Nicholas Vansittart praised Owen personally but reminded MPs of his visionary ideas and obnox ious opinions on religion. Neither William Wilberforce nor the Whig Lord Althorp would sanction its referral to a select committee for this reason, and because doing so indicated a kind of acceptance of the plan.36 Torrens, writing in the Edinburgh Review, was its fiercest critic; John Minter Morgan and Owen’s business partners its apologists.37 Owen toyed, albeit rarely convincingly, with the idea of becoming an MP. After a dissolution was mooted in 1816, he conducted himself like a candidate in waiting, with public demonstrations of largess and celebrations, and by permitting his carriage to be drawn by workmen between Lanark and New Lanark on his return from London.38 He had held aloof from proceedings in the volatile Linlithgow Burghs constituency at the general election of 1812, when, after tortuous negotiations, the Tory fourth Duke of Buccleuch secured the unopposed return of Sir John Buchanan Riddell of Riddell, Roxburghshire, as a supporter of the new Liverpool ministry.39 As a putative parliamentary candidate there in 1818, Owen issued a wideranging electioneering address to the inhabitants of New Lanark, but he failed to follow it up with one specific to the electorate of Linlithgow Burghs. The anticipated decline in the government’s Scottish electoral management, which might have assisted him, was not evident. Buccleuch and the second Viscount Melville instigated a whispering campaign against him as a hopeless 136


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‘visionary’, and councillors were warned to expect business losses if they were disobliged. Owen was in any case loath to stand before Lanark, which he believed he could influence, became the returning burgh at the next dis solution. Neither did he intend to grasp the opportunity to destabilize the constituency afforded by the movement for Scottish burgh reform. William Maxwell of Carriden, the Whig who did so in 1818, secured the Linlithgow delegate’s vote but still lost to Riddell by three to one.40 Owen’s principal writings had been recently revised and reprinted; and before the general election was over he set out with his family for the Continent, intending to gain credence for his views and support for the international limitation of the working day as a visiting lobbyist at the Aix-la-Chapelle peace conference. The Caledonian Mercury predicted failure.41 However, Owen disÂ�cussed his views at conference dinners, presented them to delegates as commemorative memorials ‘on behalf of the working classes’, and brought famous visitors and publicity to his mills.42 Longmans advertised five sets of Owen’s tracts, memorials, essays and addresses for sale in February 1819, including a reprint of John Bellers’s pamphlet.43 Riddell’s death in April 1819 caused a by-election in Linlithgow Burghs when Scottish dynastic politics were destabilized by the unexpected death of Buccleuch, leaving a minor as heir. Adam Hay, the leading contender, was absent abroad, the Tory Hugh Scott of Harden refused to stand, and Owen, the first to declare (24 April), had a slim chance of becoming an MP.44 Ignoring the realities of Scottish Burgh elections, his notices stated that he neither had nor expected political patronage and stood to promote his ‘plan to improve the condition of the lower classes’.45 The Buccleuch party fielded the Glasgow West India merchant Robert Nutter Campbell of Kailzie, Peebleshire, substituting Monteith (now provost of Glasgow) at a late stage in a vain bid to retain the seat, which the Whig John Pringle of Haining won through the Selkirk delegate’s casting vote. Owen desisted. His autobiography mentions near-certain success, and being detained in London by the factory bill; but he was also campaigning against a deflation ary return to gold payments, and shared the platform at the London Tavern on 18 May with Peel (who disagreed with his son on the issue), the Birming ham banker Thomas Attwood and others fearful of the discrepancy between increasing industrial output and the supply of specie.46 His address to the Linlithgow Burghs’ electorate at the 1820 general election prioritized his local connections but repeated his 1819 declaration on patronage and confirmed that he sought election ‘solely to promote great public measures 137


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for the permanent benefit of all classes, and especially of the unemployed and uneducated classes’ – then on the rampage in Glasgow.47 He corresponded regularly during his canvass with Melville and Robert Peel, hoping they would respect his political neutrality and his superior strength in Linlithgow and the returning burgh of Lanark; but the government did all it could to secure a majority against him at Lanark and the election for Monteith. The Tory Gilbert Chisholme of Chisholme retired. Monteith, now certain of the Peebles vote, outpolled Pringle (who then resigned) at the Selkirk delegate’s election.48 Public support for Owen in Lanark where, in an unprecedented move, he appointed an election committee and rallied his supporters at a grand dinner chaired by William Lockhart of Balronald on 3 March, failed to prevent the election of a delegate to vote for Monteith. On 31 March Owen won the hustings and Monteith the seat (by three votes to one). There were cries of ‘Open court’, ‘Freedom of election’ and ‘Adjourn to the church’, but all election formalities were conducted out of sight in the church elders’ seats. Only through Owen’s intervention would the crowd hear Monteith afterwards.49 Anticipating defeat, Owen had publicized his ‘successful’ theories in an exchange of addresses with the inhabitants of New Lanark, and, until eclipsed by Hunt’s trial for inciting the Peterloo riot, the Linlithgow Burghs election attracted national attention. In Beaumaris the future poor law com missioner Thomas Frankland Lewis, a member of the 1816 factory committee, and co-author with Sturges Bourne of the 1817–19 select committee reports on poverty, spent the entire hour between his nomination and election de nouncing Owen.50 Owen became convinced that ‘any government founded upon popular elections has within it the seeds of continued irritation, divisions and corruption’.51 Turning to his county, where local unrest and delinquency were endemic, Owen addressed the Lanarkshire magistrates, proposing ‘model’ com munities similar to New Lanark to alleviate poverty and unemployment. A county meeting on 9 April 1821 discussed his plan and agreed, by 23 votes to 7, to petition urging Parliament to consider it. Travelling south, Owen gathered signatures in the industrial conurbations for a similar petition, printed on 19 May in his new paper, The Economist. The Lords received the Lanarkshire petition on 30 May; the Commons, where de Crespigny urged investigation, on 4 June. Controversially, especially outside Scotland, the plan recommended ‘spade husbandry’ and a labour note system as well as the ‘parallelograms’.52 Its referral to a select committee was rejected outright when proposed by Maxwell on 26 June. Personal praise for Owen was not 138


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matched by support. Canning for example stated that he had attended the debate at Owen’s request and from personal regard for him, ‘but must decide against the motion’, as ‘general to the amalgamation of the population into masses, which was totally repugnant to the principles of human nature, and above all, to the genius of the people’; he deliberately did not rule out privately funded local trials.53 At Coke’s ‘sheep shearing’ afterwards Owen was reported to be in favour of parliamentary reform and lower taxes, like Coke and the Foxite Whigs, and against currency depreciation; his com munity ‘action points’ were mocked as conducive to ‘slave plantations’ with church, infirmary, lecture room, inn and library attached.54 The philan thropic community in Britain that Owen could draw on was small and sub scriptions for the Motherwell scheme proceeded slowly, although Archibald James Hamilton of Dalzell made land available at Orbiston. Owen turned for support to Ireland, the United States and the British and Foreign Philan thropic Society, inaugurated in June 1822, when dissatisfaction with the Liverpool ministry’s measures to combat agricultural distress was rife.55 The thirty-six-strong acting committee included fifteen MPs – mainly opposition Whigs and disgruntled Tory agriculturists.56 Owen was still ‘doing well in business’, Owenite propaganda was increasing with the establishment of local co-operative associations; but, as Robert Dale Owen observed, his father had ‘lost much ground in public estimation’.57 Over a five-month period during the winter of 1822–3, staying mainly with gentry who had visited New Lanark, Owen conducted a survey of poverty and employment opportunities in Ireland, which was then of great political and practical concern to the government.58 Agriculture was depressed, the textile industry highly localized, the demands of landlords in rent and the Church in tithes were high and the Irish Insurrection Act, suspension of habeas corpus, dispatch of troops and establishment of a special com mission had failed to stall the activities of agrarian secret societies in the West. Ireland had no poor laws, and legislation for appointing constables was hard to implement.59 Through the Hibernian Philanthropic Society chaired by Lord Cloncurry, Owen presented his findings and a remedial plan based on his Lanarkshire model at meetings in Dublin in April 1823. As in 1815– 16, he ensured that his visit and publications were so well publicized that it would be hard to deny him a hearing when the matter came before Parlia ment, although his investigation was one of several proposing solutions through agriculturally organized philanthropy.60 On 18 June 1823 the Commons received petitions from Middlesex and Surrey calling for ‘the 139


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cultivation of waste lands, the adoption of poor laws and the establishment of parochial schools under the management of accredited magistrates’ in Ireland, and from the Hibernian Philanthropic Society commending and urging ‘serious consideration’ of Owen’s plan as ‘particularly well adapted to the wants, circumstances and dispositions of the Irish people’.61 The Irish Secretary Henry Goulburn had ‘no objection’ to an investigative committee, ‘but he feared that if the committee were to employ themselves in con sidering the practicability of Mr Owen’s plan . . . they would find their time not very well bestowed’.62 After the House of Lords rejected resolutions for inquiry into the Irish administration (by 105–59 on 19 June),63 the MP for Limerick Thomas Spring Rice was granted and appointed on the 20th to chair a select committee on the employment of the poor in Ireland. They examined Owen on 25 and 26 June and 1 July, permitted him to lodge a copy of his report as evidence, and discussed it with other witnesses. Owen performed well when asked about the places he had visited, New Lanark and education, although Sir John Newport’s accounts of the school of industry in Wexford surprised him. He occasionally floundered when probed about religion and the relationship between individual and community, and was cornered by Ricardo, who demonstrated his inability to discuss the ideas of others and his poor grasp of political economy.64 The committee’s report praised and ostracized Owen, as Goulburn had intended.65 The editor of The Economist, George Mudie, blamed Owen for ignoring his advice that ‘it is by political economy that your system must triumph. The world must be con vinced that it will be productive of increased wealth, as well as of increased intelligence.’66 Widely criticized, and deprived of his closest ally by John Walker’s death (9 May 1824), Owen petitioned the Lords personally in a futile bid to persuade them to implement his Irish plan, and prepared to form a new partnership that would place his son in control at New Lanark. The New Harmony venture and his forays into American politics between 1825 and 1829 sidelined him.67 He did not engage in the debates on corn (corn law repeal), cash (the return to the gold standard and recent bank failures) and Catholic relief – the major issues when a dissolution was antici pated in the autumn of 1825 and called in 1826, but he addressed the problem of grain shortages and high prices in manufacturing districts in an Address to the Agriculturalists, Mechanics, and Manufacturers of Great Britain and Ireland in September 1827, when Lord Goderich’s new coalition ministry and party strength in Scotland were tested at the Lanarkshire by-election. Lanark was the polling town.68 140


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Owen had returned from his transatlantic ventures, when the Duke of Wellington’s ministry, weakened by the concession of Catholic relief in 1829, faced criticism for failing to acknowledge the severity of the latest economic downturn. Offering his experience and plans, Owen addressed the ‘British Nation’ and ‘Parliament’ and asked the ‘gentlemen who direct the London press’ and the ‘proprietors and editors of the press in Great Britain and Ireland’ to abandon party, publish only facts and allow him space for regular articles before the 1830 parliamentary session commenced. The reaction, where there was any, was hostile.69 Following the Commons’ rejection on 23 March, after a protracted debate, of Edward Davies Davenport’s state of the nation motion, he wrote again to London editors:70 Sir – As the members of both houses of parliament have not agreed respecting the cause of the existing distress, and as the majority of them state that there is no remedy for it except patience, and a partial diminution of taxation, which will make no real difference beyond a very slight temporary improvement in the condition of the working classes, I deem it a duty to all parties to attempt to explain the real cause of the evils under which the country suffers, and the only practical measures by which they can be removed, and their future recurrence prevented. For this purpose, it is my intention to hold a public meeting on Easter Monday, [12 April] at 12 o’clock in the City of London Tavern.71

Eschewing the debate on the relative merits as remedies of currency reform and reduced taxation, Owen attributed the economic downturn to ‘moral and physical’ causes and carried resolutions for parliamentary petitions com mending his ‘co-operative’ plan. Many preferred the petition Hunt carried afterwards for a radical parliamentary reform. The Morning Chronicle covered the meeting extensively. The Times allocated it a column and a half, and when Owen complained the editor replied: ‘We are sorry we cannot comply with Mr Owen’s request to publish the whole of his address . . . it would probably fill nearly ten of our columns. We have done Mr Owen justice by taking the tithe.’ Provincial papers noticed the meeting briefly with other radical ones.72 Parliament received petitions commending Owen’s plan from the newly established First London Co-operative Society and the Association for the Promotion of Knowledge, but those the London Tavern meeting entrusted to Brougham and the Marquis of Downshire remained unpresented – Owen blamed Brougham, a regular contributor to The Times.73 He also addressed each class separately, commending Outline for a Rational System 141


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of Society and the twelve fundamental laws of nature he had debated in Cincinnati in 1829 with Alexander Campbell.74 He petitioned personally for Jewish emancipation when Robert Grant, a member of the revived Whig Opposition, failed to carry it on 17 May, and acted in parallel if not always with the MPs Robert John Wilmot Horton and Edward Berkeley Portman on emigration.75 Minter Morgan reprimanded him for sharing a public platform with them and joining the National Colonization Society’s steering committee: I hope you intend publicly to withdraw your name from the Committee advertised in the Times of this morning, or to avow your determination of recommending Emigration solely upon a principle of Co-operation. To encourage men endowed with superior qualities to go where there was a demand for the labour – may be very well for such characters as Mr Wilmot Horton, who although benevolent, is so contracted in his views, but when I see your name in such a post you appear to have entered into a narrow circle & to be quite out of your sphere.76

Owen issued no addresses at the general election following George IV’s death in June 1830. James Silk Buckingham, Olive Serres and others who contacted him were during the campaign themselves political underdogs, and Maxwell, the defeated candidate in Lanarkshire.77 Afterwards, he lectured in London on religion and the Rational System of Society. The Times had refused it ‘free space’, and commented: Owen’s ‘work should be circulated, but he has other means of doing so’. Family bereavements and the severance of his connections with New Lanark increased his dependence on old friends and itinerant lecturing, while the demonstrable failure of his communities and his continued mistrust of Malthusian arguments and parliamentary reform harmed him. On 2 July 1831, even his fellow shareholders of University College (London) shouted him down.78 Though inactive at the snap general election on reform, he chaired a mass-gathering of forty-seven co-operative societies shortly afterwards at a popular electioneering venue – the Spread Eagle Inn, Hanging Ditch.79 Proceeding through associations, he addressed King William IV through The Times before founding one ‘to remove the causes of ignorance and poverty’ in December 1831, which he directed ingloriously; the benevolent union of trades that he established the following month became the Equitable Labour Exchange.80 Commenting, Henry Hetherington, the editor of the Poor Man’s Guardian criticized his 142


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strange perversity of mind in expecting to realise his political millennium before working men are placed on an equal footing with the other classes of the community with regard to political rights . . . he entertains an absurd idea, that with the aid of a plundering aristocracy he shall be able to establish co-operative principles, notwithstanding the unjust and iniquitous laws, which at present exist in this country.81 In his case, experience is unavailing, for after more than twenty years’ exertion, he is not a jot nearer the attainment of his object. His mental vision must have some peculiar defect, or he would perceive that he was ‘dipping water into empty wells, and growing old in drawing nothing up’.82

In April 1832 The Times compared the ‘amiable Mr Owen’s visionary ideas’ and social festivals with the French Saint-Simonians’.83 Ironically, his Gray’s Inn Road Institution became a Middlesex polling station under the 1832 Reform Act. As the nominal head of several working-class movements, Owen launched a new paper, the Crisis, before the general election in December 1832 and republished his report to the county of Lanark.84 In Birmingham, where he lectured, the leader of the Political Union, Thomas Attwood, permitted him to address a crowd of 10,000, ostensibly to secure Owenite support at the hustings for his own candidature.85 Owen, then under pressure from William Pare and Bronterre O’Brien to model the Gray’s Inn Road Institution on the Political Union, informed Allsop: to my great surprise Mr Attwood introduced me formally to the meeting, Council & Members, in the loyal terms of approbation both of myself and plans. All our friends as well as myself were confounded with the unqualified terms of approbation which he used. Here I am just now called to attend another hustings & have not a moment to spare.86

His seven-point manifesto requested voters to set aside party and personal considerations and elect the candidates most likely to support measures ‘to terminate class legislation and obtain the rights of humanity for yourselves and your children’: a graduated property tax replacing all other taxes; free trade; national education and employment systems; freedom of speech (and publication); and complete religious freedom.87 Nationally the principal issues were slavery, the trading monopolies of the Bank and the East India Company, the extension of reform to municipalities and other institutions. A hypothetical statement that under Owen ‘Great Britain would exert all 143


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her power to and energies to promote the improvement and happiness of all nations,’ was far removed from this.88 He still engaged meaningfully with mainstream politicians on education, supported the 1831–3 campaigns to abolish stamp duty on newsprint and to prevent the extension of the poor laws to Ireland.89 He was at the heart of John Fielden and Richard Oastler’s campaigns for factory reform, mustering support (petitions) at public meetings in the North and taking a strategic role as a member of the committee urging an eight-hour day.90 Experience and consistency remained the main stays of his addresses to Parliament and the press.91 Ostracized further from parliamentary circles following the spectacular rise and collapse in 1834 of the Grand National Consolidated Trade Union, which he nominally headed, he failed to secure a parliamentary inquiry on the latter or clemency for the Tolpuddle Martyrs.92 Excluding a suggestion that he might stand ‘next time’, his 1835 election manifesto had little to offer.93 Rational Society branches and halls of science established in the wake of the New Moral World (1834– 45) flourished in the industrial Midlands and North, with or as an alternative to Chartism.94 Reviewing the parties before the 1837 general election the London Dispatch discussed the physically strong, but morally weak social reformers: This party is divided into two great classes; the one adhering to the opinions of Robert Owen, and looking upon a community of property as the only honest means of disposing of the nation’s capital; the other being satisfied to have the future law of property settled by the deliberations of delegates, chosen by universal suffrage from the whole nation. Both are agreed than no reform is worth having, that does not push forward the great principle, that every man has a right to food before anyone should enjoy luxury. This party has not a single representative in either House of parliament. Its opinions are called anarchical, when known by the aristocrats; but the fact is, that being entertained only by millions of working men, few of the parliamentary oli garchs are aware of the existence of these ideas, much less of the immense progress they have made.95

Parliament received petitions from several northern towns in 1838 request ing that Owen be heard at the Bar of the House ‘to teach the legislature’ the benefits of his system; a year later Birmingham, Bristol, Manchester and Wotton-under-Edge urged inquiry.96 In January 1840, in the aftermath of Chartist riots, amid extra-parliamentary pressure for reform and increasing fears and petitions attacking the irreligion of socialism, Henry Phillpotts, 144


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the High Tory bishop of Exeter, who as dean of Durham had been no stranger to electioneering and parliamentary censure, whipped up the furore festering in the press against socialism as a blasphemous doctrine. He attacked the Whig premier, Lord Melbourne, for permitting Owen to be presented to Queen Victoria the previous July, and for failing to prosecute his followers (the rational religionists) under the blasphemy laws. An avalanche of petitions and addresses critical of Owen and socialism, mocked as ‘blowenism’, ensued, including a 4,000-signature Birmingham petition presented by Phillpotts. Owen submitted a clarifying statement to the home secretary, Lord Normanby, and Brougham introduced his 18,644-signature personal petition for inquiry in the House of Lords on 27 January, but doubted if ‘in point of form’ it should be received.97 It was appended to A New Manifesto of Robert Owen in reply to the Bishop of Exeter (1840, 1841). As in 1837–8, Owen fostered petitions critical of the 1834 poor law in 1840–1, but newspapers in Bristol, Manchester and Wolverhampton remained hostile. His Address to the Electors of Great Britain and Ireland at the 1841 general election was in essence that of 1832, issued from the headquarters of his new organization, the Home Colonization Office.98 Afterwards, the New Moral World printed a weekly letter to Peel as prime minister; and the Chartist Northern Star criticized the Owenite community at Queenwood.99 Owen had petitioned personally in 1840 for clemency for John Frost and the Newport rioters.100 Following the failure of the 1842 Chartist petition, a rapprochement was discussed in London ‘to avert the ruin of the middle and working classes’ where Owen ites welcomed Feargus O’Connor’s plan for home colonization and moralforce Chartists acknowledged some of Owen’s principles. From April 1842 Owen added a ‘stable currency’ and ‘national service’ (military training for males) to his manifesto. His critics claimed that it included open marriage and divorce laws.101 The Chartists alone, among social reformers, had formal strategies in place to field candidates at parliamentary elections, although they lacked a national registration and election committee until after their 1846 convention.102 Mainly, but not exclusively from the United States, in 1844–7, where he failed to impose his constitution on New York, or to per suade Peel’s government to grant him diplomatic status during negotiations concerning the Oregon Treaty, Owen watched Peel’s ministry break apart over the concession of corn law repeal (which he welcomed) and saw Queen wood fail under the direction of William Pare.103 He retained a ‘great interest in all my old friends & in all that is going on in what is here called the “Old Country”’, and told Allsop how he hankered for news. 145


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I am obliged to Mr O’Connor for sending the Star to me, but I have never received one & it has been a great disappointment to me, for I obtained valued news in that paper which I can obtain in no other. The Inquirer is sent to me most regularly, but I perceive they put a penny stamp upon each, addressed for me, as your letter is, at Mr Deitz, 13 John St Broadway New York & it has not missed one week.104

Owen gained nothing from interviews he requested with the secretary of the Board of Trade John Macgreggor, the foreign secretary Lord Aberdeen, and future Irish lord lieutenant the Earl of Clarendon during his visit to London in the summer of 1846, yet he considered it appropriate to add their names to his list of correspondents and friends.105 The successful revival of the ten-hour-day campaign that winter put his name in the public eye. In January 1847 Pare suggested they should relaunch their Irish campaign, as Daniel O’Connell’s power was weaker and Lord John Russell’s new ministry intended acting on Ireland.106 Owen ‘left America’ in a blaze of transatlantic publicity in May 1847 to do so.107 On 14 July the Chartists’ MP Thomas Slingsby Duncombe, the president of their National Central Registration and Election Committee, presented Owen’s personal petition ‘praying for a commission to investigate his plans for employing the poor of Ireland’. On 17 July Brougham, the presenter on the 16th of Owen’s petition on behalf of the London co-operatives, introduced it in the Lords with his usual eulogy to Owen as the originator of infant schools.108 Owen may have contemplated standing for Parliament during his 1846 visit (the date of a printed address to the electors of Marylebone); but in 1847 he appeared to be a late starter, unsanctioned by the metropolitan Chartist committee at the Literary Institute in John Street, Tottenham Court Road on 13 July. They had asked the National Charter Association to back the sitting Liberal Benjamin Hall and Daniel Whittle Harvey. Harvey, however, retired on the 23rd, after a constituency ballot favoured Sir Dudley Coutts Stuart as the second Liberal. Owen’s manifesto, the nine-point one of 1842, ignored the usual Chartist demands on suffrage.109 Marylebone was a large and complex metropolitan constituency returning two Mps, and charged £170, not the usual £135, for use of the hustings. Owen’s impact on the election is unclear. Unlike the other candidates, he had played no part in the round of highly publicized party caucuses.110 His proposer Lloyd Jones eulogized his early achievements and influence on recent factory legislation, but Owen’s speech at the nomination meeting was quickly curtailed, thwarting his objective. 146


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Despite reports to the contrary, based on the returning officer David Salamons’s deliberate mistake, Owen won the popular vote, ‘the show of hands’; but he polled no more than three votes and finished last in fifth place behind two Liberals, the Tory Protectionist and the unofficial Liberal candidate, Shee.111At the declaration, Owen mentioned ‘promises’ received for ‘next time’, the birthrights of food and shelter; a graduated property tax that he said would save the country £3,000,000 annually; and military citizenship train ing on the Swiss model to save £10,000,000–£12,000,000. After the election, he went to Ireland and was appointed to the Irish Council at their pre-session meeting at the Rotunda in November.112 He petitioned Parliament praying to be examined on the currency, education and property distribution, before going to Paris to report on the 1848 revolution, and, like Duncombe, welcomed the peaceful outcome of the Chartist march at Kennington Common.113 Owen was next mooted as a candidate following the death in July 1852 of the Tory MP for Oldham John Duncuft, a supporter of Lord Derby’s ministry. Notices were issued in his name, and he probably went to canvass, but was persuaded to desist. He still issued addresses and sent petitions to Brougham requesting to share his experience and social plans with Parliament, but at this stage in his life Owen was writing his memoirs at the farmhouse he had taken near Sevenoaks and ‘deep in Philosophy from morning to night’.114 A Chartist paper printed his 1852 canvass notice, possibly as a spoof; it was not partisan, but a twelve-point list of claims to the electors’ suffrage detailing his personal achievements. It concluded: ‘It is true that I am old; but I am not yet past good and substantial public service. If, however, you have a younger candidate that can effect more for the good of the people – elect him by all means.’115 Rarely heeded in Parliament, other than as a nuisance, after 1823 (his last select committee appearance) Owen was prey to his habitual tendencies to pre-empt success and anticipate the acquiescence of others in his views. He duped himself that the high-born acquaintances whose names are peppered throughout his autobiography were his friends, and that the government would soon sanction the gradual implementation of his socioeconomic plans. Possibly hampered by reduced Commons publicity for petitions after 1832, his refusal to create a fixed base in municipal govern ment was telling. He may have missed an outside chance of becoming an MP in 1819–20, and decided against buying his way into Parliament like most of the hundred or so manufacturers in the unreformed House of Commons, but he remained a major public figure, ‘always a gentle bore in 147


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regard to his dogmas and his expectations; always palpably right in his descriptions of human misery’.116

Notes Discussions with Dr David Fisher and Dr Terry Jenkins of the History of Parliament and Professor Malcolm Chase of the University of Leeds are gratefully acknowledged; likewise the assistance of staff at the National Library of Wales and delegates at the 2008 Gregynog conference. â•‡2 SWRO, 4, pp. 291–2. The right to elect representatives of royal burghs, for example Linlithgow, Peebles, Selkirk and Lanark, was restricted to the members of their annually elected town councils. Upon receipt of the sheriff’s precept, each council had to be convened to set a date for and to hold an election to select its delegate (commissioner) to vote, as directed, at the parliamentary election in the returning burgh – the duty rotated among the towns of a district. In the event of a tie, the delegate of the returning burgh had a casting vote. â•‡3 Ralph Miliband, ‘The politics of Robert Owen’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 15 (1954), 233–45. â•‡4 Chushichi Tsuzuki, ‘Robert Owen and revolutionary politics’, in Sidney Pollard and John Salt (eds), Robert Owen: Prophet of the Poor (London, 1971), pp. 13–38. â•‡5 OS, 1, p. 2; A New View of Society and Report to the County of Lanark, ed. V. A. C. Gatrell (Harmondsworth, 1971), pp. 9, 44; Life of Robert Owen, ed. John Butt (London, 1971), p. xxiii. â•‡6 NAS GD64/1/247; BL Ashley MSS A4133, John Chalk Claris (pseudonym Arthur Brooke) to J. H. Leigh Hunt, 29 July 1824. â•‡7 MC, 2 April 1813. â•‡8 E. Wilson, Observations on the State of the Poor (Reading, 1795); Peter Mandler, ‘Tories and paupers: Christian political economy and the making of the new Poor Law’, Historical Journal, 33 (1990), 81–103. On Owen’s claim that he was influenced by Quaker educationalist John Bellers’s 1696 proposals for a college of industry see Ian Donnachie, Robert Owen: Social Visionary (Edinburgh, 2005), p. 137. â•‡9 See Michael S. Smith, ‘Anti-radicalism and popular politics in an age of revolution’, in Clyve Jones, Philip Salmon and Richard W. Davis (eds), Partisan Politics, Principle and Reform in Parliament and the Constituencies, 1689–1880: Essays in Memory of John A. Phillips (Edinburgh, 2005), pp. 71–92; and Joanna Innes, ‘Representative histories: recent studies of popular politics and political culture in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England’, Journal of Historical Sociology, 4 (1991), 182–211. 10 CM, 30 March, 6 April 1812, 17 February 1814; SWRO, 1, pp. 7–10. 11 I. R. Christie, British ‘Non-elite’ MPs 1715–1820 (Oxford, 1995); PP VIII (1802–3), p. 890; Lloyd Jones, Life, Times and Labours of Robert Owen (London and New York, 1890), 1, p. 196. â•‡1

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Robert Owen as Politician and Parliamentarian 12 13

14 15

16

17

18 19

20

21

22 23

24

25

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27 28 29

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LJ, XLVII, 436, 486, XLVIII, 549, 555. Glasgow Chronicle, 27 January 1815; Glasgow Courier, 31 January 1815; SWRO, 1, pp. 101–7; also Owen’s letter to The Times, 5 April 1844. CJ, LXX, 361, 384, 470; MC, 5, 8 August 1815; SWRO, 1, pp. 110–19. MC, 25 April 1816; PP III (1816), 254–62, 270–4, 300, 329, 347 and passim; CJ, LXXI, 265, 300, 301, 307, 308, 314, 405, 408, 483. Report of the Committee on Working Class Education in the Metropolis (1816); PP IV (1816), pp. 1–113, 238–42; XX (1833), 18, 78, 122–3, 192; CJ, LXXI, 412; LXXII, 95, 104; LXXIII. 312; B. Leigh Hutchins and A. Harrison, A History of Factory Legislation (London, 1966), p. 22; SWRO, 4, p. 170. The Examiner, 20 March 1818; CJ, LXXIII, 71, 202–7, 212, 213, 217, 220, 289, 304; LJ, LI. 634, 638, 642, 752, 760–1; Hutchins and Harrison, History of Factory Legislation, pp. 22–6. SWRO, 1, pp. 271–7. Hutchins and Harrison, History of Factory Legislation, pp. 27–9; LJ, LII, 84, 90, 554, 566, 697; CJ, LXXIV, 554, 560, 575–6, 608. CM, 29 November, 6 December 1819; PD, XLI, 815–16; CJ, XXV, 31, 36, 54, 57, 60, 63, 74, 77; LJ, LII, 966. SWRO, 1, pp. 120–42; MC, 25, 26, 27 July, 23 September; Derby Mercury, 1 August 1816; Examiner, 4 August, 1 September 1816, 12 January 1817; Trewman’s Exeter Flying Post, 3 October 1816. MC, 1 August 1816. SWRO, 4, pp. 186–7; Gatrell, ‘Introduction’, to Owen, A New View of Society, p. 55; CJ, LXXII, p. 95; SWRO, 1, pp. xxx–xxxi. For example Ipswich Journal, 12 April 1817; Hampshire Telegraph, 14 April 1817; Exeter Flying Post, 17 April 1817. Derby Mercury, 17 April 1817; Hull Packet, 22 April 1817. For a useful discussion of Ultra-Tory attitudes to mechanization, see David Eastwood, ‘Robert Southey and the intellectual origins of Romantic conservatism’, English Historical Review, 104 (1989), 308–31. Donnachie, Robert Owen: Social Visionary, p. 135; Leeds Mercury, 26 April, 3, 10, 17, 24 May 1817. Political Examiner, 27 April, 18 May 1817. Times, 29 May, 25 July 1817; SWRO, 1, pp. 156–82. CM, 18 August 1817. The reactions of The Times and the Morning Post of 9 August are reprinted in SWRO, 1, p. 182. Viscount Granville (1773–1846). Sun, 7 August 1817; Times, 15, 19, 22 August 1817; CM, 25 August 1817; SWRO, 1, pp. 183–210; John Belchem, ‘Orator’ Hunt: Henry Hunt and English Working-Class Radicalism (Oxford, 1985), p. 77. SWRO, 1, pp. 199–236. Ibid., pp. 245–9; CM, 14 May 1818. 149


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35 36

37 38

39 40

41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48

49 50

51 52

53

54

55

56

Times, 28 June, 27 July 1819; Gentleman’s Magazine (1819), (i), pp. 438–40; CM, 3, 15, 19, 31 July 1819. The Commons motion was postponed pending the decision of the committee chaired by Kent. Lloyd Jones, Life, 1, pp. 197–202. CJ, LXXV, 66; PD XLI, cc. 1189–1217; Times, 17 December 1819; CM, 20 December 1819. Gentleman’s Magazine (1819), (ii), pp. 598–9; (1820), (ii), p. 59. CM, 12, 19 October 1816; 11 October 1817; 25 July 1818; MC, 19, 26 October 1816; 10, 24 October 1817. The Commons 1790–1820, Linlithgow Burghs. Ronald M. Sunter, Patronage and Politics in Scotland, 1808–1832 (Edinburgh, 2003), pp. 16–98. CM, 12 October 1818. SWRO, 1, pp. 252–67. CM, 22 February 1819. SWRO, 1, pp. 278–96. CM, 1 May 1819; MC, 3 May 1819. SWRO, 4, p. 286; Times, 19 May 1819; CM, 24 May 1819. Lloyd Jones, Life, 1, p. 218. NAS GD51/1/198/15/29; 198/27/11; 198/37/9; National Library of Scotland MSS 11, f. 14; CM, 12 February, 18, 25 March, 6 April 1820. CM, 11, 25 March, 3, 13 April 1820; Glasgow Herald, 20, 27 March 1820. Bangor University Department of Archives, Beaumaris MSS iv. 319; v. 58; North Wales Gazette, 16 March 1820; Glasgow Chronicle, 18 March 1820. SWRO, 2, p. 121. Gentleman’s Magazine (1821), (i), p. 79; (ii), p. 464; J. F. C. Harrison, Robert Owen and the Owenites in Britain and America (London, 1969), pp. 25–34; Donnachie, Robert Owen: Social Visionary, pp. 227–9. SWRO, 1, pp. 287–332; Glasgow Herald, 13 April 1821; Harrison, Robert Owen, pp. 22, 26; LJ, LIII, 449; CJ, LXXVI, 411, 474; PD (series 2), V, cc. 1316–25. SWRO, 1, pp. 333–9; SWRO, 4, pp. 274–8; R. M. Bacon, Report of Holkham Sheep-Shearing (Norwich, 1821); Times, 10, 14 July 1821; A. W. Stirling, Thomas Coke and his Friends (London, 1912), pp. 434–52. Gentleman’s Magazine (1821), (i), p. 79; (ii), p. 464; Harrison, Robert Owen, pp. 25–34; Donnachie, Robert Owen: Social Visionary, pp. 227–9. Proceedings of the First General Meeting of the British and Foreign Philanthropic Society for the Permanent Relief of the Labouring Classes (London, 1822), p. vii and passim; Lloyd Jones, Life of Owen, 1, pp. 198–200. The MPs were Sir Thomas Mostyn, Sir Edward O’Brien, Sir William de Crespigny, Sir Thomas Lethbridge, Sir James Graham, Colonel Thomas Wood, J[ames] Ingram Lockhart, Thomas Spring Rice, Sir Edward Price Lloyd, John Maxwell, jun., Colonel John Baillie, Colonel William Lewis Hughes, William Williams, Hudson Gurney and George Smith. 150


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Robert Dale Owen, Threading My Way: Twenty-Seven Years of Autobiography (London, 1874), pp. 191, 194. He observed that his father had been ‘misled by prosperity, by benevolent enthusiasm; and there had been lacking, as a steadying influence, thorough culture in youth’ and ‘critical scholarship’. 58 Donnachie, Robert Owen: Social Visionary, p. 192. 59 Virginia Crossman, ‘Emergency legislation and agrarian disorder in Ireland, 1821–41’, Irish Historical Studies, 24 (1991), 309–23. 60 Harrison, Robert Owen, p. 30; SWRO, 1, pp. 333–53; Dublin Journal, 9 May 1823; Reports of the Proceedings at the Several Public Meetings Held in Dublin’ (Dublin, 1823). 61 CJ, LXVIII, 403–4; PD (series 2), IX, cc. 1033–72. 62 PD (series 2), IX, c. 1022. 63 Ibid, cc. 1033–71. 64 CJ, LXXVIII. 413; PP, III (1823), pp. 74–201, especially, pp. 74–83, 88, 90, 92, 99, 101–3. 65 PP, III (1823), pp. 9–10. 66 NLW MS 14352C, Mudie to Owen, 3 January 1823, 25, 29 August 1848. 67 LJ, LVI, 271. 68 BL Lansdowne MSS, Goderich to Lansdowne, 6, 13 September, 27 October 1827; Glasgow Herald, 8, 26 October 1827. 69 Times, 5, 13, 19 January, 4 February 1830; SWRO, 2, pp. 125–37. 70 A committee on the state of the nation was ‘an ad hoc institution periodically created by the initiative of opposition MPs on the pretext that government policy had produced exceptional discontent or disaster’ (P. D. G. Thomas, The House of Commons in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1971), p. 269). The Wellington ministry had deliberately brought forward their 1830 budget and proposed certain tax reductions which the Opposition (Whigs, Ultras and Radicals) had called for before the motion was debated. 71 Times, 30 March 1830; Examiner, 11 April 1830. 72 MC, 13 April 1830; Times, 13, 19 April 1830; Liverpool Mercury, 16 April 1830; Newcastle Chronicle, 16 April 1830; Ipswich Journal, 17 April 1830; Examiner, 18 April 1830; Bristol Mercury, 20 April 1830; Hull Packet, 20 April 1830. 73 Times, 17, 18, 31 May 1830; LJ, LX, 429; CJ, LXXV, 475. 74 SWRO, 2, pp. 123–211; Belchem, Orator Hunt, pp. 202–3, 209; Examiner, 25 April 1830; Times, 20 May 1830. 75 CJ, LXXXV. 432; Owen proposed a National Emigration Society to alleviate poverty through assisted emigration to Canada, the Cape and Australia. 76 OS, 9, p. 22; Times, 18 June 1830. 77 OS, 9, pp. 23–50. 78 Times, 11 September 1830, 1 February 1831. 79 Manchester Times, 28 May, 4 June 1831; Times, 4, 5 July 1831. 80 Times 12, 13, 20, 27 December 1831, 4 January, 4 April, 9, 20, 22 October, 5 November 1832. 57

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Poor legal protection for collective fund-holding. PMG, 14 January 1832. â•‡83 Times, 4 April 1832; Preston Chronicle, 5 April 1832. â•‡84 Times, 5 November 1832. â•‡85 On the importance of mass support at electioneering and nomination meetings see Jeremy C. Mitchell, The Organization of Opinion: Open Voting in England, 1832–1868 (Basingstoke, 2008), and Malcolm Chase, ‘ “Labour’s Candidates”: Chartist challenges at the parliamentary polls, 1832–1860’, Labour History Review, 73 (2009), 64–89. â•‡86 NLW MS 14352C, Bronterre O’Brien to Owen, 27 May 1832; BL Add.46344, f. 1. â•‡87 SWRO, 2, pp. 222–3. â•‡88 Ibid. p. 216. â•‡89 Times, 3 October 1831; Aberdeen Journal, 20 October 1831. â•‡90 BL Add. 46344, f. 3; Hutchins and Harrison, History of Factory Legislation, pp. 56–7. â•‡91 Times, 30 January 1834. â•‡92 UCL Brougham MSS, Owen to Brougham, 24 February, [April], 18 May, 19 July 1834; LJ, LXVI, 988; Times, 15 August 1834. â•‡93 UCL Brougham MSS, Owen to Brougham, 19 July 1834, 29 June 1835; LJ, LXVI, 988; Times, 15 August 1834; PMG, 3 January 1835. â•‡94 UCL Brougham MSS, Owen to Brougham, 8, 29 June 1835. â•‡95 London Dispatch, 5 February 1837. â•‡96 Times, 31 July 1838, 23 July 1839; PP LIV (i), (1854–5), p. 728. â•‡97 Times, 25, 28 January, 13 February 1840; Age, 2 February 1840; John Bull, 16 February 1840; Satirist, 8 March 1840; PP LIV(i) (1854–5), pp. 728, 906–7; Lord Melbourne’s Papers, ed. Ll. C. Sanders (London, 1889), p. 409. Melbourne claimed he had acted ‘unguardedly, and impudently without much thinking and in order to get rid of him [Owen] said yes’. â•‡98 PP LIV (i) (1854–5), p. 728; NS, 3 July 1841. â•‡99 NS, 16 October 1841; Satirist, 6 March, 17 April 1842. 100 NLW MS 14352C, Normanby to Owen, 1 February 1840. 101 NMW, 23 April 1842; Examiner, 4 June 1842; NS, 11 June, 22 July, 10 October 1842; Manchester Times, 28 October 1843. 102 NS, 8 August 1846; Chase, ‘“Labour’s Candidates”’, 64. 103 OS, 10, pp. 110, 132–9; BL Add.46344, ff. 14–23. 104 BL Add. 46344, ff. 9, 14. 105 Ibid. ff. 23–9. 106 NS, 19 December 1846, 20 March 1847; Times, 18 January 1847; OS, 10, pp. 122–3. 107 NS, 26 June 1847; Lloyd’s Weekly London News, 27 June 1847. 108 Daily News, 15 July 1847; MC, 17 July 1847; Liverpool Mercury, 17 July 1847. â•‡81 â•‡82

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NS, 10, 24 July 1847; Lloyd’s Weekly News, 15 July 1847; Times, 30 July 1847. Chartist support for a land plan, a voluntary system of education (with Dis establishÂ�ment), the extension of direct taxation and free trade, and finance for defensive wars only, accorded with Owen’s manifesto. 110 Putative candidates included John Bagshaw (Liberal) selected to replace Sir Charles Napier; Lord Dudley Coutts Stuart (Liberal) for whom Bagshaw made way; Daniel Whittle Harvey (Liberal reformer) disqualified from standing unless he resigned as a metropolitan police commissioner; David Salamons, disqualified as returning officer; the author Edward Lytton Bulwer; Serjeant Shee (Liberal); John Williams (Liberal), chairman of Harvey’s committee; Benjamin Hall (Liberal), who successfully resisted de-selection; Sir James Hamilton (Protectionist). See Daily News, 5, 8, 16, 18, 25 June 1847; Manchester Times, 5 June 1847; MC, 7, 21 June, 14, 28 July 1847; Times, 16, 31 July 1847; NS, 24 July 1847. 111 MC, 2 August 1847; Times, 2 August 1847. 112 BL Add. 46344, ff. 33, 35; Times, 8 November 1847. 113 PP LIV (i) (1854–5), p. 702; Times, 12, 15 February, 4 March 1848; BL Add.46344, ff. 39–88; Brougham MSS, Owen to Brougham, 30 June, 21 August 1848. 114 BL Add. 46344, ff. 193, 194; Times, 22 September 1852; Era, 8 December 1852. 115 Reynolds’ Newspaper, 22 August 1852. 116 Gentleman’s Magazine (1858), (ii), pp. 643–5. 109

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8

Robert Owen’s Unintended Legacy: Class Conflict 1

Ben Maw

It is well known that Robert Owen was very unsympathetic to class conflict and to ideas that advocated it.2 To a significant extent Owen’s view in this regard can be seen as a product of his millenarian worldview, which was, by its very nature, hostile to all alternative worldviews. W. H. Oliver has demonstrated that Owen’s millenarian mindset led him to view ‘truth’ and ‘true principles’ as substitutes for divine influence.3 Thus Owen could write of the principles he advocated: ‘These principles require only to be known in order to establish themselves . . .’.4 An obvious corollary of this belief was that all contending ‘principles’ were merely erroneous distractions, even though, as he explicitly stated, Owen was more interested in ‘explain[ing] that which is true’ than in ‘attack[ing] that which is false’.5 A concomitant of Owen’s distinctive brand of millenarianism was a far greater degree of humanism than could be found in the thought of other millenarians. For Owen, everyone had been diverted from the true path by ‘false’ and ‘superstitious’ beliefs. Indeed, he believed that the biggest social conflict lay precisely in the battle between true views and false views, which were leading mankind, as a species, astray. However, while, for Owen, re demption for everybody lay in this world rather than the next, it is also true that, again as Oliver has observed, the logic of Owen’s millenarian position led him to portray himself as redeemer.6 Put crudely, the fundamental human (as opposed to ideological) division, from this perspective, was the one between Owen himself and everyone else. A further reason for Owen’s hostility to all forms of class analysis was that, for him, such analyses created division, and therefore added to the


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effects of the system of competition and private property, which, he believed, were themselves hugely powerful agents of division and atomization. However, despite Owen’s hostility to class analysis, the main argument of this essay is that Owen’s thought and activity were key building blocks of new ideas about class and class conflict that emerged in the early 1830s. The reason why Owen’s ideas were put to uses of which he himself disapproved, is, ultimately, to be found in the social and economic changes which shaped early nineteenth-century Britain. For, on the one hand, these changes account for the indispensability of Owen’s thought as far as working people them selves were concerned. But, on the other hand, they also account for the inadequacy of his thought. For Owen’s ideas did not, in themselves, constitute an ideology by reference to which working people felt they could interpret the societal processes within which their fortunes were enmeshed, and, con sequently, the means necessary to attain a better society.

Environmentalism and Moral Determinism Owen’s environmentalism was, of course, very far from new.7 The same is true of the necessitarianism, or ‘moral determinism’, which Owen derived from his environmentalism. By the eighteenth century, both environmentalism and moral determinism were well established in Western thought – particularly in the British Isles and France. It is very likely that both Owen’s environ mentalism and his moral determinism stemmed from William Godwin, with whom Owen was acquainted.8 Godwin’s ideas were far more skilfully elaborated than Owen’s, though they were hardly less extreme.9 However, despite this lack of originality, it is nevertheless the case that environmentalism and, even more so, moral determinism were very much out of kilter with the prevailing ideological proclivities of all classes in early nineteenth-century Britain; and if Owen’s articulation of these ideas was crude and one-sided, then this crudeness and one-sidedness were products of both the hostile ideological climate Owen knew himself to be inhabiting, and the messianic fervour with which he consequently undertook the task of salvation he saw ahead of him.10 Within evangelical Christianity most obviously, but also the dominant philosophy of the age, a usually vulgarized variety of classical political econ omy, individuals’ circumstances tended to be viewed as a reflection of their character and moral virtue, or lack thereof.11 A government inspector, Hugh 156


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Robert Owen’s Unintended Legacy: Class Conflict

Seymour Tremenheere, wrote that ‘great employers who collected large bodies of labourers on wild districts’ would not ‘acknowledge . . . the dependence of moral and intellectual conditions on its [sic] material surroundings’.12 Therefore, before he even began to attack religion itself, Owen’s environ mentalism and moral determinism were providing a fundamental challenge to the philosophical and theological underpinnings of the age. If these ideas long preceded Owen, it is still true that, more than any other single figure in Britain, Owen was to become synonymous with them. (There are various reasons for this, but of course the fame Owen had won through his long association with New Lanark – and the attempts he made while there to create better human beings – were critical.) Environmentalism, then, and the doctrine of ‘non-responsibility’ (as moral determinism was sometimes called), were the dominant tenets in the thought of one of the dominant figures in working-class radical thought and culture of early nineteenth-century Britain. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the repercussions of these ideas were wide and various, or that some of these repercussions were not at all to Owen’s liking.

System In order to divert attention away from individuals, and individual blame, Owen focused his attention on an abstract ‘system’. An integral feature of this ‘system’ was that it governed – perhaps even determined – the behaviour of those living within it. Fundamentally, the system, as Owen saw it, was competitive and it was acquisitive. Competition did not take place solely between different firms and their associated workplaces, but also between individuals within each workplace. Each individual was placed in competition with every other individual, and for this reason the system led to a process of ever-increasing atomization. Now, it is the case that, in one sense, this analysis served to divert attention away from individuals and from individual blame for destructive or injur ious behaviour. Owen did not usually engage in the kind of vituperative personal attacks perpetrated (to pick a salient example) by William Cobbett, in which vitriol was aimed (for example) at ‘idlers’, ‘cowards’, ‘tax-eaters’ and ‘loan-jobbers’.13 Owen tended to blame human beings, individually and collectively, only in so far as they held mistaken beliefs. Owen called his opponents ‘self-interested’, ‘ignorant’ etc. But error was not, for Owen, 157


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a moral transgression, as it was for Cobbett. Owen’s emphasis was on what his opponents falsely believed rather than on what they were. At the same time, when such an analysis was combined with previous anaÂ�lyses of social conflict – most saliently, Charles Hall’s work, but also ana lyses formulated by others such as Thomas Hodgskin and Thomas Mayhew – the implications could be, and eventually were to become, explosive. For, directing attention away from human beings and on to abstract categories was a signally double-edged device. Working-class political economy had already posited the idea that society was essentially riven between two contending groups, the ‘rich’ and the ‘poor’, who had opposed interests. The relevant work here is Charles Hall’s The Effects of Civilization on the People in European States (London, 1805).14 And Thomas Hodgskin’s Labour Defended against the Claims of Capital repreÂ�sented the most sophisticated account of exploitation in an industrial setting. However, in the early 1830s, two things happened, for which the Owenite category of ‘system’ was of crucial importance. First, a new analysis of class began to be formulated and promulgated in the working-class radical press. This began in the pages of the Poor Man’s Guardian, and it was in those pages that it was articulated most energetically and cogently, but it was also taken up, albeit in somewhat diluted form, by other papers, including the Pioneer and, towards the end of the 1830s, the Northern Star. This new analysis went hand in hand with an explicit acknow ledgeÂ�ment that class needed to be analysed as a distinct social category, since, first, the behaviour of each of the two classes depicted was by no means reducible to the character, beliefs etc. of the individuals who made up each class; and second, the workings, and indeed failings, of the system as a whole could not be understood without heavy emphasis on class and on class antagonism. For the first time ever, working-class anti-capitalist political economy formulated a mature and fully elaborated dichotomous class analysis, which assumed a central explanatory position.15 Class analysis of this kind was so subversive precisely because attention was no longer – as it was, most obviously, for Cobbett – on a particular set of individuals, whose behaviour could often be interpreted as an abuse of, rather than a predictable outcome of, the normal workings of a system.16 In the 1830s, lockouts, unemployment, indeed the nature and intensity of industrial production per se, were now often viewed as unavoidable features of a new system; and class antagonism was seen as intrinsic to this system. Furthermore, a distinction was made between classes on the one hand, and 158


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the individuals who composed each class on the other, with condemnation usually aimed at the former. The new analysis called for the replacement of the system in toto, along with the abolition of the existence of classes within that system. (And, for most anti-capitalists, ending class society meant en suring equal access, control and often ownership of the means of producing wealth.) In this sense, therefore, Owen’s environmentalism and doctrine of ‘nonresponsibility’, far from diminishing class-based politics, in fact provided it with a very significant ideological underpinning; and Owen’s popularity ensured that the new class analysis found a working-class audience (albeit limited in number), many of whom were already accustomed to thinking about social problems in terms of abstract ‘systems’. This analysis therefore achieved a level of popularity which Hall, with his much cruder proto-class analysis, could only have dreamed of. And this was only possible because the publications in which these ideas were written about were distributed by organizations comprising a significant Owenite membership.17

Organizations Therefore, the Owenite influence underlay both class analysis itself and the strength of its reception. In both these respects, grass-roots organizations were of central importance. Co-operative societies of various kinds began to emerge in the mid-1820s. In these organizations, co-operative education assumed a vital role. By the turn of the 1830s, though, a new form of activism was emerging. In part, this activism emerged with trade unions, which were populated very heavily by Owenites; but important too in this regard were labour exchanges. Labour exchanges were designed, inter alia, as a means of circumventing, and eventually rendering redundant, the existing form of currency. They were designed also to render the capitalist class redundant. Producer associations were new forms of co-operative societies, which produced goods for exchanging at the labour exchanges.18 Trade unions often had goals that went way beyond what are thought of as union goals today. For, as would be manifested most obviously in the case of the GNCTU of 1834, often their aims transcended the mere protection of wage levels and working conditions, to include the supersession of capitalists’ role in the workplace. Furthermore, the boundaries separating trade unions on the one hand, and co-operative societies on the other, were by no means rigid. Thus it was 159


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not at all unusual for one type of organization to metamorphose into another, or for a trade union or co-operative society to transform into a political union, aiming primarily at the attainment of universal male suffrage, together with working-class education. The best-known example of this kind of meta morphosis occurred when the British Association for Promoting Co-operative Knowledge was transformed, via a merger, into the Metropolitan Trades’ Union, which was then itself transformed, again via a merger, into the National Union of Working Classes. Thus an educational organization, which, according to William Lovett, spawned more than 200 producer associations throughout the country, supplying them with free literature, was transÂ�formed into a trade union and then into a political union.19 This organizaÂ�tional fusion en gendered a fusion of ideas. And this goes a long way towards explaining how it was that ideas of a Spencean and Hallite kind could meld with Owenite co-operative ideas, as well as with those of political radicalism, to produce a new, formidable working-class ideology. It is also the case, of course, that these organizations had a vital mouth piece in the form of the Radical press, with which they were intimately connected. To take a salient example, until April 1834, when the National Union of Working Classes folded, that organization had a reciprocal relation ship with the Poor Man’s Guardian. NUWC members were prominent vendors of the Poor Man’s Guardian, which was at that time still an illegal publication, while the Guardian regularly published the minutes of NUWC meetings. Both the organizations themselves, and the radical publications with which they were often linked, witnessed this melding of Owenite and political radical ideas, and the consequent emergence of new ideologies. But if the existence of these organizations goes a long way towards explain ing the significant power of Owenism in the working-class movement of the early 1830s, then accounting for the organizations themselves assumes vital importance. To achieve this, one must examine the historical develop ments against which they reacted.

Background Perhaps most fundamentally, working people and the organizations they formed at this time reacted against their own powerlessness with regard to their working lives. It has been observed many times before that it was the lack of independence experienced by workers at this time on which Owenism 160


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particularly focused. However, this observation only gets us so far, because the fact is that both class-based and non-class-based working-class analyses reacted against this lack of independence. Both sides took it as axiomatic that working people needed far greater control over the production process, but also that the nature of production itself, as well as the position of product ive activity within the entire ‘social system’, needed to be radically altered. Slightly more specific targets of these organizations were widespread poverty and unemployment. The report of the Poor Law Commission in quired into the most significant causes of the 1830s riots. It did this by posing the question to various overseers of the poor, mostly clergymen. Unemployment was the most common answer, and low wages was the second most common answer.20 The very early 1830s witnessed a serious depression, which was one of several that affected Britain during the early nineteenth century; and massive unemployment, together with significant anumbers of bankruptcies affecting (particularly) small employers, lent credence to the Owenite concept of a systemic source for workers’ suffering, which was beyond, so it was argued, the control of even the bestrewarded of the system’s beneficiaries. Owenite writers, notably John Gray, traced these problems to both the system of currency and the system of organizing production. Both of these, he argued, would need to be transformed. Instead of the pound sterling, the Owenite system of labour notes would be introduced on a national scale, and the allocation of the new currency would be precisely monitored. Similarly, instead of a system of individual, blind production for unknown clients, production would be centrally planned and co-ordinated. These proposals involved huge changes, but Gray believed that nothing short of them would be sufficient to avoid the booms, slumps and con sequent economic shocks which he believed were responsible for the poverty, unemployment and misery he wrote of. Gray’s analysis, though no more class-based than Owen’s, none the less formed a significant bridge between Owen’s ideas and the new class-based ideas, which incorporated Gray’s analysis.21 However, this was not all. Along with poverty and unemployment, work ers were also responding to suffering imposed by a more palpably human source. The industrial conflict witnessed during the early 1830s ‘drove home with unparalleled force the contemporary nature and locus of economic power’, as Noel Thompson puts it. Both lockouts and the ‘Document’ demonÂ�strated the close connection that existed between ownership of 161


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productive resources and the power to exploit.22 (Employers in the building trade, in particular, insisted that their workers sign the ‘Document’, which demanded the renunciation of trade union membership.) In addition, the entire early nineteenth century had of course seen a raft of legislation passed which convinced workers of the alliance that was being forged between state and capitalist. Since the turn of the century, three areas of legislation in particular stood out as seeming to indicate that the govern ment was firmly in the clutches of the employing class. These years had seen the passing of the Combination Acts of 1799–1800, which, for twenty-five years, outlawed all combinations of workers leading to industrial action; the Six Acts of 1820, which among other things outlawed public meetings of more than fifty people and permitted justices to enter houses without warrants; and the notorious 1823 Master and Servant Act, under which any breach of contract by a worker could result in prosecution and imprison ment, while similar breaches by employers were merely a civil matter. The Six Acts heralded what E. P. Thompson called ‘the most sustained campaign of prosecutions in the courts in British history’.23 And the Master and Servant Act was, according to John Saville, simply ‘the last stage of the penal laws in the long history of the discipline of labour’; workers were prosecuted under it throughout the second quarter of the nineteenth century.24 The Poor Man’s Guardian contained manifold references to the huge dis parities of power which existed between masters and men within the work place, and to the legislative exclusivity which buttressed and sustained this inequality. The Six Acts, too, were deeply unpopular. On one occasion, indeed, Hetherington reprinted an extract from Cobbett’s Weekly Political Register in which Cobbett decried the duplicity of the Whigs, who, although they had protested against the Acts, did so knowing their protests would amount to nothing.25 And on a number of occasions ‘Victims of the Odious Six Acts’ were listed in the Guardian’s pages. This socio-legislative backdrop was clearly a precondition for the formation of the Poor Man’s Guardian’s class analysis, and also the belief that ‘the government is made by the profitmen to protect them in their exorbitant profits, rents, and impositions on the people who labour . . . It is the profit-men who are the oppressors every where, the government is their watchmen, and the people who labour are the oppressed.’26 There was, for Bronterre O’Brien, an objective tension, which he now reflected ideologically, between deliberate, ruthless action carried out by both employers and legislators, and the unpredictable and savagely indiscriminate 162


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agency of largely unimpeded market forces of the kind analysed by Gray – which seemed to affect both workers and (particularly) small employers in equal measure. And it is this tension that explains why ‘class’ emerged in his thought as an essential category between ‘system’ and individual. This analysis proved to be influential with Owenite writers such as James Morrison. In 1833 and 1834, the two best-selling working-class unstamped publications were the Poor Man’s Guardian and Morrison’s Pioneer. Of course, the editors of these publications read each other’s work. And Morrison seems to have moved towards O’Brien’s class analysis as a result of both the un successful climax of the ‘turn-out’ of Derby unionists, and the successful prosecution and transportation of the Dorchester workers, both of which occurred in 1834. The Derby incident seems to have convinced Morrison of the decisive power of the masters, and the Dorchester incident seems to have convinced him of the strong connections that had been forged between masters and the state.27 One highly important factor in convincing workers that the state was now in the hands of the ‘possessing class’ was the Poor Law Amendment Act of the same year, 1834, which was arguably the single most hated piece of legislation of the entire nineteenth century. The Poor Man’s Guardian printed a letter by ‘Equality’, which said that, with the passing of the Bill, ‘open war has been declared against labourers by a class of capitalists’.28 O’Brien averred: ‘ “The Poor Man’s Destruction Bill” is purely and solely the work of the middle or profit-hunting classes. If these classes chose, the Act would never have passed; and if they choose even now, it never can be executed.’29 Also worthy of mention in this regard is the Irish Coercion Act of 1833, and also the 1833 Factory Act. (This latter Act did make provision for allow ing an inspectorate into factories. However, in the short term it was seen as an Act geared to the needs of employers, primarily because both work hours and wages for adults were ignored.30)

Consequences There was a crucial ideational consequence of this changing context, which had to do with the social position occupied by those writing within it. A fundamental difference between O’Brien and Owen is that they had radically different views about human nature – and these differences were, perhaps, 163


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predictable. For whereas the political consciousnesses of both O’Brien and Morrison were formed while the social and legislative developments described above were taking place – and both figures, of course, were intimately involved in the organizations which responded to these developments – Owen was already in his early sixties by this time. His own political consciousness had been formed in the very different atmosphere of New Lanark during the first two decades of the nineteenth century. In keeping with the messianic element of Owen’s writing and activism, he wrote of human nature as follows. Children, he argued, may be formed collectively to have any human character. And although these compounds, like all the other works of nature, possess endless varieties, yet they partake of that plastic quality, which, by perseverance under judicious management, may be ultimately moulded into the very image of rational wishes and desires.31

Of course, this attitude is somewhat unsurprising given Owen’s utterly domin ant position vis-à-vis the workers that surrounded him at Manchester and at New Lanark. In conspicuous contrast, O’Brien, at the Poor Man’s Guardian, wrote about workers as potential agents of their own liberation. Whether congratulating London operative tailors for setting up producer associations in order to obtain independence from their masters, or lauding the quality of debate to be heard at the ‘Congress of Co-operative and Trades’ Union delegates’, O’Brien – who of course was deeply immersed in a great deal of this activity himself – saw himself as much in the role of ally as of leader of working people.32 It was only later, from the late 1830s on, that O’Brien’s impatience with workers led him sometimes to adopt a caustically condescending tone when addressing them.33 His period at the Poor Man’s Guardian, however, saw him write as both a would-be leader and as a sympathetic reporter of events which had an organic dynamic of their own. Indeed, it is not easy to imagine anyone cutting their political teeth during this period, and working in this environment, being convinced of the ‘plasticity’ of human nature. Ultimately, the radical differences between Owen and O’Brien’s formative experiences surely played a very significant part in shaping their funda mentally different depictions of what human beings were, and of how their lives could be improved. These fundamental differences, between the two 164


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men’s views of human nature, were closely linked to O’Brien’s class-based, and Owen’s non-class-based, social analysis. O’Brien lacked a captive work force upon which to experiment. His need to sell papers meant that he needed constantly to gauge the proclivities of his audience with a fair degree of accuracy. It meant perceiving which aspects of present society this audience was most hostile to, and, sometimes by simple negation, what the society of the future was to look like.

Democracy The solutions proffered by the working-class radicals of the 1830s – that is, the society of the future they envisaged – had a character that can really be reduced to one word: democracy. However, this observation only gets us only so far, given that the meaning of this word is far from uncontested. The most useful distinction to make here is between democracy as a protective mechanism, and democracy as a constituent element of the good life; or between what has been called ‘protective democracy’ and ‘developmental democracy’.34 In the 1830s, democracy as a protective mechanism (‘protective dem ocracy’) meant democracy as a means of preventing the domination of the working classes by the ruling classes. Primarily, in this period, this idea was to be realized via the advent of universal male suffrage – which had, of course, been a political radical demand since James Burgh’s Political Disquisitions and Major John Cartwright’s Take Your Choice, and had been advocated much earlier by both the Levellers and the Diggers. (It could also, though, mean direct democracy along with other measures that were also deemed part of the ‘good life’. Therefore, the two forms of democracy, protective and developmental, though conceptually distinct, were often combined within a single goal.) It is well known that Owen was hostile to protective democracy. He opposed universal suffrage, and indeed it was his refusal to accept this as an initial goal that really separated him and his movement from the political radicals and, later, from the ‘political Owenites’.35 However, democracy as a constituent element of the good life (‘developmental democracy’) was much broader, and straddled both the economic and the political spheres. Here the discussion of this will be limited to two, albeit vital, variants of developmental democracy. 165


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At its most basic, developmental democracy meant simply economic remunerative justice. Working-class radicals, both Owenite and non-Owenite, had difficulty deciding how remunerative justice was to be ensured; and, worse still, there was broad disagreement about what remunerative justice actually was. (That is to say, on whether workers should be rewarded on the basis of their output, or their effort in the workplace, or their need, or rather on the basis of absolute equality. Further, it was not uncommon for more than one definition of remunerative justice to be advocated by the same individual.36) But there was broad, if not unanimous, agreement that however remunerative justice was defined, it was clearly being systematically violated in capitalist society, as the fruit of labourers’ toil was routinely abstracted by the capitalist class. In other words, the present system was based simply on theft, with which no idea of remunerative justice could be accommodated.37 Just as radical thought of both Owenite and non-Owenite varieties had trouble with the concept of remunerative justice, so within the Owenite communities themselves this was often a significant source of conflict. True community of possessions was never achieved in the communities, for various reasons which there is not room to discuss here. Instead, credit was given according to the number of hours worked or, sometimes, the value of the goods produced.38 However, the fact that communities based on non-exploit ative systems of remuneration were capable of existing at all (Orbiston (Scotland), 1826–7; New Harmony (US), 1825–8; Ralahine (Ireland), 1831–3) was, in itself, highly inspirational, and had an impact far beyond those individuals actually participating in communitarian schemes. Evidence for this exists in the fact that communities were held out by many to be the ideal form of society. Just as importantly, class analysis, as it was originally formulated in the Poor Man’s Guardian, envisaged a future society based on collective labour and on machinery, employed in a non-exploitative social context; and this emphasis reflected both the heavy Owenite (and Grayite) influence on O’Brien’s work, together with the large amount of Owenites within the NUWC and other organizations.39 Secondly, developmental democracy meant decision-making power within the workplace. And this is where Owenism really came into its own. For the culture it created in this regard was very significant. Gregory Claeys has demonstrated that Robert Owen’s attitude to democracy was by no means as uniformly negative as has often been argued. There were, Claeys shows, significant democratic strands within Owen’s thought, stemming from repub licanÂ�ism, radical Puritanism and natural jurisprudence.40 166


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In accordance with this ideological sympathy, Owen’s activity was not merely ‘paternalistic’, as is often argued, but was also, at least to an extent, democratic.41 While, as mentioned earlier, Owen was opposed to universal suffrage, and while he clearly kept a tight rein on his workers, not only in New Lanark but also in situations where he had the option to do otherwise – particularly in the communities – it is, at the same time, true that within both of these environments a significant degree of decision-making power was delegated to a more local level.42 At New Lanark, there was a degree of judicial democracy. During his very first year of management, Owen divided the village into groups of houses called ‘neighbourhood divisions’, the heads of which were elected annually. These heads elected twelve jurors, who would decide on all matters relating to order within the village. In the communities, members enjoyed a fair degree of democratic control, though this was limited. In the communities based on a single owner or a few owners, the basic property structure could not be challenged, nor the major economic decisions. The evidence pertaining to communities funded exclusively by member residents is too meagre to justify conclusions of any degree of strength. However, the fact remains that in all communities, workers were given a significant degree of control over the day-to-day running of community life, and this element, too, provided a very important and inspir ational real-life example to motivate those outside, or on the periphery of, the movement. This kind of democratic structure really came into its own in the period 1829–34. The evidence pertaining to the internal operational structure of the co-operative societies of various kinds, and to the trade unions (including the GNCTU), is unfortunately thin. However, what we do know is that both James Morrison and J. E. Smith believed that a House of Trades should replace Parliament. The House of Trades would comprise elected represen tatives, and its structure would be pyramidal.43 Admittedly, reference in this regard was made to a ‘dictator’. But it was made to be an elected dictator – so it is important to look beyond the two men’s unfortunate choice of language, or at least to see it in this context. While W. H. Oliver may be right to claim that the idea of a House of Trades was simply the inevitable corollary of a plan for universal co-operative production – in other words, that one idea was inherent within the other – the fact is, as we have seen, that Owenite culture contained democratic elements from much, much earlier – the very beginning of the nineteenth 167


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century – all of which provided ideological inspiration for working-class writers of this period.44 Yet, the fact remains that Owen was hostile to universal suffrage, and the decision-making he delegated was strictly limited. In addition, the period 1829–34 was unique for Owen; this was the only time when he immersed himself in the working-class movement. The relationship between him and this movement was always tense; and when the GNCTU collapsed suddenly in 1834, Owen abandoned the working-class movement for ever. It is import ant to remember, however, that from the late 1820s onwards, Owenism the movement became distinct, and at least semi-separate, from Owen the man. And from 1829 on, the movement became decidedly more democratic than was Owen himself. Given this context, it is not surprising that, as we have seen, Owen’s extreme environmentalism was bound to an incredibly one-sided and crude view of human nature: a view which distinguished him rather obviously from more class-analytical anti-capitalist and socialist writers. Thus whereas a figure like O’Brien could wonder whether or not a society made up of Owen ite communities was really compatible with human nature, concluding that only experimentation could provide a definitive answer; and arguing, more importantly still, that the formation of communities would either be led by workers themselves or not at all, Owen’s view of totally plastic, totally mal leable human nature rendered such ruminations unnecessary.45 For, many of Owen’s pronouncements indicate that he believed that human nature was, quite simply, whatever it was shaped into (by Owen himself, the impliÂ�cation often seems to have been; or else by educators acting in strict accordance with Owen’s wishes).46 This observation forms part of the explanation of why Owen’s relation ship with the working-class movement between 1829 and 1834 was always tense, and shows us that the radical democracy espoused by some sections of the class-based faction was a very big departure from Owen’s view – however important Owen may have been to this faction’s very existence. Regarding democracy, then, both sides of the equation need to be borne in mind – that is, on the one hand the fact that Owen was, despite his reputation for anti-democracy, open to some forms of it, and that he kept some of these forms alive in practice throughout the early nineteenth century; but also, on the other hand, the fact that Owen’s democracy was limited in scope; that it was hostile to all forms of protective democracy (most obviously, universal male suffrage); and that the limited extent of Owen’s democratic 168


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leanings was a function of what was, without doubt, quite an authoritarian view of human nature. The seeds, therefore, of the culture that would emerge after 1829 were present from the very beginning – despite the countervailing ideological elements that were also present within Owen’s thought. From 1829, then, the flourishing of producer associations, labour ex changes and trade unions imbued with a new resonance the concept of democracy as a constituent element of the good life. The new class analysis drew very heavily on conceptions of democracy kept alive within (though not exclusively within) Owenite culture, which it then added to the protect ive idea of democracy which traditionally separated it from Owenism. Thus O’Brien began talking about extending democracy throughout the work place very soon after a brief debate with Morrison, which took place in the editorials of the Poor Man’s Guardian and the Pioneer.47 It was very soon after this that O’Brien began espousing a system of direct democracy. Two obvious additional sources of inspiration here seem to have been Buonarroti and Rousseau’s Social Contract. However, the wider point is that different forms of democracy were being discussed openly in the working-class radical press, and that at various points Owenism can be shown to have played a direct role in enriching the conceptions of democracy espoused by class-analytical anti-capitalists like O’Brien.

Conclusion There were other ways in which Owen, through Owenism, influenced class analysis. In particular, John Francis Bray took Owen’s millenarianism in a radically new direction in 1839. As part of Bray’s highly teleological account of human history, millenarianism was reformulated as an explanatory mech anism by reference to which human history in its entirety was to be understood. Just as importantly, of course, Friedrich Engels was introduced to Owenite culture at meetings of the Rational Society in the 1840s. These influences are also highly important. However, the influences outlined above were chronologically prior to these, and therefore merit consideration in their own right. Owen’s environmentalism and doctrine of ‘non-responsibility’ were integral elements of the new class analysis in the early 1830s. His concept of ‘system’ was an associated, and vital, addition to the new analysis. And, just as import antly, Owenite practice was a vital vehicle for keeping alive democratic ideals 169


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– in particular, ideals regarding remunerative justice, and also participation in day-to-day decision-making (even if, as I have already suggested, Owenite culture itself assumed a semi-autonomous form from 1829). In addition, these ideals had an impact that extended far beyond Owenism, demon strating very vividly just how closely linked were all forms of working-class activity at this time, both Owenite and non-Owenite – political and trade unionism, co-operation in all its forms, and, from 1838, Chartism. Ultimately, the causes of the mutations described above are to be found both in objective processes and in grass-roots reactions to them. Owen, O’Brien, Morrison, Hetherington, the most prominent individuals in this historical moment, and the movements it produced – are well known. However, the key to understanding the path that leads from Owen to the class analysis formulated in the Poor Man’s Guardian lies in largely unrecorded experiences: that is, those of the individuals who made up the co-operative societies, trade unions and political unions of 1830s Britain.

Notes I would like to thank Malcolm Chase for commenting usefully on an earlier draft of what follows. â•‡2 It is thus doubtful whether Owen can be said to have articulated a theory of labour exploitation. (Noel W. Thompson, The People’s Science: The Popular Political Economy of Exploitation and Crisis, 1816–34 (Cambridge, 1984), p. 77.) â•‡3 See W. H. Oliver, ‘Owen in 1817: the millennialist moment’, in Sidney Pollard and John Salt (eds), Robert Owen: Prophet of the Poor (London, 1971), pp. 166–87: pp. 168–9. â•‡4 SWRO, 1, p. 38. Ralph Miliband’s view of Owen – that he was a ‘true child of the eighteenth century’ (‘The politics of Robert Owen’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 15 (1954), 233–45: 234) – is correct. Owen, in line with eighteenthcentury Enlightenment rationalism, saw reason as an ‘acquisition’ (rather than a ‘heritage’: the dichotomy is Ernst Cassirer’s) obtainable through analysis, the correct conception of which was itself to be the reward of education, properly understood. (Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, trans. F. C. A. Koelln and J. P. Pettegrove (1932; Princeton, 1951), pp. 13–14.) However, Owen’s brand of secularized millenarianism took him way beyond even the most fervent Enlightenment believers in the transformative power of rational argument – firstly, in his faith in the speed with which rational argument would take hold the minds of those who absorbed it, and secondly in the position he assigned himself in the spreading of ‘truth’ and ‘true principles’. â•‡5 SWRO, 1, p. 42. â•‡ 1

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Oliver, ‘Owen in 1817’, pp. 170–1. The term ‘environmentalism’ here denotes the idea that each individual’s capacities, traits and, more generally, character are formed by his or her environment. â•‡8 See Ian Donnachie, Robert Owen: Social Visionary (Edinburgh, 2005), pp. 115–16. As Donnachie points out, however (p. 117), Owen had probably read other thinkers of the Enlightenment era while a member of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society in the 1790s. â•‡9 Regarding environmentalism, Godwin wrote of ideas in the mind: ‘The whole mass is in perpetual flux; nothing is stable and permanent . . .’ Godwin thus placed in doubt the very existence of a self. (William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, and its Influence on Modern Morals and Happiness, ed. Isaac Kramnick (Harmondsworth, 1976), p. 104.). 10 That is, taken as a whole. By this time, of course, environmentalism had gained a significant foothold in educated circles. Associationist beliefs were deeply em bedded, for example, within philosophical radicalism. However, on the whole, environmentalism was treated with contempt. 11 Classical political economists almost all accepted some version of the Malthusian notion that workers’ misery was a direct consequence of their ‘natural’ tendency to reproduce to an imprudent extent. And this notion, far more than any egalitarian implications derivable from associationism, dominated ruling-class attitudes to working people. 12 Quoted in Asa Briggs, Introduction to William Lovett and John Collins, Chartism, a New Organization of the People (Leicester, 1969), p. 12. 13 William Cobbett, Cobbett Selections: With Hazlitt’s Essay and other Critical Estimates, Introduction and notes by A. M. D. Hughes (Oxford, 1923), pp. 126, 127, 159. 14 What was new here, of course, was not the categories themselves, but rather the specific social groups placed within them. 15 I am not, of course, trying to argue that Owen was the only fundamental influence vis-à-vis this analysis. Along with the aforementioned work by Hall, for example, fundamental too were Hodgskin’s ideas. It is also the case that O’Brien was influenced by others whose work already contained a mixture of Owenite and non-Owenite elements: for example, Richard Egan Lee, George Petrie, Thomas Mayhew, John Gray and, perhaps, Henry Hetherington. On O’Brien’s influences more generally, see Ben Maw, ‘Bronterre O’Brien, class and the advent of democratic anti-capitalism: the social and political ideas of Chartism’s “Schoolmaster”’, Ph.D. thesis, University of Swansea, 2005, especially chs 1–3. 16 In so far as Cobbett expressed belief in a system, that system was essentially political. I have examined the Cobbettite and Paineite positions in this regard in Maw, ‘Bronterre O’Brien’, pp. 23–32. 17 This argument does not, of course, entail the notion that those who made use of Owen’s ideas accepted, wholesale, either his environmentalism or his moral determinism. â•‡6 â•‡7

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19 20 21

22

23

24

25 26 27

28 29 30 31 32 33 34

35

36

37

An organization attempting to unite producer associations in London, the London United Trades’ Association, also bought raw materials on the wholesale markets in order to assist individual associations. BL Add. 27,791, f. 245. E. J. Hobsbawm and George Rudé, Captain Swing (London, 1969), p. 81. Gray’s analysis of social relations focused on the distinction between productive and unproductive labour. See on this Gregory Claeys, Machinery, Money and the Millennium: From Moral Economy to Socialism, 1815–1860 (Princeton, 1987), pp. 110–29. Noel Thompson, The Real Rights of Man: Political Economies for the Working Class, 1775–1850 (London, 1998), p. 83. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth, 1980), p. 768. John Saville, The Consolidation of the Capitalist State, 1800–1850 (London, 1994), p. 21. PMG, 19 January 1833. PMG, 14 January 1832. Almost overnight, there was a change in Morrison’s editorial tone, following the Derby lockout. In early January 1834, he wrote that the Derby masters were digging themselves a grave ‘more terrible than hell’ (Pioneer, 4 January 1834). PMG, 20 September 1834. PMG, 18 October 1834. Dorothy Thompson, The Chartists (London, 1984), pp. 24–5. SWRO, 1, p. 41. PMG, 19 October 1833, 10 May 1834. Maw, ‘Bronterre O’Brien’, pp. 242–6. This corresponds roughly to a division highlighted by David Held, Models of Democracy (Cambridge, 2006). Referring to the new type of consciousness that emerged from the fusion of Owenite and political Radical personnel in organizations such as the BAPCK. For example, John Francis Bray, in Labour’s Wrongs and Labour’s Remedy, or the Age of Might and the Age of Right (Leeds, 1839), seemed to vacillate between arguing for remuneration on the basis of equality (p. 30) and remuneration on the basis of effort (p. 63). Sometimes, indeed, as, for example, in the case of the elderly and inform, Bray argued for remuneration on the basis of need (p. 168). The most important work in this regard was Hodgskin’s Labour Defended against the Claims of Capital (London, 1825). In that work, Hodgskin took issue with mainstream, liberal political economists’ argument that the capitalist was a useful agent in the productive process, who, accordingly, ‘earned’ a legitimate form of remuneration – i.e. profit. Hodgskin argued that fixed capital was both produced by and used by workers, and that without this dual input, machinery etc. was useless. Capitalists’ ownership of fixed capital did not, therefore, represent a legitimate basis for remuneration, but simply a source of power over wage 172


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38

39

40

41 42 43

44 45

46 47

labourers. And it was this ownership relationship, and the power it bestowed (enshrined in law), which enabled capitalists to extract profits at workers’ expense. Circulating capital, on the other hand – which Hodgskin defined narrowly as the means of labourers’ subsistence – was, in effect, a reification. By confounding labourers’ means of subsistence (which Hodgskin reduced in turn to food and clothing) with the money wage which enabled labourers to purchase such means, and also with the power relationship which enabled the capitalist to control labourers’ remuneration in the first place, mainstream political economy had obscured the fact that it was not ‘capital’ at all, but rather the ‘co-existing’ skill of other labourers (for example, bakers and tailors), which allowed working people to subsist. Both kinds of ‘capital’, Hodgskin concluded, were in fact ‘syn onymous’ with ‘a labouring population’ (Hodgskin, Labour Defended, p. 108); and in a non-exploitative society, it would be labourers themselves who would decide how the fruit of their toil was to be deployed and distributed (Hodgskin, Labour Defended, p. 83). J. F. C. Harrison, Robert Owen and the Owenites in Britain and America: The Quest for the New Moral World (London, 1969), pp. 180–2. On these issues, see Ben Maw, ‘The democratic anti-capitalism of Bronterre O’Brien’, Journal of Political Ideologies, 13 (2008), 201–26. Claeys, Citizens and Saints: Politics and Anti-Politics in Early British Socialism (Cambridge, 1989), ch. 1. Ibid., chapter 2. Ibid., p. 68. W. H. Oliver, ‘Organisations and ideas behind the efforts to achieve a general union of the working classes in the early 1830s’, D.Phil. Thesis, University of Oxford, 1954, chs 22–3. Ibid., p. 430. Southern Star, 9 February 1840; J. B. O’Brien, State Socialism (London, 1885), p. 4. SWRO, 4, pp. 206–7. PMG, 23 August, 4 October 1834. For the debate itself, see the Pioneer, 31 May 1834 and PMG, 7 June 1834.

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9

Robert Owen and ‘the greatest discovery ever made by man’ Geoffrey Powell

Owen was convinced that the world in which he found himself was mad. Its occupants were suffering from a species of ‘rank insanity’.1 They were able to run what he called the ‘old system’ only because they were blind to reality. He used the image of having one’s eyes bandaged. If human society in the old system was insane, it was so, not because mistakes had been made over facts to which the sane also had access, but because it had no perception at all of what made sanity possible. When he said that the problem with those without vision was that they believed they formed their own characters, Owen did not mean by this that, by making this one surely correctable mistake, they had confounded their entire lives, but rather that this belief was central to the worldview of those who could not see. Later in his career, he found this belief about self-making inadequate in itself to explain insanity and added to it ‘the supposition that man possesses the power to believe and to feel according to the bidding of others’.2 With this crucial addition he showed his Enlightenment credentials, for Immanuel Kant based his memorable definition of Enlightenment on precisely this supposition. ‘EnlightenÂ�ment is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another.’3 What was it Owen found so insane (which, in his terms, meant ‘inconsist ent’) about the world in which he lived?4 The three curses of humanity he listed as religion, private property and marriage, but he also made obser vations about other features of the old system as he built up his model of a new system. The most fundamental feature was surely private property. If some could make exclusive claims of ownership, others, of necessity, were


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denied ownership. Property for some meant dispossession for others. Wealth for some made poverty for others. Society, as a result, was composed of individuals with opposing interests. Since the whole point of a society of people is community of interest, such opposition was contradictory. A system of ownership could only be rational if it benefited all and proceeded through mutual co-operation. This system of opposing individual interests required a legal framework to try to secure some kind of order, but all it could do was to legalize injustice. Society produced offenders, yet it punished them for behaving as they had been trained to behave, encouraging what it forbade. The employment system was characterized by a series of contradictions. The propertied complained of the wretchedness of working people, yet the conditions they imposed on them ensured their wretchedness. The owners complained that the market was overstocked with goods yet, through mechan ization and long working hours, they ensured overproduction. The poor rates for the unemployed were seen as a threat to society, yet the conditions for generating unemployment were also created by that same society. Incidentally, Owen was neither the first, nor the last, to see inconsistency or contradiction in economic life as the defining characteristic of irrational belief systems and their societies. Aristotle had been struck by the way that, if we seek to acquire things both to satisfy our needs and to make profit for its own sake, we live a contradiction. Natural acquisition is straightforward enough. If we need things to live, we try to acquire them – food, clothing, housing and so on. When we have secured what we need, our acquisitions come to an end. If, however, we carry on striving to acquire – without any rational limit – we are acting unnaturally. Natural acquisition of wealth has a rational limit, while unnatural acquisition has no such limit. Aristotle recognized that, in trying to be both natural and unnatural at the same time, we would be involved in a contradiction. Evidently, the inconsistency which so pervaded Owen’s society had been a feature of human behaviour from the earliest times. While Owen saw nothing irrational about self-defence, waging war for conquest or revenge was wholly unacceptable to him since it defeated its object. Only by diminishing the ‘others’, those who were to be conquered, as not our equals or fellow beings, was it possible both to claim to respect others as ourselves and to abuse or kill them. The religion on which such a militaristic society depended provided the way of thinking necessary to make this seem reasonable. Those who believed the required doctrines were to be loved and rewarded, while those who did not were to be hated and 176


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‘The Greatest Discovery Ever Made’

punished as sinners. Religion taught both love and hatred for fellow humans, both brotherhood and division. The state pursued other contradictory policies. While it wanted its popu lation to be hard-working and financially cautious, it also wanted, at the same time, through its cultivation of gambling, a risk-taking population. On the one hand, the population had to be sober and healthy but, on the other, producing and selling alcohol was both profitable and a means of supplying a useful opiate for a population which could not be allowed to be too moral or too rational. A choice of partner was believed to be a purely individual matter. With choices made, a marriage contract for life followed, but the economic system, which this self-making belief created, moved as a juggernaut over all relation ships and institutions as it changed the means of wealth creation, so that love could not be for life after all. The partner for life became an obstacle to newly formed relationships and, where divorce was not permitted, marriage became the reason for sexual deceits and exploitations of every kind. Partners found themselves both practitioners of ephemeral relationships and believers in lifelong commitment. The problem about the vision that led to all these contradictions was that it could not see reality. The militarists did not see the destruction and murder of conquest as barbaric but as heroic and the fulfilment of a glorious duty. Those who imposed punishments believed the offending individuals devised their crimes in their own heads and were therefore fit subjects for punish ment and retribution. They could not see that these criminals were mere puppets in the hands of the social system. Even though gambling and alcohol use were cultivated by the state, those who became addicted to them were seen as having a personal problem. It could not be acknowledged that they had fallen into a pit dug for them by their society. Just how did Owen become so acutely aware of the vision problem? Fortu nately, he made the answer to this question easy by telling us himself where his way of seeing came from. ‘Causes over which I could have no control removed in my early days the bandage which covered my mental sight.’ ‘My resolutions were taken in early life; and subsequent years have added to their strength and confirmed them.’5 It is to his Newtown inheritance and experience then, that we have to turn if we are to understand his ideas. In addition to being a studious little boy, Owen was also seen as notice ably religious in a religiously active community. Unfortunately, he says little of what influence the three Methodist ladies, who ‘took a great fancy’ to 177


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him, might have had on him, though the impression they left on his memory was strong enough for him to remember them in old age.6 He is more likely to have valued the notion of being born again, of being chosen to have his eyes opened, through their influence than from the teachings of the estab lished church, for which such manifestations of enthusiasm had proved threatening in the past and needed to be suppressed. The confidence with which he lived out his messianic role may have resulted from absorbing something of Calvinistic predestination from these sisters. More generally, he does not mention, perhaps because he was not aware of, the radical culture into which he was born, yet his own doctrine required that his ideas were the product of his culture and not of an individual, however inventive. Evidently, it provided all the wholesome ingredients necessary to produce the distinctive and resolute reformer he became. In his recollections of his early life, he tells us that, in performing his role as the ‘little parson’, he wrote three sermons.7 They have not survived because, on reading Laurence Sterne’s sermons, he found them so close to his own that he feared being accused of plagiarism and threw his compositions into the fire. However, we may examine Sterne’s sermons to learn of the thinking of the young Owen. There are a few of them, in particular, which contain thoughts of the kind likely to have excited the little parson, though all of them, as Sterne’s Preface tells us, ‘turn chiefly upon philanthropy’.8 Sermon III is likely to have been the one which made him seem most obviously a plagiarist. It uses the story of the good Samaritan from Luke’s Gospel, surely the best known in the New Testament. A traveller, who has been attacked and robbed, lies on the roadside. A priest and a Levite pass by and do nothing to help him, but then a Samaritan, on seeing this victim of crime, picks him up and ensures that he is cared for. Sterne assumes we all have compassion in our hearts, so the Samaritan is only being properly human. What is it about the priest and Levite, supposedly professionals in virtue, which leads them to behave as though they had no connection with a member of their own species? He does not explain the reasons they would have given to justify their behaviour, but he acknowledges that there really are selfish people, like these two men, who ‘take part in nothing beyond themselves’. Deep down, there may be universal compassion, but on the surface, there are real differences of perception and response. These differences cannot be explained away as mere lapses of moral discipÂ�line, and young Owen would have read other passages in the Gospels which contained all he needed to state the vision problem in the way he 178


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did. Consider, for example, the story of the rich man and Lazarus, also in St Luke. While the rich man lives in luxury, the beggar Lazarus wastes away at his gate. On his death, Lazarus goes to Abraham, but when the rich man also dies, he goes to hell. He pleads for relief from the flames and, when none is forthcoming, he asks for Lazarus to be raised from the dead to warn his brothers what will happen to them also if they do not change their ways. The conclusion to the story is blunt and stark. Even if Lazarus appeared to them it would make no difference. Being terrified is not the same as changing one’s way of thinking. The problem with the rich is that they simply do not see the universal brotherhood of man. There is a great chasm between those who understand universal compassion and those who do not, and none may pass across it. There is a passage in Owen’s New Lanark Address of 1816 which indicates that this story had made a significant impact on his thinking. With scant regard for the sensitivities of his audience, he said; Your minds have been so completely enveloped by this dense covering, which has intercepted the approach of every ray of light, that were an angel from heaven to descend to declare your state, you would not, because so circumstanced you could not, believe him.9

Of course, if having a kind of vision was fixed and no one could do anything about it, Owen’s life’s work would have been pointless, but there is another well-known part of the teaching of Jesus which leaves the way open for finding a means of crossing the chasm. There is a remark, added after his statement that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom, that ‘for men this is impossible; but everything is possible for God’.10 This enigmatic addition suggests that there are ways of enabling someone to transform his way of seeing the world. It was in response to this challenge that Owen dedicated much of his life as a reformer and educator. Though an outspoken critic of the religion of what he called the ‘sects’, it would be quite mistaken to regard Owen as anti-religious, at least if we are to include within religion the teaching of Jesus as recorded in the Gospels. However contradictory traditional religion may have been to him, the message of Jesus he saw as rational and consistent. His writing is laden with refer ences to that teaching – he had come amongst his people like a prophet, and he made it clear, in a note at the end of his 1817 Letter on the Relief of the Poor, that his ‘efforts have been, and will be, directed to secure the interests of true religion, and to establish it permanently throughout the world’.11 179


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His new system will be ‘true and genuine Christianity, freed from the errors that have been attached to it’.12 It will realize ‘those invaluable precepts of the Gospel’.13 Those familiar with biblical writing will recognize just how deeply Owen’s way of expressing himself was influenced by it. His overtly religious language was already much in evidence in his 1816 Address, where he referred to the need to be ‘born again’.14 In the religion of the sects there was nothing out of the ordinary about being born again, or believing that human problems would be solved on the Messiah’s return to earth. This was what the mass of believers accepted, but they were not expected to take it seriously, except in so far as the ministrations of the Church could legitimize and direct their responses. Owen’s confidence and fervour in his chosen role, and in the coming of a new age, place him amongst the enthusiasts. While the insti tutionalized routines of belief pushed Christ’s second coming into the back ground, those who read the New Testament with enthusiasm, especially excited by the new world order of the Kingdom which his second coming would usher in, had it at the forefront of their attention. The ‘millennial moment’ for Owen came in 1817, when his writing became particularly saturated with references to the dawning of the new age. The closing section of his Address on Poor Relief, in which he wanted to displace religion as faith with religion as charity, he expressed through the language of Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians, and this Pauline discourse remained a chosen means for him, leading to the passage in his 1833 Address, where, in true prophetic mode, he proclaimed: ‘The period is at hand when the minds of men must be born again; when they shall no longer see as through a glass darkly, but face to face, and know each other even as they know themselves.’15 In his 1817 Address, he also took the opportunity to refer to that part of Luke’s Gospel where Jesus, in predicting the collapse of the Temple and its old order, had to respond to the question ‘When will it all come about?’ Owen’s response to this question was: ‘A little time longer only shall men have eyes, and see not, ears and hear not, understandings and understand not.’16 The time had come. Even in his New View of Society, which has the appearance of being a confident presentation of the effective ness of the empiricist principles of training and conditioning, and in which the framework for his millenarian belief is hardly visible, it is still there. The ‘extraordinary events of the present times’ are the sign that the ‘Power which governs and pervades the universe’ has determined that men will progress from ignorance to intelligence.17 180


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There was, of course, a history of millenarian Radicalism before Owen, and though he still needed its framework to formulate his new system, in proclaiming himself plodding and matter-of-fact, he consciously distanced himself from his enthusiast predecessors, who were regarded as impractical and dangerous crackpots. In his 1816 Address at New Lanark, he referred to the ‘supposed’ millennium, thus giving himself a critical distance from it, and he extended this further when he said, ‘What ideas individuals may attach to the term millennium, I know not.’18 By means of this distance, he was able to transform the concept to secular use. The ‘period when the mind of man shall be born again’ will be made maniÂ�fest, not through some miraculous sign, but through the dawn of reason.19 The Creator may make this possible, but it is humans who will secure its arrival, if they adopt ‘proper measures’.20 The millennium became a thoroughly human-centred phenomenon for him when he was convinced he was experiencing this dawn because ‘those who have duly reflected on the nature and extent of the mental movements of the world for the last half-century must be conscious that great changes are in progress’.21 ‘The new and irresistible power of mechanism’ in industry (especially in his cotton mill) was so advanced that plenty was possible for all, and machinery and technology could ‘execute all the work that is over-laborious, disagreeable, or in any way injurious to human nature’.22 Owen thought the time was right for the new age for a number of reasons, each connected with the industry he had played a major part in developing. The scale of production made material plenty for all a real possibility and there need no longer be lives blighted by toil and dangerous working con ditions. Industry also demanded social interdependence and co-operation, so that the brotherhood of equals could displace competitive individualism in the workplace. The intellectual demands of complex industrial processes, in stimulating the intelligence and extending knowledge, helped lift people out of the idiocy and wild, senseless imaginings which he thought had, from the earliest times, held them in bondage. At last, then, the conditions of production had evolved to a point where intellectually, socially and material ly, humans could become their true selves. The Christian life of the Kingdom could secure a place on earth. In the terms of the religious language of the old system, in fulfilling his personal role he seemed to be making the arrogant claim that he was a Messiah returning to earth; yet, in his new religion of charity, not faith, it is the development of industry which brings liberation, and it is the manager 181


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of a cotton mill who proclaims it, not ‘the son of man coming on a cloud with great power and glory’.23 This is not the way the Gospel writer thought it would be but, though low-key and far from being overwhelmingly spec tacular, this mundane process of coming to recognize the facts, of seeing what is truly the case, is in the hands of humans themselves. It is not some thing, however wonderfully delivered, which is given to them, but outside their control. Owen was, in effect, amongst the first of the de-mythologizers of New Testament literature, and his secular message is an exciting one because it transposes the vague mysteries and promises of religion into the very substan tial world in which, through industrial development, the new system can be realized. The saving mechanism is no longer a matter of belief and divine intervention but of humans acquiring knowledge and remaking their world with it. The millenarian message is translated into a practical secular language, and the vision problem becomes a subject for science, not merely for divine grace. When it came to his own role in this, it was not just false modesty which led him to say that he did not come to his people to ‘establish a name’ but to relieve them from the errors and evils of all names.24 The new system would be one in which clarity and truth would exist without the individual ism of heroes or leaders. Owen was as ordinary as the Samaritan on the Jericho road. If we view the Gospel narratives through his new secular vision, we soon have a picture of the form his new system would take. If we compare a secular with a religious interpretation of the parable most relevant to his reforming purposes, that of the labourers in the vineyard, a co-operative system soon takes shape.25 As a secular story, it becomes an account of a comÂ�munity’s rational means of sustaining itself through work. As it is presented, the vine yard is run on wage labour. The labourers are paid for the amount of work they do, but if the owner were to reject this exploitative system and regard all his workers as sharers in a communal enterprise created to sustain all its members, what matters is the needs of all the members (which are the same), not whether they are early or late comers to the community. In such a cooperative system, there are no contradictions and no divisions between owner and owned. Needless to say, the ‘owner’ also becomes a labourer in this system of shared ownership. This picture of the ‘Kingdom of Heaven’ provides the kind of social consistency Owen needed as a model for his new system. In its religious form, however, in the Gospel of Matthew, in which all the narrative contributes to a proclaiming of the saving sacrifice of Christ, 182


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the landowner is a God-figure who, since he is in charge of the vineyard, can be kind to his workers if he chooses. He is free to do what he likes with his money, paying the latecomers as though they had worked all day. The Kingdom of Heaven, in this case, is a place where the welfare of its citizens is dependent on the whim of an all-powerful ruler, and the contradiction between cohesive community and division between individuals is made blatantly obvious, as the owner sows the seeds of discord between his workers, and individuals are encouraged to vie for his benefactions. Owen’s greatest discovery rules this interpretation out of court, and with it, of course, the whole traditional use of New Testament religion as a support and justifi cation for authoritarian hierarchical society and possessive individualism. Owen’s ability to distance himself from a naïve millenarian expectation can also be seen in the way he was not as committed to a sudden dawning of a new age, as at first appears. It was not just deference to aristocrats or magnates which made him reject the idea that a sudden change of system was desirable. He stressed, often, that the change from the old to the new system would have to be gradual: The change from the one to the other . . . must not be too hasty. All I ask is, – let it be gradual, and conducted in the true spirit of benevolence; and let no one be injured in mind, body or estate. . . . The institutions of our forefathers, erroneous as they are, must not be handled with violence, or rudely touched. No: they must be still preserved with care, supported, and protected, until the new state of society shall be far advanced in quiet practice, – until it has proved its numberless important benefits to mankind, even to the conviction of the most unbelieving.26

Just what clear vision demanded of Owen seems to have matured over time. In the earlier stages of his career, perhaps too easily impressed by his empiric ally minded contacts in industrial and intellectual circles, he seems to have adopted the classic and simplistic empiricist belief that, provided we can secure full control over their environment, we can mould people into any form we choose. There are passages in his New View of Society where he is as confident over conditioning theory as any of the later behaviourists. But here lies a major problem. Did the clear vision of the Gospels justify an authoritarian, controlling and manipulative means for shaping human behaviour? By 1833, he no longer thought so, but observed that in the old system it was assumed ‘man possesses the power to believe and to feel 183


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according to the bidding of others’. What followed from this moral heter onomy was the cultivation of ‘all the inferior animal passions’ and opposition to the ‘progress of real knowledge’.27 His new system, therefore, could not be realized through the kind of factory reform which had made him wealthy. In spite of its achievements in improving worker behaviour, through its authoritarian paternalism it still cultivated, rather than rejected, the thinking of the old system. Heteronomy breeds self-interest and individualism, and he was convinced by 1817 that these had no place in his new system. ‘Indi vidualised man, and all that is truly valuable in Christianity, are so separated as to be utterly incapable of union through all eternity.’28 Owen arrived at a comprehensive working model of the thought of the blindfolded. They believed both that they made themselves and that they had to believe and feel according to the bidding of others. In being selfmakers, they were innocent of what actually made them, and their illusory self-making had the peculiar feature of denying them their autonomy, since they had the need to depend on the authority and direction of others. Today we have no difficulty in putting these apparently unrelated characteristics of blindfold thinking together to recognize what, in Jean Piaget’s terms, is now called ‘egocentrism’. This combining of self-making with direction from outside was pervasive in the religious culture Owen inherited. Adam and Eve were punished for eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil because they were considered free agents who, knowing they were forbidden to eat the fruit, could have been obedient and impervious to temptation. This was a strangely contradictory system of belief, in which self-direction and external direction were involved at the same time, and Owen would have none of it. This was still the case even when, by the end of his life, his ‘greatest discovery’ had become ‘[t]hat the made receives all its qualities from its maker, and that the created receives all its qualities and powers from its Creator’.29 It was this that was to be written in letters of gold. At first glance, this seems at variance with his two earlier formulations, but when we con sider it more carefully, it really amounts to a consolidation of what they signified. His earlier versions are merely aspects of the same principle – that clear vision involves living by a rationality given to us, which enables us to be objective about ourselves, without exception. Although he had the notion of a Creator, he was careful to make ‘him’ into ‘it’ so that no idolatrous anthropomorphism could be involved. In his 1833 Address, for example, his Creator is an ‘Incomprehensible Power’ who 184


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is not to be worshipped, but adored ‘in admiring silence’. It is not to be humanized or have ‘any of the qualities of our limited senses’ attributed to it.30 The Creator, therefore, cannot function in the way the religious God does. There is no personal commanding or directing of people, no one to impose heteronomy. If something is moral and binding on humans, it is so because their reason has been fashioned in such a way as to make it moral, not because commandments were presented on stone tablets. The mechanism necessary for heteronomy to function is simply absent. Clear-sighted people make judgements and act autonomously, but only because they have been made to judge and act in this way. The Creator, having set things in motion, remains aloof, distanced from the created. Though his final version of his great discovery looks like a reverting to a grand affirmation of religious belief, therefore, it is nothing of the kind. Creation generates in us admiring awe at how things are, at the wonders of experienced reality; but all this version is saying is that a rational under standing of ourselves and our reality recognizes the given-ness of our capacit ies. His God-or-Nature, makes us see one way or the other. All humans can do is use the capacities they have. These capacities presuppose the existence of abilities not of our making and this undermines the whole self-directed edifice of the old system, in which each individual has to see and think as an egocentric. Unfortunately, Owen’s grasp of this egocentrism problem was too rudimen tary to protect him from utopianism. He thought real knowledge, once offered, would be irresistible, the blindfolds would be removed and the new system would quickly spring to life, and even for those who needed training for clear sight, there would be a foolproof education, guaranteed to produce the required results. On this basis, E. P. Thompson’s dismissive assessment of Owen’s intellectual efforts, that ‘however admirable Owen was as a man, he was a preposterous thinker’, would seem to be justified; yet, in so far as his thought was preposterous, it was so in just the way the fundamental intel lectual structures of the old system were.31 His utopianism was formulated by means of the classical rationalist/empiricist system, used by the cautious as well as the bold, and his exposure to the censure of the circumspect only arose because he, with his uncompromising commitment, subjected that system to strains it could not take. In rationalist mode, Owen claimed that universal benevolence had the certainty of a mathematical demonstration (‘These principles require only to be known in order to establish themselves’), while, in empiricist mode, 185


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he claimed: ‘Any general character . . . may be given to any community . . . by the application of proper means’;32 ‘Train any population rationally, and they will be rational.’33 The rationalist option bases its extravagant belief on the notion that self-evident truth, once revealed, simply has to receive our assent, but while saying that consistently seeing all people as our neighbours and equals will strike those with clear vision as self-evidently true, for those with bandaged vision, its logic will lose its life as soon as it enters their heads. When Owen was extraordinarily optimistic over the speed with which people would accept co-operation, he was so because self-evidence domin ated in his thinking, but there was also a very strong empiricist side to his optimism. Since he possessed clear vision, he felt it his vocation to instruct others so that they, too, could have their eyes opened, and empiricism pro vided him with the means to make the process seem straightforward. After all, the empiricist claim that circumstances form people, if taken seriously enough, leads to the extravagant belief that we can make anything of any body if we have full control over the conditions of their lives. We can see, therefore, how, by playing by the rules of the intellectuals of his day, he ended up with utopianism. Owen needed a different intellectual framework to articulate what inspired him, and, in spite of his public show of confidence, in private he must have sensed that his theory did not match his practice. Marx’s third thesis on Feuerbach, which observes that ‘the materialist doctrine concerning the changing of circumstances and upbringing forgets that circumstances are changed by men and that it is essential to educate the educator himself ’, provides a sound warning for those who think that, since they possess clear vision, they can set off to educate others to acquire it as well.34 Instruction cannot be the means to propagate clear thinking because, as Owen himself came to realize, clear vision cannot result from believing according to the bidding of others. Instruction makes egocentric individualists, and indi vidualists do not make co-operators. In any case, though authoritarian regimes follow this option with relish, their training systems, however rigorously applied, are as likely to produce rebels as devotees. Recollection of his own childhood experience may have weaned him off his early enthusi asm for training, for he knew that he himself had not been instructed to see the way he did. What had made him was a whole way of life, of practice, including, of course, the reading available to him. There was a complex chemistry to his own formation which had little to do with formal instruction. 186


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The message Owen was trying to convert into practice was neither empiri cist nor rationalist, though it is easy to see how what Jesus taught could be made to fit the expectations of both. Having eyes to see is an all-or-nothing business, which seems to fit the rationalist’s concept of intuition, or the believer’s trust in divine intervention; yet at the same time Owen recognized that the conditions of life are also important in securing vision. Otherwise there would be no point in saying that the poor, rather than the rich, are especially advantaged when it comes to seeing clearly. While seeing is a revelation, a life-changing transformation of understanding, therefore, it is likely to occur in contexts in which co-operative living generates common interest and the equality of persons. This makes Jesus something of an inter actionist, realizing that circumstance and personal endowment are inextricably interwoven, in just the way Owen had experienced them in his boyhood, but Owen had no way of articulating this complex model of human formation in his own day. As a result, he failed to trace the source of the vision problem far enough, and underestimated its seriousness. He was able to characterize the way in which the old system saw the world, but he could not explain what made people blindfolded in the first place. He was like a doctor who had managed to identify the symptoms of a disease but not the cause, but he had taken the first, and therefore most important, steps in diagnosis and treatment. In the true spirit of the Enlightenment, he helped liberate the teaching of Jesus from its religious shell and present its challenge to the modern world. He showed how only those who ‘know themselves’, who have the vision to understand the rationality of common interest, can make a success of mutual co-operation, and when they do, they will be free of the divisions, crimes and misery of an inevitably contradictory individualism.35 Only they will be capable of building a far superior system. The doctor who took up what Owen had left unfinished was, of course, Karl Marx, whose awareness of the importance of contradiction in the functioning and malfunctioning of capitalism was at least as keen as Owen’s. As he expressed it, so pithily, in the Grundrisse, ‘Capital itself is the moving contradiction, [in] that it presses to reduce labour time to a minimum, while it posits labour time, on the other side, as sole measure and source of wealth.’36 We need to consider, briefly, his writing on the vision issue if we are to try to supply Owen with the additional critical means he needed. Marx saw the vision problem as caused, not by being blindfolded, but by seeing things upside down. He agreed with Owen that we have the illusion 187


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that our ideas create the world we inhabit, but his particular genius led him to go on to attempt to explain just how this illusion was generated. Marx had the idea that nature had sprung on man a totally incompre hensible thing, the notion of common interest, generated by division of labour. This was something of which he could only make sense by framing it in the concepts he already had. He already had the notion of private or self-interest, which was part of his individualized life, but this could not make sense of what it was that enabled self-seekers to become obedient to principles of selflessness, co-operation and brotherhood. A principle is a mysterious thing. It is formed in people’s heads. No external orders are given, so nothing shows, yet its motivating power cannot be denied. The orders must be coming from beyond them, from an independent power alien to them (whether God or Mammon). This incomprehension of common interest not only robbed man of its benefits but made him forfeit his human identity in exchange for an instrumental status. His efforts to account for this world merely produced ideology, not real knowledge. In Capital, when the maker of a table, suffering from this incompre hension, takes it for sale, the inanimate object seems to take on a human life in the commodity market, while its maker becomes like the table before its animation. This makes him also a commodity in the labour market and alienated from his human identity. Just as, in religion, ‘the products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own . . . so it is in the world of commodities with the products of men’s hands’.37 A useful image in this regard was later supplied by Wittgenstein who sought to explain his point that the uniform appearance of words con fuses us unless we understand their particular application. Wittgenstein used the example of looking into the cabin of a locomotive, where we see handles all looking more or less alike. We might assume from this that they all have the same function, when of course they have a range of distinct functions. Those who only know handles as, say, the means for turning power on will assume all of them have the same function. Likewise, some one with only an eye for particular interest will treat common interest in the same way. Common interest appears to those who can see only private interest as though it is identical and functions in exactly the same way. It appears as the same kind of handle. So what makes people live by principles of co-operation and brotherhood must involve heteronomous laws which direct them to do so, just as the self-interested are directed. Since, however, what makes people live the life of universal benevolence relies on rational 188


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principles autonomously conceived, and not on directions from outside, behind the handle of common interest a mechanism for yet more heteron omy simply does not exist. There are no gods or commodities endowed with directive powers over humans. Because of this confusion, the world which Marx’s visual incompetents made was every bit as crazy as Owen’s old system, but although the analysis Marx gave of it was truly heroic in its scale and accuracy, it still had some thing of Owen’s utopianism about it. By rooting his diagnosis in division of labour rather than in something even more fundamental, Marx thought evolving nature itself, in due course, would solve man’s incomprehension problem for him. Beyond a certain point, the development of the powers of production would become a barrier for capital, so that ‘the last form of servitude assumed by human activity, that of wage labour on one side, capital on the other, is thereby cast off like a skin, and this casting-off itself is the result of the mode of production’.38 At least Owen’s similar suggestion that the Creator first blindfolded man just so that he would appreciate vision that much more when the blindfold was removed is so obviously fantastic as to make us wary of it. Through his tracing of the source of the vision problem only as far as economic process, Marx was, like Owen, treating an effect as if it was the cause. Selfish individualism could still flourish, what ever economic reorganization took place, because it was not division of labour as such which was the source of the problem. That he had still not penetrated to the source of the problem was observed by Simone Weil when she said, ‘Marx gives a first-rate account of the mechanism of capitalist oppression; but so good is it that one finds it hard to visualise how this mechanism could cease to function.’39 There had to be a way of stepping back to something more elemental in human development than division of labour. This becomes clear if we study the work of Jean Piaget. Piaget made the bold claim that the thought of young children was not just a rudimentary or unskilled version of adult thought but was actually different from it, though he complicated matters by saying that many adults also failed to think like adults, so that the differ ence of thought had little to do with age. Briefly, the difference he identified was between centred and de-centred thought. The de-centred thinker (in Owen’s terms, with eyes to see) has the rational capacity to think objectively rather than subjectively. He is therefore capable of any process involving detached reflection or the forming of hypotheses. He also understands the common interests of his social group and can live by internalized principles. 189


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He is capable of all this because he has personal consciousness, which he has developed through membership of a community in which there is mutual respect and common interest. The centred thinker, on the other hand, though unable to see beyond himself, does not have a unique thinking identity because he is unconscious of himself as a person. He cannot understand the interests of others or put himself in their shoes and, though he is still an individual with desires, it is the kind of individualism which is selfcentred and not critically aware. He termed this centred state ‘egocentric’ and, in explaining what causes this irrational condition, he offered some thing really significant for our understanding of Owen’s vision problem. Piaget’s account of child development (freely interpreted) runs something like this. Infants are sensori-motor creatures without adult concepts. Adults set out to nurture them and initiate them into their world, but there is a problem in this process which they can do nothing to avoid. Children are in need of help and direction and, in responding, parents have to take control and be authoritarian. Their relation to children has to be unequal and can not be mutual. As a result, the rational character of adult language, which manifests itself so extensively through notions of mutuality and common interest, is experienced by children only as controlling and authoritarian. Their interaction with parents, which is a necessary part of what is said, does not belong to it, but to the language of control and direction alone. Parents will talk to children as autonomous persons and display the concepts of mutual respect and common interest – they will not arbitrarily favour one child above another, and so on – but to maintain their physical wellbeing and security, they render the language of moral autonomy heteron omous. As far as the children are concerned, what should appear as an introduction to a radically different way of becoming human and rational, seems more of the same. On this basis, it would seem, human rationality would die out, since adults would be incapable of passing it on to each new generation, but, since this was obviously not the case, Piaget explained the acquisition of personality and rationality by children as something they do for themselves. They discover them in the social groups they form amongst their contemporaries, in which there are the necessary mutual relationships and common interests and, all being well, they will develop into adult de-centred thinkers, in spite of the barriers to understanding their unwitting parents have put in their way. When subject to the control of their parents, what form do children give to adult discourse? Adults tell them what to do, evidently powerfully bound 190


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themselves by the rules they impose on children and, since the principles which guide them are beyond children’s vision, the rules will seem to be imposed on the rule imposers in their turn. Indistinguishable from laws of nature, they must be non-negotiable and fixed for ever. Denied the means of understanding how rules are devised rationally, children think they are commands, if not from other adults, then from God. With no distinction between natural and human processes, the human is made to work as though it is natural and the natural to work in a human way. As a result, children treat moral issues as though they are natural or material. When, for example, the egocentric is told two stories, one in which a child breaks fifteen cups by accident and the other in which a child, in the process of getting some jam from the cupboard when his mother is out, breaks only one cup, he thinks the former is the serious offence because a large number of cups are broken. That the breaker of fifteen cups does not intend to do damage and is not misbehaving in any sense does not feature. Invisible concepts like intent and motive are not understood, so the issue has to be a material not a moral one. This absence of any grasp of the moral is just what characterized those blindfolded individualists in Owen’s insane society. For them, morality was always a matter of material self-interest, of profit and loss, and not of personal intention and vision. That someone could have a charitable and co-operative view of the social world, and not assess everyone in terms of material wealth, potential for profit, or status, was not understood or given any credence within that world. Though the notion of morality as enlightened self-interest was current before him, it was Adam Smith who helped give it acceptance in economic affairs when, in his Wealth of Nations, he observed: ‘Great objects . . . are evidently not necessary in order to occasion the greatest exertions. Rivalship and emulation render excellency, even in mean pro fessions.’ It was the material experience of free competition for work, in which all endeavour to ‘justle one another out of employment’ which obliged ‘every man to endeavour to execute his work with a certain degree of exactness’, and not some rational imperative or great object, like express ing one’s love for one’s neighbour by doing the best one can to secure his well-being, which was the proper spur to action or enterprise.40 Owen, like Kant, had his roots in the Gospels, and Kant’s writing on morality is more helpful for understanding his moral imperative of universal benevolence than anything written in the British empiricist tradition. Readers of Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals will know that he there 191


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made the point that morality was about understanding the rational principles binding on persons, not the calculation of material self-interest. ‘Empirical principles are wholly incapable of serving as a foundation for moral laws.’41 On the face of it, for those who share Owen’s enthusiasm for the develop ment of a new system, Piaget’s account of human development seems re assuring since, though children start out in life with confused vision, they find their own salvation. They are able to grow into adults who can think autonomously and distinguish between moral and material discourse, but Piaget drops hints that his view of the state of society was closer to Owen’s than at first appears. He says, for example, ‘Even the most rational of adults does not subject to his “moral experience” more than an infinitesimal pro portion of the rules that hedge him round.’42 In other words, he has little opportunity to use his autonomous reason even if he has it. The adult world, therefore, not only unconsciously makes children into egocentrics, it also conducts its own affairs in a largely egocentric manner, creating societies, now familiar to us, in which competitive individualism reigns, greed is the highest virtue and the limitless pursuit of money is thought eminently reasonable. In giving a more precise account of how kinds of understanding are con fused, and in seeing the generation of rationality in the community of equals, Piaget did much to secure Owen’s educational route to restoring the clarity of vision which is a prerequisite for creating a new system, however long it may take. Though Owen’s own educational methods were remarkable enough, Piaget’s understanding of the egocentrism problem enabled him to create a sound theoretical basis for cultivating rather than obstructing autonomy and rationality in society. If we want a rational society, we must cultivate co-operation rather than individualism. Individual competitive work towards examinations encourages emulation, setting one against another, and merely reinforces egocentrism, as does adult authoritarian control. Teachers must be collaborators and comrades, not masters. Of course, this form of education, which cultivates common interest and co-operative effort, could create nothing more than islands of subversion if the surrounding society continued to be firmly committed to competitive individualism. A practical reform strategy therefore has to involve the whole social mechanism, as Owen realized. Piaget’s diagnosis of the vision problem was as far-reaching as Marx’s but, in extending it to the process of child development, he arrived at a cause more fundamental than the commodity system or division of labour. He 192


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showed how, in Marx’s example of the table, the root of the problem of the commodification of the human already lay in the maker before he took his table to market. Only with this realization can a serious defence of rationality begin, and progress towards Owen’s new system be made, since, with our vision obscured by the egocentrism of childhood and further cultivated by an education in competitive individualism into adulthood, we can only become compliant recruits for a capitalism which, symbiotically, both needs our alienation to enable it to function and provides us, though in thrall, with our irrational sustenance. Now, more than ever, we can see the relevance of Owen’s irrepressible conviction that human reason can create a way of life in harmony with its moral imperatives, and workable because consistent. Even its advocates con cede that capitalism has to be reformed to satisfy our expectations, both moral and material. With Owen as our guide, there need be no pretence. While his renowned innocence may have caused him many disappointments, it was a positive asset when it came to recognizing that consistency works and contradiction does not. This is what it is to learn from his matter-of-factness, but, in learning from developments since his time, we also need to recognize that creating something like a new system cannot be a decisive, all-or-nothing business. When we see the vision problem in the light of Piaget’s analysis of ego centrism, any kind of naïve millenarian expectation becomes quite illusory. The human condition is not one which can be cured, however propitious the circumstances become, since it is chronic. We are all made egocentric in childhood and, like all chronic conditions, it lies in wait to take control, even when we have attained good health. The best we can do is to strive for rationality and limit the damage ‘rank insanity’ can do to our lives and our economic systems. There can be no dramatic resolution of our human predicament. Even Owen, the apparent millenarian, was able to show us this. Our brief exploration of Owen’s vision problem must end here, though there is much more that needs saying on the matter. Since he brought it to the attention of the modern world, we may be entitled to name it after him. Perhaps it was ‘the greatest discovery ever made by man’, since our survival will depend on it, though if Owen had been less boastful, he would have conceded that, thanks to the culture that nurtured him, he got the idea, originally, from the son of a carpenter who had been put to death for it, by the old system, well over a thousand years before he was born.43 193


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Notes SWRO, 1, p. 129. SWRO, 2, p. 224. â•‡3 Immanuel Kant, An Answer to the Question: ‘What is Enlightenment?’ in Kant: Political Writings, ed. Hans Siegbert Reiss (Cambridge, 2003), p. 54. â•‡4 SWRO, 1, p. 57. â•‡5 Ibid., pp. 133, 139. â•‡6 SWRO, 4, p. 54. â•‡7 Ibid. â•‡8 Laurence Sterne, ‘Preface’ to The Sermons of Mr. Yorick (vol. 3 of The Works of Laurence Sterne, n.p., 1805). â•‡9 SWRO, 1, p. 133. 10 Matthew 19:26, New English Bible (Oxford and Cambridge). 11 SWRO, 1, p. 232. 12 Ibid., p. 141. 13 Ibid., p. 124. 14 Ibid., p. 121. 15 SWRO, 2, pp. 226–7. 16 SWRO, 1, p. 215. 17 Ibid., p. 36. 18 Ibid., pp. 130, 131. 19 Ibid., p. 284. 20 Ibid., p. 131. 21 Ibid., p. 61. 22 Ibid., pp. 210, 218. 23 Luke 21:27, New English Bible. 24 SWRO, 1, p. 23. 25 Matthew 20. 26 SWRO, 1, p. 231. 27 SWRO, 2, p. 224. The word ‘heteronomy’ is used here as a label for a moral system in which fixed rules or directions are imposed on us from outside rather than from our own rational judgement. 28 SWRO, 1, p. 204. 29 SWRO, 4, p. 47. 30 SWRO, 2, p. 226. 31 E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London, 1968), p. 865. 32 SWRO, 1, p. 38. 33 Ibid., p. 54. 34 Karl Marx, ‘Theses on Feuerbach’, in Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, edited by C. J. Arthur (London, 1974 edn), p. 121. 35 SWRO, 1, p. 308. 36 Karl Marx, Grundrisse (London, 1993 edn), p. 706. â•‡1

â•‡2

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‘The Greatest Discovery Ever Made’ 37 38 39 40

41

42

43

Capital (London, 1976 edn), I, p. 165. Marx, Grundrisse, p. 749. Simone Weil, Oppression and Liberty (London, 1958), p. 40. Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Edinburgh, 1843 edn), pp. 318, 319. Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, ed. Lara Denis (Plymouth, 2005 edn), p. 99. Jean Piaget, The Moral Judgement of the Child, trans. Marjorie Gabian (Harmonds worth, 1977), ch. I.8. Robert Owen, Memorial to the Right Honourable the Lords of Her Majesty’s Treasury (Sevenoaks, 1858).

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10

Exporting the Owenite Utopia: Thomas Powell and the Tropical Emigration Society1 Malcolm Chase

It is four decades since the publication of J. F. C. Harrison’s groundbreaking Robert Owen and the Owenites in Britain and America. Harrison explored how early socialist ideologies percolated labour movements on both sides of the Atlantic, and the complex intersection of British and American com munitarianism around the personality of Robert Owen. Harrison noted the regularity with which working people embraced Owenite ideals while abandoning Owen and Owenite institutions. In Britain, most of those who sought a new moral world were content to do so within the British Isles. But there were a handful of groups for whom the new life, free and un confined, appeared realizable only overseas. The largest of these was the Tropical Emigration Society (TES), and its effective leader was Thomas Powell, one of those ‘working men whose names recur frequently in Owenite and working-class journals but about whom little is now known’.2 The TES was the most ambitious transnational migration to emerge from the organized labour movement during the first half of the nineteenth century. It also offers a window on to the global dimension of early Owenite socialism. Its impulse to cross the Atlantic derived from three powerful con victions. The first was enthusiasm for Owenite ideals, coupled with mounting frustration at Owen’s personal leadership and the Rational Society, estab lished to further his vision.3 The second was that a community of equals was realizable only beyond the constricting influence of British economic, social and political institutions. Indeed, Europe as a whole languished in ‘Egyptian mental darkness’, according to Johannes Etzler, the socialist and scientist whose ideas shaped the TES.4


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Malcolm Chase

The third conviction was that the potentiality of material abundance (a major stimulus to all early socialist and agrarian projects) was most readily obtainable freed of the constraints of the British political and socioeconomic system. However, the society rejected British labour’s common place belief in the USA as the beacon of freedom, in favour of the young republic of Venezuela. It was also a highly ambitious undertaking. The 250 ‘pioneers’ who sailed for the Caribbean in 1845–6 comfortably exceeded in number all those who ever resided at Harmony Hall, the official com munity of English Owenism. Yet, while the memory of Harmony remained green in British socialism, and has been subject to intensive scrutiny, it was the fate of the TES to sink into obscurity, racked by death and desertion, leaving a pathetic remnant clinging forlornly to its ideals in Trinidad, whither the society retreated when its Venezuelan colony failed.5 From the society’s inception among the artisan clubs of early Victorian London, to Powell’s lonely death in Trinidad in 1862, fulminating against Indian and Chinese migration to the island, a study of the TES provides insights into the international aspects of early socialism. What follows falls into two parts. The first retrieves Thomas Powell’s story; the second analyses the TES. Powell was born in 1802, like Owen, in Newtown, Montgomeryshire. In 1821 he moved to London to work as a shopman for a City ironmonger. It was here that Powell’s political apprenticeship began, as one of a trio of tradesmen, all recent migrants into London and quickly committed to the rapidly emerging world of co-operation. The others were William Lovett (an apostolic figure in British labour history), who arrived from west Cornwall in 1821 and worked for a cabinetmaker a short walk from Powell’s employer; and printer James Watson. He arrived from north Yorkshire in 1822, straight into employment by the renowned republican and disciple of Thomas Paine, Richard Carlile. Powell, Lovett and Watson were self-educated, earnest and idealistic. All were members of the London Co-operative Trading AssociÂ�ation, founded in 1827, which aimed to use revenues from retail co-operation to employ its members, and ultimately to generate sufficient funds to purchase land where its members would settle. ‘Why should poverty exist?’ the associ ation demanded; ‘should anyone, able and willing to work, be in want? The earth is large enough’. Both Lovett and Watson served the association as storekeeper.6 In 1829 the three became founder members of the British Association for Promoting Co-operative Knowledge. Lovett was its storekeeper and Powell its secretary. The two men lived together at this time. This association 198


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Exporting Utopia: Tropical Emigration

is best known for operating the Owenite Equitable Labour Exchange, using as a currency notes representing the labour input involved in producing the items that members traded; but it also aimed to settle its members on the land, as it made clear in a forceful address on ‘the real cause of destitution’: a rapacious aristocracy . . . claim as their exclusive property nearly all the land in the kingdom, and which enables them to place the whole of the working population in the position of slaves, by making their labour a marketÂ�able commodity . . . The question is, can the labouring population devize any efficient plan to emancipate themselves from such a state of degradation?.7

Powell was one of the seven leading members who signed this Address. He had become a citizen of an exhilarating world, in which organized labour seemed poised not to overturn the capitalist economy but rather to leap beyond it into an alternative world of its own creation. Like most workingclass Owenites, however, Powell was not a doctrinaire idealist. He publicly clashed with Owen over the feasibility of labour notes as a universal currency medium, and attacked Owen’s lofty disdain for democratic principles: ‘they complained of the influence of capital in oppressing the labouring classes, but they were about to raise up a new capital and a new set of capitalists.’8 But mainly Powell worked quietly in ‘backroom’ roles, collecting subscriptions and auditing accounts. He also lectured on currency issues to Radical groups in the capital.9 However, in autumn 1832, Powell forsook both London and co-operation to become a partner in a Welshpool ironmonger’s business. Very quickly he moved from the politics of a conjectured new moral world to the rough and tumble of the Montgomeryshire Boroughs parliamentary constituency, an arena dominated – politically and physically – by Powis Castle and its owner, an East India proprietor. Powell played a leading role in the com mittee that brought a Liberal candidate to within fourteen votes of victory at the general election of December 1832. After successfully petitioning against the result on the grounds of corruption, the Liberal was returned as MP. Immersion in small-town politics was something of a shock to the co-operator who had cut his political teeth among London’s artisan intelliÂ�gentsia. ‘Threats in all shapes were tried and when these failed other stronger measures were resorted to – ruin and loss of all that was dear to us was to be the consequence if we acted contrary to [Powis Castle’s] desire.’10 199


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A reputation as an articulate and independent speaker led him to play a formative role in Montgomeryshire Chartism. In 1837 he teamed up with the veteran unstamped pressman Henry Hetherington, the London Working Men’s Association missionary to mid-Wales. But Powell’s personal life was in turmoil. He was an indifferent businessman; his politics cost him customers and may also explain why he was struck out of the will of a wealthy elderly cousin. In 1838 Powell was declared bankrupt and his house, shop and stock sold from under him. But his Chartist activities continued unabated and, indeed, his rhetoric acquired a harder edge. In April 1839, Powell (speaking in tandem with Hetherington) told a crowd of more than 2,000 in Newtown: I have at all times stood forth as your leader in the warfare and I hope you will not now forsake me if called upon, but oppose force to force if necessary – some of your members want us to employ moral force – what will moral force do for us, what has it done for us? You have groaned enough under tyranny already and know it will not avail you. Be determined and your opponents will not withstand you – your number is sufficient. Be close together and you will march thro’ every town and city in the kingdom.11

In the summer of 1839, following riots in the Welsh weaving centre of Llanidloes, Powell was found guilty of seditious speaking and sentenced to a year’s imprisonment.12 On his release he was homeless, in debt and estranged from his family. He therefore returned to London to work as a shopman for Hetherington. He became secretary of the London Atheistical Society and assisted George Jacob Holyoake – an energetic figure bridging Chartism, free thought and co-operation – in running the Anti-Persecution Union.13 From October 1844, however, Powell devoted most of his energies to the TES. He was its founding secretary and edited its journal, Morning Star. The TES enthusiastically subscribed to the back-to-the-land ideal, a vital component of popular politics in the 1840s; but the land to which it aspired was in the Venezuelan republic rather than the cold clays of Britain. In abandoning home colonization, espoused by Robert Owen, in favour of a colony overseas, it attracted significant support from dissident Owenites within the largest and most influential branches of Owen’s Rational Society, as well as prominent national voices in the movement, for example John Goodwyn Barmby and James Hill.14 Some 1,600 people across forty-nine branches subscribed to its shares. An additional attraction was the active participation of the American inventor 200


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and visionary Johannes Etzler, in 1843–5 a prominent figure in English socialist and Chartist circles.15 Etzler had both resided and lectured at the Ham Common (Surrey) Concordium, an influential centre of ‘non-Owenite’ socialism, existing in largely amicable opposition to Owen (who visited the community in 1843).16 Etzler’s work featured regularly in the Radical press.17 Ably abetted by his business partner Conrad Stollmeyer, it captured the attention and approval of figures as diverse as Bronterre O’Brien, Joseph Clinton Robertson (formerly a close associate of Thomas Hodgskin and co-founder of the London Mechanics Institute) and the parliamentary printer Luke Hansard.18 Wave, tidal and solar energy lay at the heart of Etzler’s technological vision. Unfortunately the prescience of this vision was unaccompanied by any capacity for its practical realization.19 But this was not obvious in the context of the technologically exhilarating 1840s. Etzler’s proposals for vast tidal-powered ships were compared with Brunel’s Great Britain, and his machinery to grub up virgin forest was routinely compared with another novelty of the age, the railways. Were his ideas any more farfetched than electrolysis or railways had seemed even thirty years before? asked Hansard.20 The TES’s magazine was clear: Let this society be a beacon by which all labourers in the vineyard of industry shall be lighted to the haven of content and independence, which the bene volent Robert Owen has often wished for and talked of, but the intelligent and practical Etzler has pointed out the way to attain.21

In November 1845 an initial group, numbering fifty-seven, left for Trinidad, where the society established a base from which its community at Guinamita in Venezuela would be supplied, a short journey across the Gulf of Paria.22 Members lost no time in promulgating their beliefs: a Baptist missionary noted ‘they have little regard for religion in many cases, and in some they seemed filled with hostility against it’.23 Powell led a second party of 193 settlers, leaving Britain in March 1846 and arriving at Port of Spain, Trinidad, on May Day. Only on arrival did they learn the fate of those who had pre ceded them. Of thirty-seven pioneers who had sailed on to Guinamita nine had died there; twenty-four had fled, mostly back to Trinidad, where five more died and eighteen had been hospitalized. Among them were ‘the most aggravated cases of fever he ever saw in this country’, thought a doctor with thirty-four years’ experience on the island. The land purchased for them in Venezuela was a tangle of brushwood; the only available food was salt fish, 201


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tasso (Venezuelan dried beef), and plantains; drinking water had to be fetched from a brackish swamp. Accommodation was limited to an opensided thatched shed and the hulk of a schooner, wrecked on the beach.24 Trinidad’s governor had sent the surgeon from the island’s garrison to persuade the Guinamita party to leave. On arriving he found ‘two men and two children alone remaining’, one of whom died within hours of being brought back to Port of Spain. In the searing heat the pioneers had lost almost every vestige of dignity: for example, too incapacitated to clear ground for a committal, one burial party had interred a colonist (in a coffin made from the last remnants of the colony’s furniture) close to the beach; but ‘when the grave was dug the water came in so fast that they had to stand upon the coffin to keep it down till the grave was filled up’.25 With at least one member of the island’s Council of Government alleging murder, a committee of inquiry was appointed into events in Guinamita. Three survivors were interviewed, including Thomas Brooks, who had returned to Port of Spain to confront Etzler with the enormity of the chal lenges faced by the pioneers. The presiding genius of the project had never left the island’s capital and told Brooks ‘that it was unfortunate but that his actions were controlled by two agents’, whom he had appointed to lead the pioneers. He then promptly disappeared, first to Caracas, then to the United States, and was never seen again. Conrad Stollmeyer dismissed Brooks with the comment, ‘no great achievement had ever been effected without death.’26 To a doctor at the Trinidad hospital, Stollmeyer claimed the deaths were ‘in nearly every case the consequence of individual carelessness, blind selfishness and want of judgment’. Powell feebly sought to defend Stollmeyer in the colony’s press, ‘determined to account for everything unaccountable’, in the words of one editorial that dismissed the TES while gleefully exposing Etzler and Stollmeyer’s part in a spurious project to develop a railway on Trinidad.27 The TES pioneers were now irrevocably divided between those wanting to go home or move on to the western United States and a smaller group, led by Powell, determined or forced by circumstance to tough things out. The periodic reports Powell sent back to Britain were an almost unmitigated chronicle of death, dissension and despair. Bitterly, he recorded, ‘Etzler, has ran away to America, afraid to meet his dupes. His accounts unsettled, no cause given, no explanation entered into.’28 There was a flurry of optimism in August 1846 when a second attempt was made to settle in Venezuela. His spirits revived, Powell sent to Britain an account of his ‘truly delightful’ voyage, ‘surrounded by aquatic birds of all colours and sizes, and fish are 202


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seen sporting in hundreds around you’. But this attempt fared hardly any better than the first and Guinamita was soon abandoned. A large contingent sailed for the USA: ‘the vessel has not been heard of since and is feared lost.’29 Forlorn and demoralized, the remaining twenty-three men, eleven women and sixteen children regrouped at a small estate near Port of Spain, which they attempted to cultivate communally. The settlement was poign antly named by Powell, Erthig – an anglicization of Erddig, the name of one of the most palatial great estates in Wales.30 Back in Britain Morning Star was abandoned: a sympathetic Bronterre O’Brien assumed the task of publishing TES business through his National Reformer. The remaining TES shareholders reconfigured their association as the United States Emigration Society, its constitution averring: ‘We recognise no distinction of sex, class, sect, country or colour.’31 Not without a certain smugness (for the society’s failure vindicated the home colonization strategy of the Chartist land plan), the Northern Star commented: ‘The emigrants to that south American paradise Venezuela have for the most part died like rotten sheep: the remainder are living in misery.’32 There is scant authority for a New York Times report of 1859: ‘the exiled Chartists [who] came to the island some years ago . . . all are doing well.’33 Most who could left Erthig, even if it was for menial work elsewhere in Trinidad, and were ‘absorbed into the lower echelons of the whites’, in the words of the sole history of the island to mention this migration. ‘Sur prisingly little is heard of them afterwards.’34 Only Stollmeyer stayed and thrived, living on to the early years of the twentieth century. He edited The Trinidadian for a time, though his main business interest was exploiting Trinidad’s naturally occurring pitch lake and experimenting with refining petroleum from pitch.35 But Thomas Powell scratched a living at Erthig until 1858 when he too gave up the land to work for a Port of Spain newsagent and bookseller. ‘If my circumstances would allow me I would again try London for a living,’ he wrote to Holyoake in 1862. He complained of how Watson and other British socialists had deserted him: ‘Not a letter has reached me in 6 or 7 years although I wrote several letters but no answers arriving after repeated attempts to hear from them I gave up in despair.’ However the fundamental reason for his continued exile was evident in his admission that ‘unÂ�fortun ately I have been foolish enough to beget a family and am tied to the Island unless I could leave behind sufficient for these poor creatures to live’.36 We may surmise it was not poverty alone that prevented Powell from bringing 203


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his family to Britain (though by 1862 he had fathered five children, all under twelve, and it must have been a major consideration). Though Powell in this letter was silent on the matter, on a different document Holyoake scribbled cryptically against his name, ‘Married a coloured Wife.’37 Powell’s dismissal of his ‘poor creatures’ is indicative of a casual racism typical of white West Indian males (many of whom fathered black families, not all recognizing a continuing personal responsibility as at least Powell clearly did). A degree of self-loathing is evident in Powell’s brief allusion to his family, sadly consistent with the rest of what was to be his last-ever letter to Britain. He had quarrelled with, and left, his employer; he complained of the cost of food, of high taxation, of the politically supine and rootless white population, of the effects of African, Indian and Chinese immigration on ‘native’ (i.e. former slave) labour. Over 13,000 indentured labourers had been brought to Trinidad from China and India by 1862.38 Powell was wit nessÂ�ing the transformation of the plantation economy and the consequent explosion of poor black squatter cultivation. The irony of the post-abolition economy resting on another form of un-free labour cannot have been lost on him. But before the year was out Powell was dead.39 What can we conclude from the story of Thomas Powell and the TES? Although the naïvety of its conception forcibly strikes the modern observer, in the almost millenarian atmosphere engendered by Owenism in the 1840s, its appeal was immediate and exhilarating. The TES struck a raw nerve with Owen loyalists. It advertised heavily in New Moral World, the Rational Society’s official newspaper, but met increasing hostility from its editor George Fleming. This was especially so after Stollmeyer wrote to the paper criticizing the flailing attempts to keep Harmony Hall afloat, ‘in a taxed and overburdened monarchical country [and] in a cold climate which requires a multiplicity of labours to withstand and overcome’.40 Correspondents responded with critiques of Etzler’s inventions and accounts of American communities that were teetering on the edge of collapse. Fleming blamed disappointments at Harmony Hall on the movement having ‘been deserted by so many’: which is the best and speediest mode of securing to the professed disciples of the Social System the practical and permanent benefits of that system? Is it by a united, vigorous, and determined effort at home, or a division of their energies into many sectional attempts – some here, and others upon foreign shores?41 204


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‘There is no need to go the Tropics yet,’ declared Isaac Ironside, one of the main financial backers of Harmony Hall. ‘Whenever we wish it,’ he added optimistically, ‘Harmony will be successful.’42 As Edward Royle’s study of Harmony has shown, Owenism was imÂ�plod ing at this time under the combined weight of factionalism among residents and supporters of the community, overwhelming and unrealistic expect ations, and Owen’s (hitherto deftly concealed) financial incompetence.43 It is clear from the chronology that the TES benefited from an unlocking of hitherto latent frustration at the direction of the Rational Society, en gendered by the steady decline in Harmony Hall’s fortunes (which had been apparent from the summer of 1842) and with it the erosion of con fidence in Owen himself. The TES was also the beneficiary of two broader trends. The first was an upturn in the trade cycle in the mid-1840s, which increased wage levels and regularity of employment among the social con stituencies from which the society overwhelmingly drew support. The second was the failure of successive Chartist surges in 1839 and 1842. This instilled a wideÂ�spread sense of disillusion, especially so among the London trades: the influential Chartist and socialist Allen Davenport, for example, did not bother even to mention Chartism in the autobiography he published in 1845.44 In ‘My native land goodnight’, written just before he emigrated, Thomas Powell captured this sentiment perfectly: The method of plundering the labourer of the chief proportion of his produce is so thoroughly systematised and established in this country . . . that the utter futility of any endeavour by industry to introduce a new and honester state of things, is every day becoming more and more apparent. Working men know that the suffrage is a right, but . . . liberty is but a name, under any form of government, where the present social arrangements exist; where society is divided into two parts – producers and consumers. Why then should we struggle for the very unlikely chance of obtaining a mere vote? . . . We firmly believe that political excitement has here sank into its grave, never more to be resuscitated.45

Gregory Claeys, however, has argued that support for the TES was indicative of a significant shift in British socialist attitudes to emigration, particularly, ‘in reference to general Owenite hostility to emigration as a de facto capitu lation to Malthusian ideas of over-population’.46 As late as 1839 the Owenite Co-operative Congress had robustly dismissed Birmingham’s Social United Interest Colonization Society, while New Moral World excoriated emigration projects for pandering to short-term self-interest, calling on socialists to 205


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raise ‘the standard of revolt against an irrational system of society, in the very centre of its power; and here, in England, shall the great battle against the antagonist principles of competition and co-operation be fought’.47 However, it is important to register that the transition represented by the TES was not indicative of any reconciliation between socialists and Malthus ianism. J. C. Robertson, for example, was an energetic anti-Malthusian who used the Trades’ Newspaper to attack Francis Place’s campaign to limit over population.48 Morning Star emphasized ‘the vastness and fertility’ of Venezuela. ‘There is no talk there of over population,’ wrote James Elmslie Duncan, the paper’s first editor; ‘a Malthus or a Marcus would there stand but poor chance – these are animals that are not bred or encouraged in the Tropics.’49 In the same spirit, the TES presented a copy of Etzler’s Paradise within the Reach of All Men to Richard Oastler, the anti-Poor Law campaigner and putative author of the notorious anti-Malthusian satire Marcus.50 At the root of TES ideology was a profound attachment to the potentiality of material abundance, a decidedly non-Malthusian tenet that also lay at the heart of Owen’s thinking. The belief that contemporary society was structured in such a way that material abundance was beyond reach was recurrent in early British and Irish socialist thought. It underpinned Radicals’ confidence in the efficacy of spade husbandry. But it can be discerned elsewhere – in the text of the first Chartist national petition for example. Not only was the ideology of the TES resolutely anti-Malthusian, but interest in emigration was a prominent element in organized Owenism almost from its inception. Its earliest organization, the London Co-operative Society, spawned not only the London Co-operative Trading Association (in which Powell was prominent, as we have seen) but also the Pennsylvanian Cooperative Emigration Society, the rules of which could be obtained from the senior society’s Red Lion Square headquarters.51 The Social Community Company, formed by restless Manchester socialists in 1832, sent a party of twenty-three ‘to try the principle of mutual co-operation, on something like the Owenian plan’ on land near Cincinnati, Ohio.52 The Birmingham-based Social United Interest Colonization Society has already been mentioned. By 1840, the haemorrhage of support through emigration was so great that the Rational Society, British Owenism’s official organization, started granting charters to overseas branches, commencing with a group who had purchased land in Illinois.53 It is clear that the TES belonged to a late and especially vigorous growth of socialist engagement in emigration. Other emigration societies emerged 206


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from the Owenite milieu at the same time and largely reflected the social profile and political preoccupations of the TES. Of these, the Staffordshire Potters’ Joint Stock Emigration Society (founded 1844) is the only welldocumented example.54 Like the TES it was born of deep frustration at the fortunes of the socialist movement; and like the TES it projected life in its colonies as a secular millennium: ‘an unfettered life of ease, health, happi ness, and content, amidst the various scenes of nature, and the handiworks of God!’55 In 1842, fifteen Nottingham Owenites left to found a further Illinois colony. Soon after, Huddersfield Owenism was similarly weakened when twenty-five impatient aspirants for community emigrated, apparently to Canada.56 The Rational Society’s Lambeth branch was likewise afflicted.57 New Moral World carried reports of attempts at community in Australia and New Zealand, as well as far more popular American destinations. A promin ent member of the Pant Glas community (established in Merionethshire by a Liverpool secession from the Rational Society) subsequently advertised services for intending emigrants, and hotel accommodation in the port.58 A new periodical, the Tribune and Home and Foreign Colonization Journal, sprang up in early 1845 to service the burgeoning socialist emigration movement.59 The greatest concentration of socialist enthusiasm for emigration was located in London. In June 1843, disenchanted by events at Harmony Hall, the prominent London Owenite Thomas Hunt led a group of twenty-one pioneers from the Equality Society (based at John Street) to Wisconsin. John Green, formerly editor of the paper issued by the unofficial Owenite colony at Manea Fen, Cambridgeshire, was among the party. Their colony, ‘Equality’, was founded at Spring Lake and augmented by further settlers in 1845.60 Hunt’s project in turn spawned the Democratic Co-operative Society for Emigrating to the Western States of North America, based at Hudson’s radical coffee house in Covent Garden. Its secretary was the English Icarian socialist Charles Sully. Avowedly ‘founded on Co-operation’, the society demanded that its members ‘renounce the tyrant Trinity of King, Priest and Trade’ and anticipated the ‘gradual fusion’ of its constituent com munities ‘into one great communist state’.61 Two other societies operated from the John Street institute: the Utilitarian Co-operative Emigration Association and the Co-operative Emigration Society (the latter had at least two other cognates in the provinces, one of them in Manchester).62 The Albion Phalanx of Associated Emigrants met at a radical coffee house opposite Carlile’s Rotunda, another nerve centre of metropolitan radicalism. Combined meetings of the Albion and Democratic 207


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societies, dubbed ‘the Social emigrants’, convened at the Parthenium in St Martin’s Lane, the preferred location for TES meetings and a prominent labour movement meeting place.63 Clearly, the TES was more than simply an isolated response to the decline of the Harmony Hall community; and it cannot be neatly aligned with a shift in attitudes to Malthusianism. Systemic features of English labour account for much of the support it enjoyed. Unsurprisingly, the geography of support for the TES mirrored the map of Owenite socialism. Some branches actually met in Halls of Science.64 Huddersfield was the only major Owenite centre not represented among the forty-nine branches of the TES while, of the latter’s principal centres, only Todmorden, Watford and Wellingborough were unrepresented within organized Owenism.65 The overwhelming majority (forty-two) of TES branches were English and, apart from Powell and two Glaswegians, all the TES colonists were English. Where occupations are known, the social profiles of Owenite communitarians and TES activists were largely identical. In both organizations the typical communitarian was a skilled artisan. These were workers who felt keenly the erosion of discretion and control over the disposal of their labour. But there are two important caveats. In the TES especially the decaying trades of woolcombing and hand loom weaving were also prominent. And Harmony’s residents included a considerable bourgeois cohort, reflecting the significant circle of wealthier patrons gathered round Owen.66 So the TES (in spite of the costs that emigration involved) was more plebeian in character, reflecting more accurately both the social profile of grassroots Owenism and widespread frustration with Owen’s personal tutelage of the movement. It is instructive that only Huddersfield, the liveliest and most-resilient of the Yorkshire Owenite localities, resisted the TES when the latter had branches in nearby Bradford, Bingley, Halifax, Keighley and Leeds.67 As in the Chartist land plan, multiple shareholding among TES members was unusual.68 Comparing itself with other emigration schemes, the society proudly claimed: ours is the only one that has been established by the emigrants themselves, the funds raised by their own hard earnings, and under regulations made by themselves, that admits not of inequality, [and] erases the name of master and servant (other words for tyrant and slave).69

Morning Star was illustrated on only one occasion. Tellingly, the depiction was not of a tropical community but a scene of aristocratic excess at a London 208


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party, while a female working-class victim of seduction died in the street outside. It was a graphic image very much in tune with the ‘old corruption’ trope of radical politics, and in tune too with the sentiments of the British Association for Promoting Co-operative Knowledge address on the causes of destitution that Powell had helped devise fifteen years before. It also underlines the avowedly class-specific, even class-conscious, character of the TES (something that makes the project’s catastrophic failure all the more poignant and affecting).70 Yet it would be a crude reduction to present the TES as a solidly prole tarian political movement. Like the Chartist land plan, it exhibited rather more in common with the railway mania of the 1840s than labour historians may be comfortable with. A thousand TES shares were sold within twelve weeks of its launch.71 The obverse of contemporary belief in the potential for material abundance was a widespread susceptibility to the lure of readily profitable share flotations. Indeed, almost certainly unbeknown to the major ity of the TES membership, Etzler and Stollmeyer were – respectively – engineer and company secretary of a projected Trinidad railway company, shares in which they floated in London shortly before Stollmeyer left with the first cohort of TES emigrants in November 1845.72 Thus did the TES intersect with one of the least socialist aspects of the spirit of the age. However, the society also exhibited the same faith in the Enlightenment tenets of progress, science and social science as Owenism. ‘What a country for the combination of science and all glorious nature, human enlighten ment and virtue,’ enthused Duncan (Powell’s predecessor as editor of Morning Star) about Venezuela; ‘now indeed may the disciples of an Owen, or a Fourier, build their aspirations into beautiful and tangible reality.’73 Duncan, Etzler and Stollmeyer were all vegetarians and there is evidence that other TES members were too.74 Every facet of Etzler’s predictions of tropical fecundity concerned vegetable foodstuffs. Because of his eye-catching inventions, the society perhaps appeared more in thrall to technology than it really was. A careful reading of Morning Star suggests that Etzler’s technocratic utopia did not loom as large in TES thinking as those who ridiculed it claimed. The most consistent emphasis was on the appeal of emigrating ‘to a land where the equality of man is acknowledged – where there are no unjust and sickening distinctions of rank – where kings and nobles are but things of a darker age’.75 As the Venezuelan settlement foundered, an enquiry by the governor of Trinidad revealed no disposition on the part of any survivor to connect it to Etzler’s vision.76 Political factors were important too. Simon 209


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Bolivar was often invoked by British Radicals, alongside George Washington, as one of ‘the illustrious dead who . . . have contributed to the cause of freedom’; and the initial prospectus of the TES praised Venezuela as ‘the steadiest of the South American governments, the most liberal in offers for settlers there, granting perfect liberty in religion and social management’.77 The application for a land grant, made by the society’s pioneers to the Venezuelan president, lauded his ‘free and Enlightened Country’ and eagerly anticipated ‘taking advantage of so liberal a Govt. to escape from over-toil & the fiscal oppression of their Native Country’.78 However, there was a profound mismatch between such idealism and the reality of Venezuelan attitudes to British colonialism. Owenites like Powell saw themselves linked to Venezuela as, effectively, children of a democratic Enlightenment; but Venezuelans were resentful of Britain’s informal empire in the those parts of the Caribbean it did not directly rule. Fearful of the British presence, literally in its midst in the enclave territory of British Guyana, and exploited economically by UK-controlled legal and contraband traders who operated out of Trinidad, there was little reason why Venezuela should have accorded the TES colonists favourable treatment.79 The TES migration was in many ways atypical. However, part of its appeal derived from metropolitan notions of how both colonies and former colonies were ripe for exploitation by European adventurers, notions reinforced by a dis missive view of the economic activities of indigenous peoples. ‘It [the TES] asks not for land now occupied, but turns its attention to territories at present of value to nobody, which it proposes to make valuable.’80 Alongside this political naïvety marched a literally fatal misconception about the nature of the tropical climate and the ease with which its land could be cultivated. Along with Venezuela’s republican constitution, the fecundity of the ‘ever-green’ tropics was the main attraction: ‘1 acre may be made to produce as much as 50 in this country, in such nutritive production as the banana and maize and others’; ‘On all sides we hear the cry, “The land! the land!” Men are looking to this source of all wealth, determined if man be doomed to “gain the bread in the sweat of his brow”, that they will for the future with the sweat at least have the bread!’81 The language was masculine but the stance of the TES was as determinedly feminist as any of the Owenite organizations. It promised to ‘emancipate the weaker from the stronger sex’. At one stage plans were discussed for its officers to be elected from male and female quotas to ensure at least one-third were always women. Women routinely addressed TES meetings. For example in October 210


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1845 toolmaker’s wife Maria Bissell called on the society ‘to be a guiding star to the working and oppressed classes of those countries where the soil is monopolized, and where the institutions make the rich richer and the poor poorer’.82 Bissell’s thoughts in 1848 on having to become a domestic servant in a Trinidad planter’s household, leaving her husband digging at Erthig, are not recorded. Maria Bissell’s employment history underlines that the TES residuum occupied an ambiguous and dislocated position in Trinidadian society. Of course all transnational migrants, even white Britons, experienced disÂ�loca tion, at least initially. But for Powell and his comrades it was profound. Conventionally Trinidad’s white population was regarded as an impenetrable upper class, ‘a caste apart’.83 Early Victorian Trinidad was ‘still a patently unEnglish colony’. Roman Catholicism was the dominant religion and French the dominant language (the island’s newspapers, Port of Spain Gazette and Trinidad Spectator comprised both French- and English-language material).84 Most recent white immigrants were civil servants. Stollmeyer aside, the only TES colonists known to have ‘got on’ did so by joining the island’s police force.85 The poverty of the TES colonists (and in Powell’s case also choice of marriage partner) placed them in a position of marked inferiority in relation both to other ‘European’ Trinidadians and to the French-speaking ‘coloured’ middling sort. Even Stollmeyer failed to assimilate to the white caste, a newspaper article of 1894 pointedly placing him among ‘the élite of French creoles’. Stollmeyer’s sense of racial insecurity is unpleasantly apparent in a protest he sent to the Colonial Office five years later, condemning the rumoured appointment of a black Attorney General for the colony: ‘this should not be as a niger [sic] should not govern a white man’.86 Unlike the Chartist land plan, the TES was not a defining episode in the evolution of the broader movement of which it was part; nor did it occupy the commanding position within Owenism of Harmony Hall, or generate comparable emotional intensity. Yet the TES, along with the other emi gration schemes that emerged from Owenism, was eloquent testimony both to the persuasiveness of Owen’s vision and to mounting frustration in the 1840s at the failure to translate that vision into enduring reality. As the Potters’ Joint Stock Emigration Society lamented, The principles of . . . Home Colonization have been generally tried by the working population of this country, and have as generally failed. We have had our ‘Labour Exchanges’ and ‘Co-operative Stores’. BUT WHERE ARE 211


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THEY NOW? Alas, if all the crushed hopes, vexations, and disappointments consequent on those experiments of struggling labour could be laid before the public what a frightful catalogue we should have! How many hopes would be seen destroyed! – how many hard-earned savings scattered to the four winds of heaven!87

Crushed hopes, vexations and disappointments are all too apparent in the history of the TES. ‘All Societies gradually degenerate,’ Thomas Powell observed in the final lines of his last surviving letter. ‘Masons, Odd Fellows, &c have all been tried to form a compact society, useful to themselves but have failed, gradually degenerating into eating & dining clubs.’ Yet even at this late stage, he admitted still to being ‘tempted to try Co-operation’.88 Thomas Powell deserves recognition for his dogged pursuit of a new moral world, a pursuit that alerts us to how important Owen and his ideas were to the men and women who sought to transcend the systemic inequalities of the first industrial society.

Notes I am grateful to Christopher Prior for his comments on an earlier version of this chapter, and to three conference audiences with whom it was shared (Robert Owen and His Legacy, Gregynog, 2008; Transnational Labour History, Coleraine, 2008; the Social History Society, Warwick, 2009). â•‡2 J. F. C. Harrison, Robert Owen and the Owenites in Britain and America: The Quest for the New Moral World (London, 1969), p. 199. â•‡3 The Rational Society was the title assumed by the official Owenite body, the United Community Society of Rational Religionists in May 1842. The latter had been formed in May 1839 by the merger of Association of All Classes of All Nations and the National Community Friendly Society, both of which bore Owen’s personal imprimatur. â•‡4 J. A. Etzler, Emigration to the Tropical World for the Melioration of All Classes of People of All Nations (Ham, 1844), p. 22. â•‡5 See particularly R. G. Garnett, Co-operation and the Owenite Socialist Communities in Britain, 1825–45 (Manchester, 1972), pp. 165–213, and Edward Royle, Robert Owen and the Commencement of the Millennium: A Study of the Harmony Community (Manchester, 1998). â•‡6 Weekly Free Press, 14 March 1829; see also Lion, 16 October 1829, W. Lovett, Life and Struggles of William Lovett (London, 1876), pp. 40–2; I. J. Prothero, Artisans and Politics in Early Nineteenth-Century London (Folkestone, 1979), pp. 241 and 379 n. 8. â•‡1

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BL Add. MS 27,822, fol. 17; Magazine of Useful Knowledge and Co-operative Miscellany, 30 October 1830; Malcolm Chase, ‘The People’s Farm’: English Radical Agrarianism, 1775–1840 (Oxford, 1988), pp. 149–51; Prothero, Artisans, p. 242. ‘Address of the British Association for Promotion of Co-operative Knowledge to the labourers, mechanics and artisans of the United Kingdom’, Political Letters and Pamphlets, 31 December 1830. â•‡8 Speech at a meeting (chaired by Owen) at the Equitable Labour Exchange, quoted in Crisis, 25 August 1832. â•‡9 See for example: PMG, 11 February, 21 April, 14 July and 15 September 1832; Magazine of Useful Knowledge, 30 October 1830. 10 Quoted in E. R. Morris, ‘Thomas Powell – Chartist, c.1802–1862’, Montgomeryshire Collections, 80 (1992), 95–121: 104–5; see also Malcolm Chase, Chartism: A New History (Manchester, 2007), pp. 87–91. 11 TNA HO 40/46, 6 May 1839, prosecution brief for R. v. Powell; Morris, ‘Powell’, p. 113. See also NS, 20 April 1839 and for earlier speeches Shrewsbury Chronicle, 4 January 1839;TNA HO 40/40, J. Davies to HO, 29 December 1838; and O. Ashton, ‘Chartism in mid-Wales’, Montgomeryshire Collections, 62 (1971), 10–57: 23–4. 12 The Times, 3 and 6 May 1839; David Williams, John Frost (Cardiff, 1939), pp. 158–9; Ashton, ‘Chartism in mid-Wales’, 25–33; TNA HO 40/46, 25 May 1839; Morris, ‘Powell’, 111. 13 W. J. Linton, Memories (London, 1895), pp. 85–7; Edward Royle, Victorian Infidels (Manchester, 1974), pp. 87–8, 315. 14 Royle, Robert Owen, p. 230, notes that both the Manchester and the London A1 branches of the Rational Society supported the TES. The Glasgow delegate to the 1844 Congress deplored the impact the TES was having on his branch, NMW, 25 May 1844; see also 5 October and 23 November 1844. Christine Latteck, Revolutionary Refugees: German Socialism in Britain, 1840–60 (London, 2006), p. 34. 15 Gregory Claeys, ‘John Adolphus Etzler, technological utopianism and British socialism: the Tropical Emigration Society’s Venezuelan mission and its social context, 1833–1848’, English Historical Review, 101 (1986), 351–75, is greatly preferable to Steven Stoll, The Great Delusion: A Mad Inventor, Death in the Tropics, and the Utopian Origins of Economic Growth (New York, 2008). 16 James Gregory, Of Victorians and Vegetarians: The Vegetarian Movement in Nineteenth-Century Britain (London, 2007), pp. 28–9. For the Concordium see J. E. M. Latham, Search for a New Eden: James Pierrepoint Greaves (1777– 1842), the Sacred Socialist and his Followers (Cranberry, NJ, 1999). 17 Crisis, 17 May 1834; NMW, 21 November 1835, 4 and 11 June 1836; Cleave’s Weekly Police Gazette, 9 April 1836; Cleave’s Penny Gazette of Variety and Amusement, 22 July, 5 and 19 August 1843, 6 January 1844; English Chartist Circular, 83 (September 1842), 128 (July 1843); NS, 22 July, 12 August, 2 and 9 September, 21 October 1843, 29 June–13 July, 27 July and 19 August 1844. â•‡7

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Conrad Frederick Stollmeyer, a German, had been a bookseller and publisher of socialist and homoeopathic literature in Philadelphia. He claimed to have been on the committee of the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society, Creole Bitters, 3 May 1904, cited in Donald Wood, Trinidad in Transition: The Years after Slavery (London, 1968), p. 85. Buonarrotti’s History of Babeuf’s conspiracy for Equality . . . translated from the French Language, and illustrated by original notes, etc, by Bronterre (London, 1836), p. 219; Dialogue on Etzler’s Paradise: between Messrs Clear, Flat, Dunce and Grudge (London, 1843); [J. C. Robertson, (ed.),] Mechanics Magazine, 4 February, 21 October 1843, 11 October 1845. 19 W. H. G. Armytage, Heavens Below: Utopian Experiments in England, 1560– 1960 (London, 1961), pp. 184–94; Claeys, ‘Etzler’, 351–75; Joel Nydahl, ‘Introduction’, in Collected Works of John Adolphus Etzler (New York, 1977), pp. vii–xxxviii. 20 ‘Minor Hugo’ [Luke Hansard], Hints and Reflections for Railway Travellers and Others, or A Journey to the Phalanx (London, 1843), II, p. 178. See also I, pp. 69–70, 96–9. 21 MS, 14 June 1845. 22 NMW, 26 October, 30 November, 14 December 1844, 3 May 1845; MS, 11 October 1845, 10 January 1846. 23 Letter from Cowen, Port of Spain Gazette, 5 January 1846, reprinted in Baptist Record and Biblical Repository, 3 (London, 1846), p. 370. 24 TNA CO 295, vol. 150, ff. 242–67, report from the Solicitor-General and Agent-General of Immigrants to Macleod, 13 April 1846. See also Trinidad Spectator, 22 April 1846 and Port of Spain Gazette, 5 May 1846. 25 TNA CO 295, vol. 150, ff. 238–9, Macleod to Gladstone, 15 April 1846; f. 264, evidence of Thomas Brooks. 26 Ibid., f. 262–3, evidence of Brooks. 27 Port of Spain Gazette, 5 and 19 May 1846. 28 MS, 28 March, 20 June, 1 August and 12 September 1846; National Reformer, 13 and 20 March, 10 April, 29 May 1847. 29 National Reformer and Manx Weekly Review, 13 March 1847. 30 MS, 26 September 1846, 27 January 1847. 31 Ibid., 29 August 1846; National Reformer and Manx Weekly Review, 6–20 February, 6–27 March, 17 and 24 April, 8 and 29 May 1847. 32 NS, 10 April 1847. 33 William G. Sewell, The Ordeal of Free Labor in the British West Indies (New York, 1861), p. 103 – letters originally written for the New York Times. Sewell’s title was ironic: he argued that emancipation had led to economic prosperity across the British Caribbean. 34 Wood, Trinidad, p. 89. 35 Ibid., citing Creole Bitters, 3 May 1904. 36 Co-operative College, Manchester, Holyoake Papers 1415, Powell to Holyoake, 24 March 1862, ff. 1–2. 18

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Bishopsgate Institute, London, G. J. Holyoake Collection, account book of the London Atheistical Society (annotation to entry in 1845–8 letterbook). 38 Arnold J. Meagher, The Coolie Trade: The Traffic in Chinese Laborers to Latin America, 1847–74 (New York, 2008), p. 250; Marjory Harper and Stephen Constantine, Migration and Empire (Oxford, 2010) pp. 148–56. 39 Obituary, Secular World, 1 February 1863. 40 NMW, 1 March 1845. 41 NMW, 15 March 1845. 42 NMW, 1 February 1845. See also 26 October, 30 November, 14 December 1844. 43 Royle, Robert Owen, pp. 218–24. 44 Malcolm Chase (ed.), The Life and Literary Pursuits of Allen Davenport (Aldershot, 1994), pp. 51–3. 45 MS, 1 March 1845. 46 Claeys, ‘Etzler’, 352. 47 Proceedings of the Fourth Congress of the Association of All Classes of All Nations and the Second of the National Community Friendly Society (Leeds, 1839), pp. 79, 95; NMW, 8 June 1839. See also Social Pioneer, 4 May 1839. 48 Trades’ Newspaper, 17–31 July, 13 November 1825; Prothero, Artisans, pp. 206–9. 49 James Elmslie Duncan, Flowers and Fruits, quoted in MS, 1 February 1845. Duncan was a phrenologist, shorthand tutor and promoter of vegetarianism (NMW, 23 November 1844). Like Powell he was also a Chartist, and twice arrested for riot in 1848: see David Goodway, London Chartism, 1838–48 (Cambridge, 1982), pp. 82, 262 and Claeys, ‘Etzler’, 364 n. 4. 50 Fleet Papers, 15 July 1843. 51 Co-operative Magazine and Monthly Herald, 1 January 1828, Trades’ Free Press, 16 December 1827. 52 Crisis, 10 May 1834. See also 7 June 1834. 53 NMW, 16 May 1840; J. C. Langdon, ‘Pocket editions of the New Jerusalem: Owenite communitarianism in Britain, 1825–5’, University of York D. Phil. thesis (2000), p. 317. 54 H. Owen, The Staffordshire Potter (London, 1901), ch. 4; G. Foreman, ‘Settlement of English potters in Wisconsin’, Wisconsin Magazine of History, 4 (1938), 375–96; W. H. Warburton, History of Trade Union Organisation in the North Staffordshire Potteries (London, 1931), passim, esp. pp. 118–19; Harrison, Robert Owen, pp. 179, 228–9; Frank Burchill and Richard Ross, A History of the Potters’ Union (Hanley, 1977), pp. 85–95. 55 Potters’ Examiner, 3 February 1844. 56 NMW, 23 December 1843, 22 March 1845; Royle, Robert Owen, p. 191. 57 NMW, 27 May 1843. 58 NMW, 1 February 1840; Reasoner, 11 July 1849. See also Claeys, ‘Etzler’, 373, and Langdon, ‘Pocket editions’, pp. 312–13. 59 The first two numbers were advertised in NMW, 25 January 1845. 37

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Langdon, ‘Pocket editions’, pp. 323–30, provides the fullest account of the Colony of Equality. For Hunt’s relations with Owen see Royle, Robert Owen, pp. 80, 98, 102–3, 105, 126–7, 159–60, 190, 212. See also Harrison, Robert Owen, pp. 174–5, 177–9 and 251; Claeys, ‘Etzler’, 369; NMW, 1 September 1838, 2–16 March and 25 May 1844, 1, 22 March and 2 August 1845. 61 BL, British and Early Printed Collections, JAFF157, item 25, Address of the Democratic Co-operative Society for Emigrating to the Western States of North America [London, 1844]; For Sully see Armytage, Heavens Below, pp. 205, 207. 62 NMW, 29 June, 5 October and 23 November 1844, 14 June 1845. 63 Movement and Anti-Persecution Gazette, 17 February, 23 March, 29 June 1844; NMW, 23 November 1844; Claeys, ‘Etzler’, 366. Wilbur Stanley Shepperson, British Emigration to North America: Projects and Opinions in the Early Victorian Period (London, 1957), pp. 63, 74. 64 MS, 10 January 1846. 65 Based on comparing Royle, Robert Owen, Appendix 2, ‘Owenite branches and their contributions’ with TES branches listed in MS, 11 October 1845. 66 ‘Active Owenite communitarians’ defined by period of residence at Harmony Hall (Royle, Robert Owen, Appendix 3), compared with names of those who sailed in March 1846, ‘to constitute the Tropical Emigration Society in Venezuela’, MS, 28 March 1846. Harmony had ten professionals compared with two in the TES party. 67 On Huddersfield Owenism see Edward Royle, ‘Owenism and the secularist tradition: the Huddersfield Secular Society and Sunday School’, in Malcolm Chase and Ian Dyck (eds), Living and Learning: Essays in Honour of J. F. C. Harrison (Aldershot, 1996), pp. 199–217. 68 Figures in MS, 14 February 1846, suggest holdings averaged 1.34 shares per member. 69 Ibid., 17 January 1846. 70 Ibid., 10 January 1846. 71 Ibid., 1 February 1845. 72 TNA, BT 41/694/3784, provisional registration documents for the Trinidad Great Eastern & South Western Railway Company; see also company advertise ments in Morning Chronicle, 20 November 1845 and The Times, 21 November 1845, and correspondence with the Colonial Office, TNA CO 295/148 ff. 238– 43. ‘The Trinidad Great Eastern and South Western Railway was one of the flimsiest bubble creations of the decade, and certainly more so than the other three companies planning railways in the island in 1840 and 1846’, Wood, Trinidad, p. 87. 73 Duncan, Flowers and Fruits, quoted in MS, 1 February 1845. 74 Gregory, Of Victorians and Vegetarians, pp. 28–9. In a letter (20 February 1846) to William Gladstone, Stollmeyer boasted of having lived ‘since several years on water and a vegetable diet’ (TNA CO 295/151, f. 22). London bookbinder John Jaffray carefully preserved his TES prospectus in a scrapbook next to the 60

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issues of Mankind (1851), a medical botany and rational diet periodical: see BL, British and Early Printed Collections, JAFF157, items 23–5 inc. 75 MS, 1 February 1845. 76 Daily News, 12 June 1846. 77 Quotation from Henry Hunt anniversary celebration, Ashton-under-Lyne, NS, 13 November 1847, see also 21 November 1840 and 29 March 1841; BL, British and Early Printed Collections, JAFF157, item 25, Prospectus for the Tropical Emigration Society (1844), f. 2 recto. The ‘contaminating influences’ of landed authority and the clergy were similarly cited by the Social United Interest Colonization Society as reasons for emigrating; see Social Pioneer, 4 May 1839. 78 Letter to President Carlos Soublette, dated 16 February 1846, quoted in dispatch from the British chargé d’affaires, Caracas, 20 April 1846, in TNA CO 295/154, ff. 78–9. 79 George Edmund Carl, First Among Equals: Great Britain and Venezuela, 1810– 1910 (Ann Arbor, 1980), pp. 33–42, 65–6, 93–4. 80 The Sun Beam [1845]. 81 MS, 1 December 1844; 1 February 1845. 82 Ibid., 17 January, 14 February 1846, 18 October 1845. 83 Lloyd Braithwaite, ‘Social stratification in Trinidad: a preliminary analysis’, Social and Economic Studies, 2 (1953), 38–60; Selwyn D. Ryan, Race and Nationalism in Trinidad and Tobago: A Study in Decolonization (Toronto, 1972), p. 19. 84 Carl C. Campbell, The Young Colonials: A Social History of Education in Trinidad and Tobago, 1834–1939 (Jamaica, 1996), p. 2. 85 Wood, Trinidad, p. 88. 86 [Trinidad] Observer, 12 February 1894, quoted by Bridget Brereton, Race Relations in Colonial Trinidad (Cambridge, 1979), p. 39; TNA CO 295/395, fols 745B and 746, Stollmeyer to Joseph Chamberlain, 12 December 1899. 87 Potters’ Examiner, 31 August 1844. 88 Holyoake Papers 1415, Powell to Holyoake, 24 March 1862, f. 4.

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11

Robert Owen and Wales

Chris Williams

Robert Owen has a strong claim to be Wales’s greatest radical thinker.1 Yet it has been a fairly conventional response by most writers on Owen to marginal ize the relevance of Wales. He was born in Wales, he died in Wales, so the argument goes, and that was about it. Encapsulating this view is the dismissive comment of Margaret Cole who suggested that ‘[t]he little society in which he was born and grew . . . does not seem to have the slightest bearÂ�ing on his character or his opinions’.2 This position has lately been challenged by Ian Donnachie and Geoffrey Powell.3 Donnachie has suggested that: Robert Owen might with justification be described as Montgomeryshire’s most famous son though surprisingly much that is said of him locally and throughout Wales seems to take little account of the influence his background exercised on his subsequent ideas about social psychology, education and social reform. His own character and outlook . . . were shaped by his Welsh roots, by his Welsh linguistic and cultural heritage, by the Welshness of his schooling and religious upbringing, by his immediate family and kin, and by the environment of Montgomeryshire, specifically of Newtown and its surroundings.4

This essay will first consider Owen’s relationship with Wales in his own life time, drawing as appropriate on the insights of Donnachie and Powell, and on work by Jane Moore.5 Secondly, it will trace the limited impact of Owen ism on Wales in the form of the two Owenite communities established in Merionethshire and Carmarthenshire in the 1840s and 1850s. Finally, Wales’s


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relationship with Owen as it has evolved in the century and a half since his death will be evaluated.

Robert Owen and Wales Robert Owen was born on 14 May 1771 in the room above his father’s shop in Broad Street, Newtown, Montgomeryshire. His father, also Robert (1741–1804), was a saddler, ironmonger and sometime postmaster and churchwarden in Newtown, although he had been born in Welshpool. His mother, née Anne Williams (c.1735–1803) was the daughter of a local ‘respect able’ farmer.6 Robert was the sixth child of seven, two of whom died in infancy. Owen wrote of Newtown at the time of his childhood that it was ‘a very small market town, not containing more than one thousand inhabitants, – a neat, clean, beautifully situated country village, rather than a town, with the ordinary trades, but no manufactures except a very few flannel looms’. 7 Ian Donnachie, however, has drawn a far more complicated and multilayered picture of the area, as experiencing ‘considerable economic, social, cultural and linguistic change during the closing deacdes of the eighteenth century’.8 Donnachie notes that Newtown was one of ‘several emergent flannel making locations in central Wales at that time’, but that probably the ‘general ambience’ of the town, with its riverside setting and rolling country side interspersed with woodland, had the most influence on the young Owen.9 At the age of ten, ‘anxious to leave home’, Owen left Newtown and Wales to serve a four-years’ draper’s apprenticeship at Stamford in Lincolnshire.10 He appears to have visited Newtown on three further occasions, visiting his parents and relatives ‘in and about Newtown’ sometime around 1785, return ing again early in the nineteenth century, and then making his final visit in 1858.11 There is no explanation for this failure to return more frequently to his birthplace provided by Owen in his own writings. One may judge that he became extremely busy, particularly once established at New Lanark, and that this might have prevented him from journeying to Newtown on the occasion of the deaths of his parents. Thereafter he may have felt little connection with the place, although, of course, he did return to the town to die.12 What, in his first ten years, may we suggest that Owen took from Wales which made a difference to his ideas and views of the world? Or, to put it 220


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another way, in what sense, if any, was he a distinctively Welsh thinker? First, Owen appears to have had at least some familiarity with the Welsh language and with its broader cultural resonances. Although it is not clear whether he was a fluent Welsh speaker as a child, the balance of probability is that he was bilingual. Owen himself wrote that when arriving in Manchester he spoke a kind of ‘Welsh English, in consequence of the imperfect language spoken in Newtown, which was an imperfect mixture of both languages’.13 Owen definitely read English as a child, because we know that he was read ing voraciously not only popular classics such as Paradise Lost, Pilgrim’s Progress and Robinson Crusoe but also books on history and theology.14 Undoubtedly, his facility in English was a great advantage, but we should not see him as automatically or entirely anglicized in his speech and thought. Newtown provided the young Owen with the opportunity to hear ideas expressed forcibly in both English and Welsh, in his father’s shop, in the schoolroom and in church, and he may have picked up a tendency towards rhetoric from the hwyl of Welsh preaching, as well as been influenced by a strong group of local Methodists.15 Second, it is possible that the radical atmosphere of the religious politics of the district had some influence on him. Gwyn A. Williams noted that the textile districts around Llanidloes and Newtown were one of the key centres of ‘the more liberal, more combative, more rationalist and more radical doctrines’.16 And Geoffrey Powell has suggested that Owen was much influenced by the ideas of what he calls the ‘Welsh Enlightenment’, suggest ing that: Our understanding of the Welsh Enlightenment . . . would be seriously dimin ished if we did not recognise that all that Owen tried to achieve, practically and intellectually, was an expression of the great awakening within Wales, religious and secular. In 1816 he told his listeners at New Lanark that his resolutions were taken in early life . . . What came later merely strengthened and confirmed them.17

This is a fascinating notion, if in need of more substantial underpinning. It finds some support in Brinley Thomas’s query, in a lecture marking the centenary of Owen’s death in 1958, whether Owen’s ‘religious home in Newtown left upon him an imprint which he could never erase?’18 Yet we should be cautious. While it is important to acknowledge the cultural resonances of Welsh Protestantism and its preaching style, and to note that 221


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Owen himself composed three sermons and was nicknamed the ‘Little Parson’, we should not ignore Owen’s own testimony that, at the age of ten, after having studied ‘with great attention’ many religious books and tracts, he conÂ�cluded that ‘there must be something fundamentally wrong in all religions’, a viewpoint that was much to trouble Welsh commentators in the nineteenth century.19 Nevertheless, in the light of the evidence displayed and suggestions ad vanced by both Donnachie and Powell it is difficult to agree with Margaret Cole’s earlier judgement that Newtown had ‘not the slightest bearing’ upon Owen. In fact, the point had earlier been made by another biographer of Owen, G. D. H. Cole – Margaret’s husband(!) – that ‘these early years at Newtown exerted a decisive influence on the bent of his mind’ and it was also suggested by Brinley Thomas that ‘Newtown made him what he became’.20 Donnachie summarizes his argument thus: . . . by the time Owen . . . left Newtown . . . he could be seen to have had a practical and by no means uneducated upbringing, laced with limited but nevertheless potentially useful social skills, which would open doors to employ ment in the wider world of commerce and industry. He would carry in his baggage memories of a Welsh childhood spent among a hard-working, religiousminded, shopkeeping family, and of life in an enviable rural environment to which in his subconscious he would always long to return.21

Yet, we should take care not to overstate the impact of his early Welsh years. As Gregory Claeys notes, Owen had ‘few political opinions to speak of ’ as late as the 1790s.22 Although we must recognize the potential impact of Newtown, both as an adolescent and as a young man Owen was subject to many other influences, especially in Manchester and in New Lanark. Jane Moore’s ‘“Parallelograms and circles”: Robert Owen and the satirists’ should be received with a similarly qualified approval. Moore opens by char acterizing Owen as ‘one of the most significant Welshmen of the Romantic period’, and by observing that while he has ‘the status of radical Welsh saint in some quarters’ he has been consigned ‘to the role of dangerous infidel in others’.23 After nodding in the direction of the arguments of Powell and Donnachie, however, Moore’s argument proceeds at a tangent. Examining those who criticized, and particularly who satirized Owen, she observes that his antagonists made no reference to his ‘Welshness’, and sees this neglect as of broader significance: 222


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. . . the elision of Owen’s Welshness by English satirists can be interpreted as part of a broader cultural blindness in the Romantic period to the impact of the Enlightenment in Wales . . . this blindness in turn allows us to think through the problem of the invisibility as well as the visibility of certain kinds of Welshness in Romantic-period writing.24

Moore explains that, in the early nineteenth century, the ‘familiar image’ of Wales is of ‘the backward yet enchanting Celtic retreat – a quintessentially rural, quaintly traditional and seductively primitive haven existing on the fringes of metropolitan society, English modernity and industry’.25 Such a place could not be conceived as one that could produce such an advanced political thinker as Robert Owen, so Owen’s Welshness was ignored, ‘silently erased’, despite the fact that for many satirists of the time the characteristics of the Welsh people and their culture afforded easy targets. . . . it is possible to judge the satirical reaction against Owen’s self-presentation as part of an inability to acknowledge the significant otherness of his Welsh upbringing and the influence the style of Welsh nonconformist preaching had in shaping his highly individualized, provocative performances and his controversial ideas.26

This is interesting speculation, although it relies heavily on an assumption that Owen necessarily was seen, and saw himself, as Welsh. We should acknow ledge the possibility that some of Owen’s critics simply were unaware of his Welsh origins. Brinley Thomas believed that ‘Robert Owen seems to have thought of himself and more than once referred to himself as an Englishman’, although of course in the times in which Owen lived many patriotic Welsh men also used ‘England’ and ‘English’ as shorthand for what would more accurately be called ‘Britain’ or ‘British’.27 But given that Owen left Wales as a child, returned only three times (once to die) and made very little of his national identity (and perhaps the term is itself verging on the anachronistic during Owen’s lifetime), we have to be prepared to consider that the nondeployment of his Welshness by critics was not part of a process of silent erasure but simply a reflection of their ignorance.28 Owen made very few references in his published works to Wales or to the Welsh people. Brinley Thomas argued that ‘[t]here is no evidence that Robert Owen ever gave any thought to Wales during his long and active life’.29 Many Welsh political movements have claimed an Owenite legacy, 223


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but on at least one point we should be clear. Owen, a man of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, had no avowed interest in Welsh nationalism in any form, and the nature of his more abstract thoughts suggest that he would not have been sympathetic to at least some of its later dimensions. Owen was opposed to nations and nationalism on principle. He came to espouse a socialist cosmopolitanism. He believed that the cause of progress would be favoured by the world’s population learning to speak one common language – which would be English – and leaving behind those particular ities and divisions which he felt hindered the fostering of a communitarian spirit.30 It has often been noted by writers keen to enhance Owen’s ‘Welshness’ that in his autobiography Owen related that Dr James Donne of Oswestry, a friend from Newtown in his childhood, sometime after 1817 (by which time Donne was headmaster of Oswestry Grammar School) had written to Owen to inform him that he was tracing his pedigree, and had discovered that Owen was ‘a regular descendant from the Princes of North Wales’. What is less often included is Owen’s response: ‘I have no doubt he thought it was information that would gratify me . . . [b]ut being at that time occupied with great public questions and extensive private business, I neglected this private affair, and never made the least inquiry respecting it.’31 A temperate judgement of Owen’s relationship with Wales will conclude that the relationship was a relatively tenuous one once he had left Newtown. Brinley Thomas makes this valid point: Between 1814 and 1834, when he was at the height of his power, South Wales was going through a phase of intense industrial development; Owen was an inveterate traveller, and if he had felt himself to be a Welshman he would surely have paid at least one visit to the scene of these dramatic changes. He crossed the Atlantic eight times, and was far more familiar with conditions in America than he was with those of his native land.32

Only at the very end of his life, when in failing health, did Owen decide to revisit the place of his birth. According to George Jacob Holyoake, ‘when he came to the border line which separates England and Wales, he knew it again . . . He raised himself up in his carriage, and gave a cheer . . . It was the last cheer the old man ever gave.’33 He put up at the Bear’s Head Hotel, and was there attended upon by his son, Robert Dale Owen. Robert Owen died on 17 November 1858 at the Bear’s Head Hotel, Newtown, and was 224


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buried (in a coffin marked ‘Robert Owen, of New Lanark’) next to the abandoned church of St Mary.34

Owenism in Wales There is little sense that Welsh society’s response to Owen during his lifetime differed from that of the rest of Britain. Owenite propaganda appears barely to have scratched the surface of Wales, perhaps because so little of it was translated into Welsh, and because Owenite ‘missionaries’ who travelled in Wales tended to lack any facility in the language.35 The Wiltshire-born industrialist and radical John Hodder Moggridge apparently sought Owen’s advice before establishing a model settlement at Blackwood in the Sirhowy valley in Monmouthshire, but this was an arrangement as much along the lines of New Lanark as of New Harmony.36 There were Owenite sympathisers in Merthyr Tydfil in the 1830s and 1840s.37 And Wales was the site of two fascinating experiments by English Owenites who, if they did not act under Owen’s personal direction or even necessarily with his approval, claimed him as an inspiration. Pant Glas 38 Towards the end of 1839 steps were taken by some members of the Liverpoolbased Society of United Friends, an offshoot of the Owenite Rational Society, to establish a settlement in north Wales, and by January 1840 the lease had been obtained of Pant Glas farm and its estate of between 700 and 1,000 acres (accounts vary), near Abergeirw in Merionethshire. Leading this enter prise was the secretary of the society, James Spurr, and John Moncas, a farmer who became its president, and their objective was to create a ‘little paradise’ amidst the isolation of the Snowdonia hills. Isolated and remote the site certainly was: five miles south-east of the village of Trawsfynydd and eight miles north of the market town of Dolgellau, but on difficult roads and sited at an elevation of 1,000 feet above sea level, in what was (according to the 1841 population census) the most sparsely populated county of Wales.39 The farm rent cost £140 a year, with an option to buy in two years for a total of £4,000. The Owenites suggested the land was ‘exceedingly fertile and beautifully situated’, anticipated being able to grow ‘every kind of grain and fruit’, and talked up the possibilities of manufacturing, harnessing 225


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water-power, even of establishing their own printing press. Moncas felt that at Pant Glas they would, . . . exhibit a practical example to the industrious, moral and intellectual working classes of this country, of the ease with which they may improve their condition, by establishing communities, founded on the principle of equality of rights and property, in opposition to the system of individualised interests of competitive society.40

Moncas stressed that Pant Glas would not attempt to rival the mainstream Owenite settlement at Queenwood, with its ‘palace-like buildings’, and he emphasized the ‘constant demand for all the agricultural produce of the neighbourhood’ that was to be had at nearby Dolgellau, and the proximity of the port of Porthmadog. The venture was financed both by those members of the society who took up residence at Pant Glas (men paying £12, women £8, aged parents £5) and by those who waited in Lancashire and Cheshire for the community to be sufficiently established to accommodate them. By mid-April Moncas claimed that ‘cottages for twenty families, and twelve single persons’ had been erected, along with two buildings that would host public meetings, a library and a school.41 Quickly, however, reports began to filter back that the venture was not proceeding at all smoothly. Pant Glas was essentially hill-farming not cropgrowing country. Much of the estate was very hilly, and the ground rocky, so difficult to plough, and at most only 40 acres were cultivated. Local land owner Sir Robert Vaughan took against the Owenites, ejecting any of their cattle from common land to the north-west of the farm at Mynydd Bach. Some felt that Moncas had sold them a pig in a poke, and left, carrying tales of the futility of the venture to those in the movement who had opposed it from the start (including Robert Owen, who felt it was a distraction from the main event at Queenwood). A propaganda war was waged in the Owenite press, James Spurr confessed that ‘the thing [was] now entirely exploded’, and Moncas was forced to admit that ‘we have made an injudicious selection’. 42 The New Moral World’s editorial response was blunt: This is to be sure a very delicate phrase to be applied to such a rough affair, and we know that many hasty individuals in various parts of the country, who have been seduced into support by the specious and deceptive reports formerly published, are expressing themselves in anything but such courtly language respecting the matter.43 226


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The venture appears to have collapsed at some point in the second half of 1840, although some members may have remained at Pant Glas until early 1841. Moncas was still active in raising money in May 1841, although possibly this was for a different project that he anticipated starting in the London area. Whatever, by the time of the 1841 population census (6 June) there was no trace of the community at Pant Glas, which was back in the hands of a local farmer. Garn Lwyd44 The second Owenite community was located in the Gwendraeth Fach valley in Carmarthenshire, on a 220-acre farm named Garn Lwyd, of which 90 acres were under cultivation. This was a more promising situation than Pant Glas, as it was relatively close to two of the major east–west roads in Wales, about eight miles south-east of the large market town of Carmarthen, and roughly the same distance from the two industrial communities of Pont arddulais and Llanelli. The soil was good and the farm was about 400 feet above sea level, set amidst rolling hills. The estate (valued at £5,000) was offered to the Leeds Redemption Society [LRS] by its owner, a Mr Williams, in 1847, although this offer was accompanied by a mortgage of £1,200.45 The LRS had been established in 1845, and was well organized and flourishÂ�ing, with hundreds of members in Yorkshire and a few branches beyond.46 Its president was the publisher David Green, and it published its own journal – The Herald of Redemption, later retitled The Herald of Cooperation – edited by James Hole. The LRS had as its objective the replace ment of capital and labour with a socialist commonwealth of ‘labouring capitalists’. In the wake of the collapse of Queenwood it was the only outlet for Owenites seeking their own community, and attracted adherents from different parts of England. LRS officials visited Garn Lwyd and began a fund-raising drive to amass the necessary money. By the early summer of 1848 they were in occupation, and later that year began to hire local labour to help with the ploughing and sowing. Robert Swindells, who had been at Queenwood, arrived to act as farm superintendent, and there was talk of building factories on the estate in due course. Investment in the venture was steady rather than spectacular, with much being spent on drainage; difficulties were experienced with local labourers, and the relatively small farm was never home to more than fifteen Redemp tionists (most of whom hailed from Yorkshire). But Garn Lwyd turned in some kind of profit, and by 1850 was sending farm produce (or funds 227


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arising from the sale thereof ) back to Leeds. A shoemaking business was established, and tailoring and hat-making were planned to follow. In 1851 the LRS began to expand – a major publicity drive including open-air meetings on Holbeck Moor and the distribution of 20,000 tracts attracted large audiences and a membership approaching 1,500. Funds were directed towards a co-operative store, which opened in Leeds in the December. From Garn Lwyd came shoes, butter, cheese and blackberry jam. It was reported that its ‘residents enjoy excellent health, and live together in peace and harmony’.47 But by the middle of 1852 the LRS, which had never managed to raise the capital sums originally predicted as necessary to run Garn Lwyd effect ively, was finding the financial burden of the mortgage too great. At some point in 1853 or 1854 the farm was given up and returned to Mr Williams, and the LRS itself folded in 1855, albeit with its funds still in credit. Many of its members sank their energies in the emergent Leeds co-operative society, others were attracted by Christian Socialism. That both Pant Glas and Garn Lwyd remain working farms to this day suggests that these were not impossible projects from the beginning. Rather, in both cases, but particularly at Pant Glas, the ambition of the Owenites far outran their resources, and the exuberant forecasts of John Moncas en gendered first suspicion and later disillusionment. Garn Lwyd, although much more modest an enterprise than its initiators had planned, enjoyed what was, for Owenite model communities in Britain, a significant longevity. Its relationship with its roots in Yorkshire was sustained by a stronger organ ization and greater realism all round. Sidney Pollard sees the history of the LRS as representing a bridge between the ‘community builders’ of the first, Owenite phase of the British co-operative movement, and the ‘storekeepers’ of the second phase, firmly established with the foundation of the English wholesale society in 1863: It was not only that there was an absence of Owenite millenial raving, a stronger trait of practical common sense, and better organisation; but the redemptionists also appeared to have more elbow room and a bigger stake in the existing system.48

Yet the fact remains that in neither case did these experiments take root in the wider Welsh communities, or lead to any appreciable upsurge of interest in or support for the ideas and schemes of Robert Owen. 228


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It was Owen’s putative secularism that most frequently proved to be a stumbling-block, setting ‘stern limits to his influence in Wales’.49 One Owenite missionary who travelled in north Wales noted that the ‘pulpits here have burst out as volcanoes of denunciation against the various goblins of clerical creation and vulgar rumour, which are christened Socialism’.50 In 1841 Owen’s Manchester followers published a Welsh translation of the Outlines of the Rational System of Society.51 A copy of this book is in Cardiff University’s Salisbury Library, the title page defaced with the following words: Un o’r llyfrau mwyaf cythreulig a gyfansoddwyd erioed ydyw y llyfr hwn. Bydded i’r awdwr weled ei gyfeiliornad truenus cyn iddo fyned oddi ar y llawr. Sonir lawer ynddo am foesoldeb ond nid unwaith am Grefydd Crist. [This book is one of the most devilish ever published. May the author see his wretched heresy before he departs from the earth. There is much noise in it about morality but no mention of Jesus Christ.]52

Brinley Thomas’s judgement is that ‘[t]his is a fair sample of the reaction which Owen evoked among the vast majority of Welshmen in his day’, and David Davies MP, reflecting on Owen’s life in 1929, admitted that ‘in the land of his birth . . . there was for him no particular regard or enthusiasm’.53 In fact it would be some considerable time before Owen’s reputation was re-evaluated by his fellow countrymen.

Wales and Robert Owen Whether or not Owen recognized his ‘wretched heresy’, his passing in 1858 occasioned some comment. Y Faner of 24 November 1858 noted the death of Robert Owen ‘y Socialist’ and ‘anffyddiwr’ (atheist), and an editorial outlined his life, but there was no reflection on his importance for Wales as such. Accounts of the funeral suggest a good deal of interest locally, but this may have been as much down to Owen’s notoreity as to any pride in his local connections, and significance was read into the fact that Newtown on burial day was afflicted by fog, while the surrounding countryside was bathed in sunshine.54 Some noted that apathy, disinterest and even hostility were particularly apparent in Newtown itself. While a public subscription (raised largely by 229


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Manchester Co-operators) had led to a plain monumental stone being laid to mark his resting place in 1861, it was reported that such supporters had been ‘anxious to do more out of respect for his memory if Newtown would have allowed it’. However, ‘Newtown wouldn’t have a clock tower or drinking fountain to perpetuate the memory of a man whose life, blameless as it was, many of the inhabitants – no doubt conscientiously – believe to have been mistaken in his aims and objects.’55 Such an attitude persisted: in 1893 the people of Newtown refused the offer of the Co-operative Union to put a marble tombstone on his grave, and Edward Edwards, brother of Sir Owen M. Edwards, visiting the grave, was dismayed to find it half covered with grass.56 Even as late as 1907, after the Co-operative movement had restored Owen’s grave in 1902, and after the Robert Owen wing of the Newtown Public Library, built at the expense of the Co-operative Union in 1903, had been opened, R. E. Davies, in a short volume on Owen, could write that ‘it is little short of a disgrace’ that ‘the folk of Newtown take no particular pride’ in the fact that Owen was one of their own.57 Richard Williams, while including Owen in his volume on Montgomeryshire Worthies, felt obliged at the same time to record this negative assessment: . . . as a theorist his views on religion were crude and pernicious and he was a most erratic, unsafe, and dangerous guide to those who took him for their leader on religious and moral questions . . . while he disbelieved and denounced all his life what the generality of his countrymen believed and held sacred, he, in his own person, offered to the world another remarkable instance of a man rushing from one extreme to another – from openly avowed infidelity to that most absurd and infatuated of all superstitions – Spiritualism.58

Yet new generations of reformers, themselves less troubled by charges of agnosticism or even atheism, were beginning to reinterpret Owen’s legacy according to their current concerns. Roughly, one may distinguish between three political strands – Liberal, Labour and Welsh Nationalist – all of which reached out to Owen. The Liberal MP for Merionethshire Tom Ellis made one of the earliest and most ambitious claims for Owen in his 1892 address, ‘The memory of the Kymric dead’. Speaking before an audience of university students at Bangor, Ellis identified four categories of Welsh hero. The first class was ‘those who have worked for the national existence and unity of Wales’, 230


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including Welsh princes such as Hywel Dda, Llywelyn ap Gruffydd and Owain Glyndwˆr. John Penry and Griffith Jones, Llanddowror were in the second category – ‘those who in Wales have borne witness to the relations of man to God’; and Dafydd ap Gwilym and Richard Wilson examples of the third – ‘those who have striven to interpret nature and the relations of man to nature’. The fourth category Ellis defined as ‘those who have pondered over the outlook for the social well-being of man, of the relation of man to man, the bearers of Neges Cymru [the message of Wales]’.59 Here there was only one candidate, for ‘Robert Owen was the bearer of Neges Cymru to the modern world’, a ‘strong, strenuous, fertile-brained Welshman’ whom Ellis ranked alongside Plato and Sir Thomas More.60 Ellis felt that Wales was the land of ‘cyfraith [the rule of law], cyfar [common social effort], cyfnawdd [congeniality], cymorthau [mutual assistance], and cymanfaoedd [common action], the land of social co-operation, of associative effort’, and that Owen was the ‘initiator in Britain of the movement for collective and municipal activity in the common effort for the common good’, and the embodiment of ‘the spirit of the old Welsh social economy’.61 Ellis died aged 40 in 1899 and there is no record that his equally brilliant colleague David Lloyd George shared his enthusiasm for Owen, but there is evidence that the younger generation of ‘liberal-Cambrianists’ associated with the articulation of a Welsh version of the ‘New Liberalism’ were pre pared to embrace at least selected dimensions of Owen’s legacy.62 In 1912 Wales magazine carried two articles on Owen.63 The more important of these was by Walter Roch (Liberal MP for Pembrokeshire, 1908–18), who wrote on Owen as ‘The pioneer of social reform’, in a series devoted to examining ‘What the world owes to Welshmen’.64 Roch noted that ‘although in many ways [Owen] stands out as the greatest Welshman of the last century, his name is scarcely known in his own country’, a state of affairs all the more remarkable, given that Wales, in Roch’s view, ‘as a rule, does not underrate even her minor prophets’!65 Roch argued that Owen was ‘too much of a Celt to be really understood by Englishman’, that he was instead ‘a typical Welsh man, a gay, responsive idealist, ever chasing the sunbeams and rejoicing in the chase; full of enthusiasm, certain that some day he would wake to find his dreams come true’: But if Owen had the Welshman’s unique virtues and temperament, he had also his failings. He had not the steady, persevering grit of the more stolid Englishman; he passed quickly from one thing to the other, swayed by emotion rather than passion.66 231


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Roch nonetheless ended on a positive note: By his love and care of child life, by his efforts to bring brightness into their school days, to stand behind them and the pitiless discipline of a sordid industrial age when children were of less account than complex machinery, Robert Owen anticipated the truest genius of his fellow-countrymen.67

Thomas Jones referred to Robert Owen as one of only two Welshmen to have had ‘world-wide significance’ (the other was David Lloyd George), and the garden city and town planning movement, which united New Liberals and some socialists, took a certain amount of inspiration from Owen.68 When the International Labour Office was founded in Geneva, the gift of the people of Wales was a bust of Robert Owen by Sir William Goscombe John for the library.69 David Davies, then Liberal MP for Montgomeryshire, gave the address ‘Rhodd Cymru’ (The Gift of Wales). Davies, speaking as president of the Welsh League of Nations Union, characterized Owen as ‘the pioneer of international social progress’, and as having given a practical demonstration at New Lanark of ‘the first and guiding principle of the I.L.O. – that “labour should not be regarded merely as a commodity or as an article of commerce”’.70 Wales, admittedly, said Davies, ‘after the lapse of many years’ was now ‘proud to recognise him . . . as one of the most illustrious of her sons’.71 The Labour movement in Wales was also very keen to embrace Owen’s legacy. The Welsh socialist R. J. Derfel wrote to Y Cymro in 1903 to argue that Owen should replace David as the patron saint of Wales.72 Keir Hardie and Ramsay MacDonald, Scots, but at different times MPs for Welsh con stituencies, honoured Owen’s memory, Hardie noting that ‘the first Socialist was a Welshman’.73 Hardie claimed that nearly every ‘great idea’ had been inspired by Owen, and Ramsay MacDonald often referred to Owen’s ideas and distinguished between the contributions of Owen and Marx to radical and socialist thought, much in favour of the former. Owen’s national identity was tactically useful to Welsh socialists having to contend with Liberal allegations that socialism was an ‘alien creed’.74 The Co-operative movement in Wales naturally emphasized its debt to Owen, and restored Owen’s grave in Newtown in 1902.75 William Hazell of Ynysybwl wrote a number of articles on Owen for magazines such as The Wheatsheaf and the Co-operative Review, and Alfred T. Davies edited a volume on Owen as a ‘pioneer social reformer and philanthropist’, published by the Ceiriog Memorial Institute in 1948.76 An All-Wales Labour and 232


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Co-operative rally at Newtown was a well-established annual event by the 1950s, held on the first Saturday of July and attracting leading Labour movement figures such as Clement Attlee, Herbert Morrison and Aneurin Bevan. The movement raised funds for the Owen Memorial Statue, one copy of which stands in Newtown itself.77 James Griffiths thought it a matter of national pride that Owen was ‘one of Wales’s greatest sons’, and cherished an unfulfilled dream as the first secretary of state for Wales that he might have named a planned new town in mid-Wales ‘Treowen’ (Owen’s town).78 Some Welsh nationalists also found inspiration in Owen. The New ComÂ� panion to the Literature of Wales suggests that Owen’s teaching ‘without the rationalistic, optimistic view of human nature – may have had some effect on the early outlook of Plaid Cymru [the Welsh Nationalist Party]’.79 D. J. Davies wrote a short article on Owen for Plaid’s newspaper The Welsh Nation in 1948. Davies saw Owen as essentially opposed to the growth of the bureau cratic state (which Davies believed was an inevitable side-effect of the direction taken by what he called ‘English Socialism’), and instead in favour of democratic control of a decentralized character. Davies felt that Owen’s ‘cardinal importance’ was in applying the co-operative ideal, which Owen derived ‘even if not altogether consciously, from the Welsh tradition and ancestry’, and that Owen ‘was forging the tools with which Welsh National ists hope to erect in Wales a democratic alternative to the totalitarian state’. Finally, Davies thought it ‘not wholly fantastic to argue that some of [Owen’s] chief flaws and weaknesses may be traced to his early divorce from his Welsh background’.80 J. F. C. Harrison has noted that ‘each generation discovers in its hero what it most wishes to find . . . For each age there is a new view of Mr Owen.’81 And as the political and religious climate has evolved, then, so each generation of Welsh politicians, thinkers and indeed historians has come to revise its view of Owen, revisions facilitated by the protean nature of Owen’s thought. He was identified as one of the Famous Welshmen, an official publication by the Welsh Department of the Board of Education in 1944, and he featured in the Dictionary of Welsh Biography. A number of works on him have appeared written by Welsh authors, some relatively slight publications, summarizing his life, sometimes written in Welsh, sometimes as essays for eisteddfodau, sometimes written for schoolchildren, few of which appear to be based on any original research.82 In his illuminating essay, delivered to mark the centenary of Owen’s death, Brinley Thomas indulged what he called ‘idle imaginings’ and posed the 233


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question of what might have happened had Owen been an ironworker’s son from Merthyr Tydfil rather than a saddler and ironmonger’s son from Newtown: . . . his attitude would have been rather different. It is interesting to speculate on the changes Owen would have wrought in South Wales if his revolutionary ideas had been applied there instead of in New Lanark; how different would have been the history of the Welsh mining valleys if they had been developed by capitalists with a social conscience. Dowlais Top might have become a garden city, and the New Lanark seed planted in Welsh soil might have yielded a bountiful harvest.83

Regrettably this has to remain only an idle imagining. But we should not worry too much about the limited nature of the connections between Owen and Wales. George Jacob Holyoake wryly remarked that Owen ‘was the only Welshman I ever knew who did not think Wales to be the world!’84 Robert Owen was undoubtedly one of Thomas Jones’s ‘uncommon’ Welsh men, but is no less worthy of being honoured in his native land for all that.

Notes â•‡

I am grateful to Alun Burge, Joe England, Siân Williams and Martin Wright for comments and advice. â•‡2 Margaret Cole, ‘Owen’s mind and methods’, in Sidney Pollard and John Salt (eds), Robert Owen: Prophet of the Poor (London, 1971), pp. 188–213: p. 194. â•‡3 Ian Donnachie, ‘Robert Owen’s Welsh childhood: kin, culture and environment 1771–c.1781’, Montgomeryshire Collections, 86 (1998), 81–96; idem, Robert Owen: Social Visionary (Edinburgh, 2005); Geoffrey Powell, ‘“They shall no longer see as through a glass darkly”: Robert Owen and the Welsh Enlighten ment’, Montgomeryshire Collections, 91 (2003), 53–69. â•‡4 DonnachiÂ�e, ‘Robert Owen’s Welsh childhood’, 81. â•‡5 Jane Moore, ‘ “Parallelograms and circles”: Robert Owen and the satirists’, in Damian Walford Davies and Lynda Pratt (eds), Wales and the Romantic Imagination (Cardiff, 2007), pp. 243–67. â•‡6 The adjective is Owen’s own, SWRO, 4, p. 51. â•‡7 Ibid., p. 52. G. D. H. Cole depicted it as ‘a remote little town of central Wales, far from the bustle of the great commercial centres’ (Robert Owen (London, 1965), p. 12), and ‘then as now a very small market town of the Welsh border’ (ibid., p. 38). â•‡8 Donnachie, ‘Robert Owen’s Welsh childhood’, 82. 1

234


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Ibid., 84. Gregory Claeys, ‘Owen, Robert (1771–1858)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2004. Owen explains this anxiety as stimulated by his reading ‘much of other countries and other proceedings’, and ‘not liking the habits and manners of a small country town’ (SWRO, 4, p. 59). 11 His first visit was ‘between the time of my leaving Mr McGuffog and my going to Messrs. Flint and Palmer’s’, and he ‘was uncommonly well received by all parties’ (SWRO, 4, pp, 69, 85). There is no year given for the second visit but Donnachie (Robert Owen: Social Visionary, p. 91) suggests late April or early May 1803, when his mother was seriously ill. It would not appear that he returned at the time of the deaths of his parents (mother July 1803, father March 1804). However, as Donnachie relates (ibid., p. 18), he did keep in touch with his sister Anne, by letter. Robert Dale Owen, Threading My Way: Twenty-Seven Years of AutoÂ� biography (London, 1874), p. 311, wrote that when his father returned to die in 1858 it was his first visit in forty years, which suggests 1818 as another possibility. 12 William Hazell, ‘Wales in Robert Owen’s time: why he did not return to Newtown’, Co-operative Review (June 1950), 135–7, argues that Newtown was simply too confined a context for Owen’s business talents, a point made (about Wales as a whole) by Brinley Thomas, ‘Robert Owen of Newtown (1771–1858)’, Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion (1960), 18–35: 19. 13 SWRO, 4, p. 82. 14 Cole, Robert Owen, p. 38. 15 Ibid.: ‘especially in Wales, theological controversy was the most natural means of sharpening the wits of a young and ardent seeker after knowledge.’ 16 Gwyn A. Williams, ‘Druids and democrats: organic intellectuals and the first Welsh nation’, in idem, The Welsh in their History (Beckenham, 1982), pp. 31– 64: p. 47. 17 Powell, ‘Robert Owen and the Welsh Enlightenment’, 69. For the Welsh Enlighten ment see R. J. W. Evans, ‘Was there a Welsh Enlightenment?’, in R. R. Davies and Geraint H. Jenkins (eds), From Medieval to Modern Wales: Historical Essays in Honour of Kenneth O. Morgan and Ralph A. Griffiths (Cardiff, 2004), pp. 142–59. 18 Thomas, ‘Robert Owen’, 27. 19 SWRO, 4, p. 54. 20 Cole, Robert Owen, p. 41; Thomas, ‘Robert Owen’, 19. 21 Donnachie, ‘Robert Owen’s Welsh childhood’, 96. 22 Claeys, ODNB. 23 Moore, ‘“Parallelograms and circles”’, p. 243. 24 Ibid., p. 244. 25 Ibid., p. 245. 26 Ibid., p. 255. 27 Thomas, ‘Robert Owen’, 33. 28 Moore’s suggestion (‘“Parallelograms and circles”’, p. 253) that Cruikshank’s famous satire of Owen depicts him ‘in a manner that might be seen to imitate â•‡9

10

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29 30

31 32 33

34 35 36

37

38

39

40 41 42 43 44

the polished, self-aggrandizing performances of the great preachers of Owen’s native Wales’ is unconvincing. Thomas, ‘Robert Owen’, 18. According to Richard Roberts, ‘Robert Owen a Chymru’, Cymru, 15 Gorffennaf 1902, 39–40: 39, ‘Arferai gydnabod ei hunan yn Gymro, ond damwain ddibwys oedd hynny; ac edrychai ar ei gydgenedl fel pobl a ddifethid gan grefydd ofer goelus’ (He saw himself as a Welshman, but regarded this as an accident of no significance, and he looked on his fellow countrymen as a people held back by superstitious beliefs). SWRO, 4, p. 56. See also Robert Dale Owen, Threading My Way, p. 23. Thomas, ‘Robert Owen’, 33–4. G. J. Holyoake, Life and Last Days of Robert Owen, of New Lanark (London, 1871), p. 8. Ibid., p. 12. Roberts, ‘Robert Owen’, 39; NMW, 8 August 1840, 7, 18 May 1842. John Hodder Moggridge, ‘Some account of the principles and progress of an experiment for improving the condition of the labouring classes of society, in the hills of Monmouthshire, begun in the year 1820’, The Oriental Herald and Journal of General Literature, 21 (1827), 310–22: 312; Brian Ll. James, ‘John Hodder Moggridge and the founding of Blackwood’, Presenting Monmouthshire, 25 (1968), 25–9; Chris Coates, Utopia Britannica, vol. 1: British Utopian Experiments, 1325–1945 (London, 2001), pp. 77–8. NMW, 3 July 1841; Gwyn A. Williams, The Merthyr Rising (Cardiff, 1988), pp. 37, 112. This account is based primarily on NMW, 1840–2, but also on Frank Podmore, Robert Owen: A Biography (London, 1906), pp. 565–6; W. H. G. Armytage, ‘Pant Glas: a communitarian experiment in Merionethshire’, Journal of the Merioneth Historical and Record Society, 2 (1953–6: 1955), 232–4; idem, Heavens Below: Utopian Experiments in England, 1560–1960 (London, 1961); Edward Royle, Robert Owen and the Commencement of the Millennium: A Study of the Harmony Community (Manchester, 1998); and John C. Langdon, ‘Pocket editions of the New Jerusalem: Owenite communitarianism in Britain, 1825–1855’, D.Phil., University of York, 2000. Isolation has remained characteristic of Abergeirw: in December 2008 it became the last place in Wales to be connected to the National Grid. NMW, 4 April 1840. NMW, 18 April 1840. NMW, 30 May, 6 June 1840. NMW, 6 June 1840. This account is based primarily on Robert Owen’s Journal, 1850–1; Benjamin Jones, Co-operative Production (Oxford, 1894); J. F. C. Harrison, Social Reform in Victorian Leeds: The Work of James Hole, 1820–1895 (Leeds, 1954); Armytage, Heavens Below; Sidney Pollard, ‘Nineteenth-century co-operation: from community 236


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45

46

47 48 49 50 51

52

53 54 55

56

57

58

59

60 61 62

63

64

building to shopkeeping’, in Asa Briggs and John Saville (eds), Essays in Labour History: In Memory of G. D. H. Cole (London, 1967), pp. 74–112; and Langdon, ‘Pocket editions of the New Jerusalem’. Williams became ‘president’ of the community at Garn Lwyd, although there is no evidence that he lived there. One was planned in Newport, Monmouthshire, although there is no evidence that it was established. Jones, Co-operative Production, p. 107. Pollard, ‘Nineteenth-century co-operation’, pp. 92–3. Thomas, ‘Robert Owen’, 34. NMW, 18 June 1842. Possibly the venture described by the Owenite missionary Robert J. Scott in NMW, 8 August 1840. Robert Owen, Yswain, Talfyriad o’r Gyfundrefn Resymol, seiliedig ar ffeithiau diwrtheb-brawb yn amlygu cyfansoddiad a deddfau y natur ddynol, sef, yr unig foddion effeithiol i symud y drygau sydd yn poeni ac yn dyrysu poblogaeth y byd (Bangor: R. Jones, n.d. [1841]). There are many other hostile annotations in this copy. David Davies, Rhodd Cymru (Cardiff, 1929), p. 7. Richard Williams, Montgomeryshire Worthies (Newtown, 1894), p. 227. Hazell, ‘Wales in Robert Owen’s time’, 137; see also Williams, Montgomeryshire Worthies, p. 227. Edward Edwards, ‘Robert Owen’, University College of Wales Magazine, 15 (February 1893), 168–73; idem, ‘Robert Owen o’r Dre Newydd’, Cymru, 4 (1893), 170–2, 309–11. R. E. Davies, The Life of Robert Owen, Philanthropist and Social Reformer: An Appreciation (London, 1907), pp. 55, 56. Williams, Montgomeryshire Worthies, p. 228. For a similar judgement see T. Mardy Rees, Notable Welshmen (1700–1900) (Carnarvon, 1908), p. 262. Thomas E. Ellis, ‘The memory of the Kymric dead’, in idem, Speeches and Addresses (Wrexham, 1912), pp. 3–26: pp. 9–10. Ibid., p. 24. Ibid., p. 21. Chris Williams, ‘The dilemmas of nation and class in Wales, 1914–45’, in Duncan Tanner, Chris Williams, W. P. Griffith and Andrew Edwards (eds), Debating Nationhood and Governance in Britain, 1885–1945: Perspectives from the ‘four nations’ (Manchester, 2006), pp. 146–68. The second being Ivor Bowen, ‘The political and social economists of Wales’, Wales (November 1912), 596–9. Walter F. Roch, ‘What the world owes to Welshmen, III: Robert Owen: the pioneer of social reform’, Wales (January 1912), 28–31. This was identical to the same author’s ‘Robert Owen’, The Socialist Review: A Monthly Review of Modern Thought, 5 (1910), 335–40. 237


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Chris Williams 65 66 67 68

69 70 71 72

73 74

75

76

77 78 79 80

81

82

83

84

Ibid., 28. Ibid., 30. Ibid., 31. Thomas Jones, ‘Welshmen – common and uncommon’ (1934), in idem, Leeks and Daffodils (Newtown, 1942), pp. 199–203: p. 199. Dictionary of Welsh Biography (London, 1959), p. 721. Davies, Rhodd Cymru, p. 4. Ibid., p. 7. Meic Stephens, New Companion to the Literature of Wales (Cardiff, 1998), p. 176. Martin Wright is currently completing a PhD at Cardiff University which will consider the influence of Owen upon Derfel in depth. Pioneer, 6 May 1911. Pioneer, 7 December 1912; T. E. Nicholas, ‘Robert Owen Y Socialist’, Ceninen Gwyl Dewi, 1 March 1913, 53–6. For an account of the unveiling of the restored grave, stressing local ‘enthusiasm’, see Robert Owen Co-operative Memorial at Newtown: The Unveiling Ceremony on July 12th, 1902 (Manchester, n.d. [1902]). W[illiam] Hazell, ‘Marx and Robert Owen’, The Wheatsheaf: South Wales Supplement (April 1940), n.p.; idem, ‘Wales in Robert Owen’s time’; idem, ‘Robert Owen memorial’, Co-operative Review (September 1953), 206–7. Alfred T. Davies, Robert Owen (1771–1858): Pioneer Social Reformer and Philanthropist (Glynceiriog, 1948) was published with financial assistance from the Co-Operative Wholesale Society. The other is in Manchester. James Griffiths, Pages from Memory (London, 1969), p. 199. Stephens, New Companion, p. 559. D. J. Davies, ‘Robert Owen’, The Welsh Nation (July 1948), reproduced in idem, Towards Welsh Freedom (Cardiff, 1958), pp. 158–9. Harrison, ‘A new view of Mr Owen’, in Sidney Pollard and John Salt (eds), Robert Owen: Prophet of the Poor (London, 1971), pp. 1–12, p. 1. Thomas Pugh, Nodiadau Hanesyddol a Beirniadol ar Fywyd a Gwaith Robert Owen o’r Drenewydd (Treffynnon, 1907); Richard Roberts, Robert Owen (2 vols, Caernarfon, 1907 and 1910); W. Jenkyn Thomas, Heroes of Wales (London, 1909); R. O. Roberts, Robert Owen o’r Dre Newydd (Llandysul, 1948); D. Gwyn Jones, Robert Owen 1771–1858 (Caerdydd, 1968); T. Ceiriog Williams, Robert Owen (Abertawe, 1975). Thomas, ‘Robert Owen of Newtown’, 26. There is a reference to Owen visiting Cyfarthfa Castle, home of the Crawshays, in Margaret Stewart Taylor, The Crawshays of Cyfarthfa Castle: A Family History (London, 1967), p. 128, although no year or even decade is suggested. Cited in Bowen, ‘The political and social economists of Wales’, 598.

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Afterword

Looking forward: co-operative politics or can Owen still help? Stephen Yeo

To use a musical metaphor as Owenites liked to do, I will concentrate on two themes, each with a single variation. The first theme concludes this book’s celebration of Robert Owen in an unashamedly present-centred way, making no claim to add to our historical knowledge of Owenism as earlier chapters have done. In the interests of rethinking socialism for our time, however, there may be a political conversation to be had – in the widest sense of the word political – between the first half of the nineteenth and the first quarter of the twenty-first century.1 The variation to my first theme will be to celebrate the work of Gregory Claeys for providing this generation with such a well-cleared path back to Owenism. The second theme looks forward from the mid-nineteenth century – Owen died in 1858. I want to ask whether seemingly unexciting periods from the point of view of socialist possibility look different in the light of Owenite, co-operative or ‘early’ socialism. For example, was the period from about 1850 to ‘the socialist revival’ at the close of the nineteenth century only a plain between two peaks of socialist activity and, as such, of little interest to socialist mountaineers? This is how such mountaineers have tended to see it. The variation here will be to risk looking even further forward, to the New Labour period, from 1997 to 2010. Has this period also been remarkable only for the absence of socialist potential? Or can it be seen more positively, in the light cast by Robert Owen and the Owenites, by co-operation and mutuality in general and by early socialism in particular? After all, an acute Downing Street adviser during the Blair years suggested from his new base in the Michael Young Foundation, that the Third Sector’s dynamism showed


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signs of making ‘capitalism’ as peripheral to society and culture in Britain as ‘monarchy’ has become to the polity.2 Such questions are worth putting only if there is a possibility that selfdeclared socialists may not recognize material for ‘associational’ (an early socialist word) construction if it does not carry a ‘socialist’ stamp. Indeed, they may even stand in the way of the wider visibility of such material when it is used by ‘ordinary people’ to make new moral – and sustainable – worlds for themselves. The idea of a social movement towards socialism, whether conscious or unconscious, sometimes gets lost among small groups of ‘late’ socialists. ‘The feeling gets around that the left doesn’t have any solutions. Actually, our society is full of alternative ways of organising things.’3 The continuities between the co-operative movement in Britain in the 1820s and in the 2010s are remarkable: more so than the continuities within socialism as idea. Members of co-operative and mutual enterprises with shared hopes and disagreements about their practice across the two periods, would recognize each other’s discourse, just as antagonists of co-operation and mutuality during both periods, whether marketeers or statists, would recognize each other’s predatory intentions towards the movement. I am not sure that the same could be said of socialists. The power of the cooperative movement qua organization or set of associations – to use the early nineteenth-century word again – remains recognizable across time. Such power has been hard for statist and professional-managerial socialists to recognize, because it exists independent of ideology. It is, in that sense, objective. It is what Marx would have called a Great Fact. Early in the twenty-first century, the largest co-operative in Britain and one of the largest in the world, the Co-operative Group (formerly the Cooperative Wholesale Society) rebranded itself. No longer ‘the Co-op’, it became ‘the co-operative . . . pharmacy, the co-operative . . . funeral service, village store, agriculture, financial services, food’ and so on. Success followed. This provoked me to wonder whether there is an opportunity in our justi fiably but dangerously anti-Political culture to re-imagine ‘the co-operative . . . politics’. What might such a politics look like, learning from Owenite or co-operative socialists to do without a capital P? As Owenites and sympa thetic Chartists realized, there is a ‘force’ in association itself, once its forms, its values and principles are understood as critique rather than client of orthodox Politics. With its sixty regional branches and its thousands of members, the Owenite Rational Society described itself in 1840 as ‘a great moral lever which was moving the world, and community was the fulcrum 240


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Afterword: Co-operative Politics

on which it turned’.4 In an age once more of great moral levers, some of them with terror attached, do we have an attractive, non-violent one of our own? My hope is that there are readers who still want to find such a lever, working as socialists with or without the name, and who remain interested in early socialism. But there is little doubt that my optimistic attachment to co-operative socialism will make me vulnerable to one of the many rich put-downs of Owen cited in Claeys’s Citizens and Saints. In the Poor Man’s Guardian of September 1832, Henry Hetherington referred to Owen thus: In his case, experience is unavailing, for after more than twenty years’ exertion he is not a jot nearer the attainment of his object. His mental vision must have some peculiar defect, or he would perceive that he was ‘dipping water into empty wells, and growing old in drawing them up’.5

Writing in the Charter in March 1840, William Carpenter, a renegade Cooperator, had similar thoughts about Owen: ‘for at least a quarter of a century he has been drawing bills on futurity at short dates, which have all been dishonoured.’6 I know the feeling. One day, maybe, human beings will be able to fashion societies in which they can use ‘we’ – we all, everyone – in a material as well as in a rhetorical manner, and even include life-forms other than their own. On that day there will probably be several billion fewer of us than now, but Owenites – with their predilection for the universal and their careful views concerning scale and size – will have been properly honoured.

Celebrating Owen The Association of All Classes of All Nations (AACAN) – the emblematic Owenite organization founded in 1835 – would make as good a name on a socialist banner for our times as it did for Owen’s. All classes, all nations, an association . . . and so, prefiguratively, no classes, no nations. Instead of Marx’s future tense in the Communist Manifesto, ‘we shall have an association in which . . .’, Owenites were confident that they already had an Association. Working people, they thought, could produce associations in the present day, to be followed by full community, in which it would be possible to surround themselves with new circumstances. Circumstances, a favourite 241


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Owenite word, were indeed determining. Owen made that clear in oftenquoted statements. But ‘arrangements’, the characteristic Owenite word for acting on circumstances, could also be made. Through such arrangements, people could educate circumstances, or determine that they (we) go in one direction rather than another, towards co-operation rather than competition. The task was not only to describe but to ‘end the unconscious determination of character by circumstances’. ‘Society shall be taught to govern circum stances.’7 Given enough conscious activity in communities, unions and societies of the appropriate size, an ethically effective ‘public opinion’ could operate. Productive associations will generate social knowledge or social science as contrasted with antisocial or dismal science. By doing so, they will assimilate government to education, regulate behaviour by means of mutual regulation and anticipate party or ‘representative’ democracy in order to put real democracy in its place. Owen ‘was much more of a “democrat” in many of his plans and organisations than has hitherto been generally been assumed’.8 Real democracy was to consist of federal self-government, cooperative and mutual, associated and individual: in other words, collective self-regulation in community. Beyond the remit of Politics with its capital P we all – at last a conscious, justified first-person plural – can construct lower-case politics with the capacity gradually to remove the upper casing from Politics altogether. Politics will have been reconstructed by means of anti-politics. In many ways New Lanark was Owen’s strongest legacy to socialism avant la lettre. After all, that highly successful experiment below the Falls of Clyde, however incomplete, constituted a different, more equitable way of making useful things, rescued groups of people from poverty or migration, and anticipated fully social and more productive relations. Maybe New Lanark should be seen as Mondragon’s oldest living relative, even though Owen’s experiment was never a co-operative and the great man never really liked co-ops anyway. The things and relations made in New Lanark included cotton, recreation, landscape, productivity, poor relief, child nurseries, neighbourhood self-government and learning, financed from the takings of a community shop. Paying for education in this way provided a model for Co-operators for the next 150 years. Details mattered in Owenism. Towards the end of his life, in a book which with typical modesty he called The New Existence of Man upon the Earth (1854–5), Owen reprinted the regulations he had laid down in 1800, the very first year of his management of New Lanark. The village was to be split up into ‘neighbourhood divisions’. 242


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Once a year the heads of households in each division were to choose a ‘prin cipal’. These were then to elect twelve jurors to sit monthly for one year, hearing and judging upon all cases brought before them concerning the internal order of the community. One of Claeys’s many original contri butions is to show how inventive Owen’s democratic – as well as technical – innovations were, much more so than those of Radicals and Chartists at that time. He left us a bankful of ideas. Owen’s New Lanark was as different from other habitats and businesses of the day, and as replicable as Medici banks and Florentine city-states had been for early-capitalist commerce and governance. His plans for age as a way of allocating governmental, product ive and educational tasks among human groups, have at last been taken seriously by a historian. Now that it is such a global issue, we may need to revisit Owen’s ideas about who most appropriately does what, and at what stage of their life cycle. His was an original contribution to making the division of labour more just, by allowing each individual’s journey through life to share fully in the highest human possibilities.9 To return to the AACAN: ‘all classes . . .’ Alongside the word ‘universal’, there were favourite early nineteenth-century nouns like ‘union’ and ‘unity’, together with all words prefixed with co- and com-. Owen thought outside familiar boxes, national as well as domestic. He wanted to reconceive the ‘family’ as an inclusive rather than a selfish, a bridging rather than a bonding unit. As ‘an extreme cosmopolitan’ he envisaged a singular, unified globe. In a related way, he conceived of the end of poverty as no longer utopian. ‘All classes’: there was a sense among Owenites and related thinkers such as William Hawkes Smith, that ‘class’ was the enemy’s weapon, their way of describing working people economically, not our way of describing our social/political potential. Politics had ‘become a mere selfish struggle of aristocratic placemen and their dependents, of sections against sections, class against class’. Nothing called socialism would succeed by reproducing all that. From this point of view, Engels’s error was not to stress the facticity of class conflict and struggle but to insist on its efficacy as banner or rallying point, compared with less gendered, less enclosed ways of thinking-through universal, social potential. ‘An association’: this is one among many prefigurative forms capable of delivering goods for members/associates now, rather than everything for everyone but . . . after the next election, after the revolution, in the afterlife. The AACAN offered socialism as a general, associational presence, not as particular personages or class cadres in or out of power. Socialism had more, 243


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or less, power: here and now. ‘Sect-like’ though the AACAN may have been, sects can be powerfully productive, transformative presences in this world as Max Weber famously understood. Socialisms were difficult to sustain, of course, as they have been in all capitalisms. They are bound to be defeated several times over as a condition of any kind of ultimate victory. But in its own time the AACAN constituted a novel, morally positive force (as in ‘moral force’ Chartism), able to make a qualitative difference to that generation of members, their children and their children’s children. Such a pattern of association was able to determine that other patterns, other patents, would have to move over an inch or two, altering the associational ecology. In nonviolent, early socialist politics which owed a lot to the Society of Friends, ‘force’ took on a different meaning. ‘Force’ as a determining property which large-scale association can have when it is fuelled by education and moral energy is an idea we have lost. The foundation stone of Queenwood community (Harmony Hall), laid in 1839, read YM1 (Year of the Millennium One). Owenites expressed strong and urgent feelings about Today and its connectedness, through their movement, with Tomorrow. In this respect, Ebenezer Howard of the Garden City movement may be said to be one of their most successful twentiethcentury followers: his Garden Cities of Tomorrow (1902) was developed from an equally Owenite version called Tomorrow, a Peaceful Path to Social Reform (1898). Without such a sense, it may be difficult to generate a binding socialist, or any other kind of transformational way of life or ethic. And there is as much ‘endism’ and ‘crisis’ around in the early twenty-first century as there was during the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Some of it is ideological, as in the end of history. Some of it is factual, as in the end of oil. The factual bit may serve, willy-nilly, to bring us sensibly closer to the millennial buzz and political chutzpah of the early decades of the nineteenth century. Max Weber and R. H. Tawney both wondered whether there was a secular ethic equivalent to Protestantism which could make possible a progressive exit from the iron cage of capitalism. The Socialist Ethic and the Spirit of Associationism . . . what a book to be able to write! If it were written for our times, it would echo Owen’s sense of a state of affairs totally different from and infinitely better than competitive capitalism, but knowable through achieved intimations of new ways of producing goods and relations. It would be informed by Owen’s knowledge – alongside our own – about the un sustainabilty of present ways. There is nothing ‘totalitarian’ about seeing community as totally as Owen did and wanting to get there, soon. 244


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It is becoming less and less appropriate to respond to Owenite associations with any kind of condescension. Their long labels seem quaint. But they conveyed something to members, however difficult we would find it to take them to market nowadays. The Liverpool activist John Finch organized an Owenite society in 1832 which he called the ‘Institution of the Intelligent and Well-Disposed of the Industrious Classes for the Removal of Ignorance and Poverty by Means of Education and Employment; and for Promoting Union and Kindly Feelings among All Ranks, Sects and Parties’. Finch became secretary of the Liverpool branch of the AACAN in 1837. He also became president of the Liverpool Rational School Society. Such brio, such freedom from academic deference: Rational Schools indeed!10 I may now be alone in liking what the AACAN merged with in 1839, ‘The Universal Community Society of Rational Religionists’, abbreviated as the Rational Society. I would join a rational society like that, for its ‘universal society’ (the Society officially adopted the name ‘Socialist’ in 1841) as much as for its ‘rational religion’. As Émile Durkheim insisted (working with the French, Saint-Simonian, associational inheritance), religions consist of the more or less adequate choices and inventions that humans make as to how we can belong, or articulate (in both senses of the word) our membership one of another. Universal ‘belonging’ in all its senses, including ‘owning’ in more than an individualist sense, has to be what socialists stand for. The Rational Society’s sixty branches and attendances of fifty thousand at weekly lectures in 1840 forbid posterity’s classification of any of its work as less than later socialisms. Effective remedies for where we are at the end of the first decade of the new millennium will probably look a bit ‘eccentrical’ at first, to use a word from William Blackstone, or ‘ulterior’ to use a Chartist word. They will grow more powerfully from the anti-political than the Political end of the spectrum around which Claeys’s Citizens and Saints is organized. Any socialist presences we manage to produce in the short term with which to honour Owen, may also resemble, initially at least, late capitalism’s uglier antagonists. They may share, for example, a tightness of sectarian belonging, even an ir rational religiosity. There is a thin line between sad, ineffective, self-gratifying, violent ‘un-politics’ and productive, moral-force solidarity, that is to say principled, materially based ‘abstention’ rooted in actually existing associ ations and communities. It is a line we need to risk treading all over again.11 The head of the Leeds Redemption Society in 1849 got it right for the longer term, that labour must prove ‘over and over again, by practical 245


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illustration, that it is organisable . . . When association has demonstrated itself to such an extent as to have become an important element of society, government must take cognizance of it.’12 The notion of a ‘voluntary associ ation rendered universal promised a society superior not only to all existing organisations but also to any previous form of polity’.13

Celebrating Claeys Claeys has made ‘early socialism’ more available as a usable inheritance. For the moral philosophy and socialist economics: Machinery, Money and the Millennium: From Moral Economy to Socialism, 1815–1860 (1987). For the associational forms, their theory and their politics: Citizens and Saints, Politics and Anti-politics in Early British Socialism (1989). For the socialist crux, the two books taken together, plus a score of articles and multiple volumes of reprints of primary sources, essential for teaching. Claeys spots what is not there as well as what is, thereby contributing to political phil osophy as well as to history in a way which few labour historians have done since G. D. H. Cole. Meanings are as important to Claeys as events. His taxonomic intelligence plays on the systematic problems socialists evaded within the discourse of their times, as well as the ones they addressed. He asks why, ‘despite the coalescence of “economic socialism” and “political socialism” ’, ‘no clear model of the administration of the economics of con trol ever emerged.’ The absence of such a reflexive model has been a lasting lacuna for socialists in Britain.14 By contrast with Owenism, social democracy compartmentalized the ‘social’, demoting it to a sphere or ‘sector’, rather than letting it test the economic and the political to destruction in order to replace them altogether. And revolutionary socialism fetishized ‘the revolution’ rather than allowing it to be fashioned before, as well as after, the event itself and to take place now as well as later. At the same time, Owenites’ commitment to community by means of Communities, society by means of Societies, together with their aversion to nation-states, made it difficult for Owenites to do serious, deconstructive work on the state, on general forms rather than particular instances of public regulation, and on what we would call political and economic planning. ‘Even if, in its labour exchange phase, various socialist plans for a national bank and bazaars were published, no conception of centralised state planning really took hold between 1820 and 1845.’15 246


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Claeys listens for nuances in natural jurisprudence, republicanism, Dis sent, Chartism and early socialism in order to encourage practitioners and historians of later socialisms to look for varieties within co-operation, social democracy and labour politics. Surprises excite him as much as confirm ations. The fact that he works within the Cambridge school of intellectual history rather than the Communist and post-Communist school of labour history, enables his readers to work politically with Owen and the Owenites as well as after them, recovering their meanings and using them to challenge our own, rather than overlaying them with the meanings of their would-be mature successors. His determination to ‘place early British socialism within the wider context of the history of political thought, and especially the history of democratic theory’ gives access, as good poets can, to worlds of meaning we know we need, but have lost.16 Claeys is conceptually as well as empirically alert. He presents a nonviolent, large-scale, working-class, inventively democratic ‘moral’ socialism which is a long way from what post-1848 revolutionaries dismissed as ‘reformÂ�ist’. He argues against the formulaic Marxist and Labour History antonym of utopian versus scientific. He prefers ‘early’ socialism to ‘utopian’, at a time when an adequate late socialism is urgently needed. He makes some Marxism look utopian, while also rooting Engels in the Manchester of the early socialists. It may already be too late to avoid anything other than a period of barbarism in the twenty-first century. My instinct, however, is that under standing some of the differentia specifica of early socialism could contribute towards preventing this. I am encouraged, for example, by unconscious echoes between the Transition Towns movement and early socialism. Transition Towns began in Totnes in 2005 and have multiplied rapidly since.17 In Citizens and Saints Claeys runs a typology alongside a chronology, organizing his work around an analytical distinction between ‘citizens’ and ‘saints’, politics and anti-politics. It might be helpful, elsewhere, to develop this distinction into fully fledged ideal-types. It is so productive that it could enable Claeys to move through the narrative of socialism in Britain from 1827 to the present day, in the thorough way that Sidney and Beatrice Webb moved through the narrative of trade unionism in Britain towards their History of Trade Unionism (1894). The Webbs were then able to publish their analytical masterpiece, Industrial Democracy (1897). These two books ‘still stand as the greatest achievements in the fields of study they inaugurated’.18 When his narrative is done, I have great if unfairly projected expectations of a ‘Socialist Democracy’ book from Claeys.19 247


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Looking forward Following this patient recovery of Owenite meanings, we now have usable knowledge with which to look forward from 1850 to the present with eyes rather different from those of conventional Labour historians. I will focus here on the period between the middle and the closing decades of the nine teenth century, while also glancing at the New Labour years ending in 2010. At least we now know some of the probably permanent problems and opportunities which are incorporated in our bodies and minds – minds of their own – as well as in our organizations, as far as socialist construction is concerned. And we have learned that these will not be resolved by Progress, the Forward March of Labour, History, the Revolution, God . . . or the Next Election. Our own agency, our memberships and belongings, in our own mutual enterprises – all classes, all nations, post-class, post-nation – will have to do. To be more specific, we need never again use the nouns ‘social’ and ‘society’ in their vapid, modern meanings without recalling their earlier, hard-edged socialist forms. The same applies to the strong adjective ‘social’ when applied to ‘system’ and ‘science’, as Owenites applied it. Early social ists intended ‘social’ to replace rather than to qualify competitive systems and anti-social knowÂ�ledges. Continuing their project without its socialist label (by then appropriated by those who wished to extend or capture the state), hundreds of thousands of working people between c.1850 and c.1900 preferred society as active, working, productive association to ‘objective’, social facts to be watched or consumed at leisure. Rather than setting them selves apart as scientific socialists in cells or offices of state, they set about socializing politics into states within the state: co-operatives and mutuals, friendly societies, building societies, trade unions, clubs and educational associations. An Austrian observer was excited by these societies during the 1880s.20 ‘The violent revolution which in 1844 Engels deemed inevitable, never came to pass.’ While economic growth was impressive, for a time it seemed as if only one class could benefit: But the result – at least in part – proved otherwise. A social element appeared . . . This social element consisted of the working-men themselves, united in various associations . . . England is at present the theatre of a gigantic develop ment of associated life, which gives to her labour, her education, her social intercourse, nay, to the entire development of her culture, a pronounced direction, a decisive stamp. 248


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Baernreither’s English Associations of Working Men (1889) was devoted to anaÂ�lysing the detailed arrangements made by co-operators and others. ‘Under standing’ was as important as prosperity among people who had ‘ceased to be inactive spectators of the proceedings of the State and society’. They were learning by experience ‘to recognise the difficulties which oppose themselves to the carrying out of social institutions’. It would be an entire error to suppose that the English workman does not extend his thought to the distant future, or picture to himself one very different from today . . . But the main thing is that his world of thought is filled with things clearly practicable and attainable, and that no Utopias find place in it.21

Partly in reaction to such a theatre, the phrase ‘social politics’ was to take on a top-down, Fabian or ‘policy’ form by 1908.22 At this time, a freshly selfconscious, professional and managerial, ‘new’ class was adopting socialism (‘collectivism’) as its ideology. One can watch this tendency at work in con flicted, labile figures like Beatrice Webb and L. T. Hobhouse. It found com plete expression in the life and work of Sidney Webb.23 Consciously associational, large-scale working-class practice continued well into the 1950s. After 1906 it had to work against or alongside a wouldbe monopolistic Labour Party. This is how William Beveridge ended his last great Report, commissioned by Friendly Societies and published as Voluntary Action: A Report on Methods of Social Advance in 1948: So at last human society may become a friendly society – An Affiliated Order of branches, some large and many small, each with its own life in freedom, each linked to all the rest by common purpose and by bonds to serve that purpose. So the night’s insane dream of power over other men, without limit and without mercy, shall fade. So mankind in brotherhood shall bring back the day.24

Voluntary action in the form of giant co-operative and mutual enterprises, such as the affiliated orders of friendly societies referred to by Beveridge, was more ambitious than the voluntary ‘sector’ was later to become. Such action did not divide politics either from working people in combinations utterly different from political parties or from enterprises for the making of useful goods and self-governing social relations. Liberal politics was seen as doing and understanding as much as voting for intermittent packages of policy. ‘Policies’ now indicate what one class of persons sells to, or does for 249


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another class of persons. It took ‘Social Democracy’ to separate the ‘social’ from Societies and attach it to private life: ‘nothing to do with politics’. This is what modern parties deliver to customers in return for votes. It may be significant that as New Labour weakened its attachment even to ‘social democracy’ after 1997, the adjective ‘social’ became free to wander restlessly through everything economic as if in search of its pre-1850, harderedged attachments: social enterprise, accountability, audit, company, firms, costs, capital . . . everything in fact except social labour. Tony Blair’s hesitant ‘social-ism’ in his Fabian lecture of 1995, two years before taking power, may not have been intended as the retreat which socialists took it for. His enthusiasm for The Report of the Co-operative Commission, The Co-operative Advantage: Creating a Successful Family of Co-operative Businesses, when he welcomed it into Downing Street early in 2001, also seemed uncontrived.25 From the other side as it were, John Monks, the general ecretary of the TUC chaired the commission itself, in a deliberate echo of the inter-war Labour Alliance. For four years from 1997 onwards, the United Kingdom Co-operative Council (UKCC), funded by the Co-operative Bank, promoted annual con ferences of the Co-operative Union (now Co-operatives UK), the Building Societies Association and the Association of Friendly Societies. It is helpful, also, that early socialist understandings of government and of education have now been recovered. Owenites used these words, and the term ‘social science’, to mean much the same thing. They all pointed to the goal of conscious, universal, associated, self-government: co-operative rather than competitive. Separating ‘government’ from ‘the government’ and ‘edu cation’ from state institutions like schools and colleges, could help to restore the active, constructive force these words had for early socialists. This is what working people were attempting between 1850 and 1900 when governÂ�ment was as often referred to as process as to an institution, to self-government as to the government. Education was as often referred to understanding – even to conflicted, class understandings – as it was to individual social mobility or achievement. Educational associations were automatically part of feder ations of like-minded, working-class associations. The early Workers’ Edu cation Association (WEA) is only the most obvious example. When I became principal of Ruskin College (founded in 1899) in 1989, its Governing Council survived as such a federation. Alongside the WEA and the TUC, the General Federation of Trades Unions (GFTU), most trade unions, the Club and Institute Union, the Labour Party National Executive and the Co-operative Union were all entitled to seats, as members of the charitable company 250


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limited by guarantee. When Labour ‘took power’ in 1997, key government figures oscillated between centrism and localism, between governÂ�ment direct ives and reminders to citizens about the limits of government and the virtues of collective self-help. David Blunkett is the clearest example.26 In retrospect, the best of the New Politics may have been the setting it provided for the growth of the New Mutualism, jettisoning old Labour but in the interests of learning from pre-1906, old old labour. Examples include: Football Supporters’ Trusts; mutual models for the governance of hospitals and clusters of schools; ideas for the remutualization of private providers of utilities, transport and financial services; reform of Industrial and Provident Society legislation, including legislation favourable to co-operatives and to credit unions; and research growing from think-tanks such as Mutuo and from a new office of state, the Office of the Third Sector. The most difficult cluster of Really Useful Knowledge which is now more available for reappropriation than it once was, concerns the practical as well as conceptual problems and opportunities surrounding the division of labour. Who does what? Why do they do it rather than anyone else? These are the strongest questions to put to capitalists, protected as they have been by class as an enclosing rather than an emancipating concept. And – a more dynamic question – who is capable of becoming what, as part of realizing ‘society’ in its strongest, most equitable sense? How much of human potentia is to be produced (educated) and made available to everyone by means of deliberate arrangements, rather than inevitably (‘naturally’ and for ‘moral’ reasons) privatized by the powers that be? It was facing this question which turned John Stuart Mill into an advocate of co-operation and John Ruskin into its fearful ally. Alongside Robert Owen’s well-known realism concerning what competition was doing to degrade people, he retained a wondrous capacity to see all of human possibility in every human being. Samuel Smiles had the same capacity: hence his belief that ‘all men might easily become what some men are’. Owenites ‘sought to create a new notion of the unified personality which linked republican and Quaker assumptions’.27 Their prophet wrote of socialism in the New Moral World as ‘combining in the same individual the producer, and the possessor of wealth, the communicator and the recipient of knowledge, the governor and the governed, to destroy the invidious distinctions that have split up the one great family of man into sections and classes’.28 Owen thought that a degree of homogenization or commonality among humans was achievable, by means of individual and communal instruction 251


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and example. But his expectations of everyman were high, in an epoch in which poverty, as he also thought, no longer need be an obstacle. Early socialists’ expectations of members and associates were much higher than dominant expectations became among social democrats and revolutionaries who deployed epithets like ‘the workers’, ‘consumers’, ‘most people’, ‘the working class’, ‘the masses’ or (a recent favourite), ‘ordinary hard-working families’. Social consciousness, knowledge or science adds another dimension to the division of labour. Who already is or will become capable of ‘knowing’ society as it is, in order to constitute it as it could be? If the answer to this question is everyone – we all – rather than a cadre of professional social scientists or a unique visionary or seer (as Owen on occasion imagined him self to be), it will be this social consciousness which will transform society from an It into an Us, from a circumstance to an arrangement. There were ‘epistemological grounds for superseding various occupations. For it was rational independence which Owen sought, with the aim of making possible a universally held conception of the common interest and public good ’(my italics).29 Knowledge and understanding were, for early socialists, basic pro cesses rather than superstructural results. This is why the Rochdale Pioneers put education and government on the same level and the same agenda as production and distribution. Individuals, clearly, do the understanding or make the knowledge. There is nobody else and nothing beyond them which can, for, as Don Paterson put it, ‘we are all the thinking that matter is doing in this part of the universe.’30 It is not surprising that towards the end of his life Owen adopted the radic ally individual, Protestant, religious practice known as spiritualism. ‘Each’, Owen argued in 1848, ‘may be his own priest, lawyer, physician and soldier.’31 Is it, in principle, every individual, regardless of who or where they are, who makes the social and, for that matter, the divine? Members of the Society of Friends certainly thought so, and Quakerism was an important contributor to the early socialist matrix. Early socialism raised the scandalous prospect of everyone’s consciousness of full sociality, as process as well as result. This is what a social society meant, or would mean when present. It is why George Jacob Holyoake put the two words together, social and society, in a way which reads awkwardly to us.32 He wanted to describe how mutuality – in his case the practice of the Rochdale Pioneers – becomes the fully conscious basis for real rather than ideological individuality. Rearranging their own powers of production, distribution, education and government took priority 252


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for Owenites over demanding their rights from politicians and lawyers. People will do different things in the new moral world as they pass from one age group to another. This will enable ‘one for all, all for one’. To achieve this now as well as then, in the present as well as in the future, required a different view of each other and of society, state, labour, capital, money, class, government and knowledge. Owenites shared a multiple, relational (but not relativist) epistemology – mutualizing consciousness through their activities in Halls of Science, socialist branches, co-operative societies and communities. Through these means of (social) production, everyone would consciously construct a new economic>political>social ecology. Members and associates would be the progenitors as well as the proprietors of full ‘community’. Owen’s autocratic impulses have been well documented by everyone who writes about him. But Claeys takes the trouble to understand how instrumental and therefore temporary Owen considered his paternal authority to be. He saw his authority as a parenthesis or necessary time-out, a caesura which would enable everyone else’s powers to engage in arranging the transition between the government (education and science) of society by competition and its government (education and science) by means of co-operation. It was as if malevolent ‘circumstances’ needed to be ‘taken out’ for an instant and managed by a single, smaller, but conscious, circumstance if saints were ever to have a chance to become the active, self-directed citizens who could make a new moral world. Owen himself or a single, centrally directed ‘Com munity’ had to cut the Gordian knot, in the same way that ‘the Party’ was thought to be capable of doing in Lenin’s What Is to Be Done? (1902). In the common sense of Labour history and Labour politics deployed from an expert or state-socialist point of view, the period from 1850 to ‘labour’s turning-point’ in the 1880s and 1890s has been seen as distinctly lacklustre – and Liberal to boot. So has the ‘neo-con’ period – ‘liberal’ in that diminished, free-market sense of the word – which began with New Labour’s break with labourism and state socialism in the late 1990s. Whether these periods should now be seen differently is now at least worth asking, as part of the conclusion of any celebration of Owen and Owenism. Both periods were full of association, in very different ways. I will end by looking back from 1900 to fifty years during which voluntary action was not the same as what is meant by ‘voluntary organization’ today. By the end of the nineteenth century in Britain an extraordinary inheritance had been brought into being by means of working people’s associational creativity. 253


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This inheritance has been available for use ever since. But it has never been taken up politically – still less socially in the Owenite sense – either as theorized project or as developed practice. New Labour’s ‘social inclusion’ agenda, which later turned into ‘community cohesion’, cannot be said to be the same project as that of Robert Owen. Even social historians have ignored the associational inheritance, in comparison with other topics. In recent years, thinkers in the Centre and on the Right in Britain have shown at least as much interest as those on the Left.33 Communities seeking to ‘rescue society behind its back’ went on being founded during the second half of the nineteenth century, as they always will. But it was large-scale co-operatives and mutuals whose activities and enterprises constituted much more than ‘shopkeeping’ which distinguished the period. Having continued to grow well into the 1950s, they are now experiencing a revival. Co-operatives, clubs, trade unions, building societies, educational associations and, largest (and most neglected by historians and activists), friendly societies grew to an enormous size. More than a third of all households in Britain had members in such associations by 1900. These associations were voluntary and open-ended. They were full of an immanent future, qualitatively better from a working-class point of view than the present. They did not regard democracy as finished fact but as un folding effort. Such effort was expressed in the growth of their chosen forms, but no single one of these made a bid for exclusivity, or collapsed the general, associational project into the self-interest of a single organization. Over lapping membership was common. A full associational life was necessarily confined to those who could afford it in the widest sense of having enough time, cultural resource and job security, as well as money. In spite of mission ary efforts, such associations tended to separate their members from people who could not afford to belong to them. But such an outcome should not be taken as their intention. They tended to be anti-state as well as antipolitical. They shied away from the word ‘socialist’ as it was being appropri ated by statists as well as by ‘all-at- once’ revolutionaries. If pushed, they preferred the word ‘communist’. But their hesitations in this regard should not be mistaken as individualism or as blindness to structure or to system. They stood, above all, for federated association as the instrument but also as the sign of a fully social life. They did not need Owenism as doctrine in order to be practising their would-be associations of all classes and all nations. In this project, formidable issues were at stake. Co-operatives and mutuals were ‘realizing’ contradictions which will be the very stuff of socialist 254


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construction if it is ever to take place. They were not merely borrowing available forms, as the Labour Party was to do with the party machine after 1906. They were innovators – the real risk-takers and in that sense the capitalists – in their branches of production. And for a time in each branch, they held the initiative, forcing private capitalists to react to them rather than the other way round. The retailing revolution is only the most obvious example; the development of actuarial science, loans for home-building and federations of clubs for socializing are three more. Some of the contra dictions they lived through were articulated as such by members themselves. Others were more apparent to commissioners and regulators appointed to discipline working-class associational forms at the behest of the state. Other contradictions need teasing out of members’ actions more than their words, by patient historical work. I will list ten of them here, without space enough to follow them through. All of them find echoes in Owenite activity, particularly in the branch life of early socialism and radical Chartism.34 They include, first, how to combine the contradictory imperatives of branch autonomy and local accessibility with central, financial and political strength and capacity for universal ization. Secondly, how to achieve horizontal federation, with links between local associations multiplying with such density that they serve as vertical links as well. Thirdly, how to combine necessary professionalism and manager ial expertise with mutual control and skilled sociality/fraternity. Fourth, how to transcend widening capitalist divisions, existing in the mind as well as on the ground, between categories like consumption and production, entertainment and education, means and ends, economics and politics. Fifth, how to get a lot for a little or, another way of putting it, how to be cheap enough to be available to thousands of people but high enough in class dividend to make joining worthwhile. Sixth, how to aggregate very large numbers of members and associates, for example in Congresses using ‘accumulated vote’ systems, without selling out to dilute forms of de-skilled ‘representation’ and without being defeated by technical obstacles such as the lack of transport, the size of rooms or the height of platforms. Seventh, how to gain and retain a position from which combinations of working people for mutual ends may be able to compete on more or less equal terms with capitalists in a context structured against such equity. Eighth, how to gain the advantages of incorporation in a legal sense without suffering the constraints of incorporation in its sociological sense. Ninth, how not to avoid, and yet at the same time not to be out-competed by organizational 255


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models which make a competitive, capitalist bid for universality in branch after branch of production such as private insurance (or, for that matter, state-provided benefits) as opposed to Friendly Society benefits. Finally, how to realize ‘all for one and one for all’ within each generation, without sacrificing the present for the future or vice versa. In worlds like those of the members of the Royal Arsenal Co-operative Society, the Co-operative Wholesale Society, the Ancient Order of Foresters, the Club and Institute Union and the County Union of the Miners of Northumberland and Durham, issues were being addressed comparable in importance to those raised in the organizations of Reformation Protestants or twentieth-century Chinese peasants. And by liberal, British working people in working-class worlds of which most of us have no conception and for which many on the Left have had a good deal of Political, Socialist contempt.

Notes I have begun such a conversation in a number of settings. See ‘The new mutualism and Labour’s Third Way’, in Johnston Birchall (ed.), The New Mutualism in Public Policy (London, 2001), pp. 226–42; Co-operative and Mutual Enterprises in Britain: Ideas from a Useable Past for a Modern Future (London, 2002); ‘The identity of co-operative and mutual enterprises and the political sociology of Emile Durkheim: an introduction’, in Lawrence Black and Nicole Robertson (eds), Consumerism and the Co-operative Movement in Modern British History (Manchester, 2009), pp. 86–106; ‘Co-operation, mutuality, and the democratic deficit, or re-membering democracy’, in Ian MacPherson and Erin McLaughlinJenkins (eds), Integrating Diversities within a Complex Heritage: Essays in the Field of Co-operative Studies (Victoria BC, 2008), pp. 223–76. â•‡2 Geoff Mulgan, ‘After capitalism’, Prospect, 157 (2009):‘capitalism may, in short, become a servant not the master’ (www.prospectmagazine.co.uk). â•‡3 Richard Wilkinson (author of The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better (London, 2009), quoted in Andy Beckett, ‘Left out in the cold’, The Guardian, 17 August 2009. â•‡4 NMW, 6 June 1840, quoted in John Langdon, ‘The great moral lever: life at the Owenite community of Manea Fen, 1839–1841’, in Chushichi Tsuzuki, Naobumi Hijikata and Akira Kurimoto (eds), The Emergence of Global Citizenship: Utopian Ideas, Co-operative Movements and the Third Sector (Tokyo, 2005), pp. 81–93. â•‡5 PMG, September 1832, cited in Gregory Claeys, Citizens and Saints: Politics and Anti-politics in Early British Socialism (Cambridge, 1989), p. 188. â•‡6 Charter, 15 March 1840, cited in Claeys, Citizens and Saints, p. 214. â•‡7 Claeys, Citizens and Saints, p. 121. Unless otherwise referenced, quotations from Owen and Owenites in this chapter may be found in this text. â•‡1

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Ibid., p. 65. Owen’s plan for the division of society into eight age groups is summarized in ibid., pp. 81–4. 10 For Finch, see J. F. C. Harrison, Robert Owen and the Owenites in Britain and America: The Quest for the New Moral World (London, 1969), pp. 122–6. 11 ‘Abstention’ refers to William Morris’s insufficiently read ‘The policy of abstention’, in M. Morris (ed.), William Morris, The Collected Works (London, 1910–15), vol. 23, for which see also my ‘Notes on three socialisms – collectivism, statism and associationism – mainly in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth century Britain’, in Carl Levy (ed.), Socialism and the Intelligentsia (London, 1987), pp. 219–70. 12 David Green, The Claims of the Redemption Society Considered (London, 1849), p. 25, quoted in Claeys, Citizens and Saints, p. 267. 13 This formulation is Claeys’s own (ibid., p. 111), expouding what ‘Owen had principally in mind when he sought evidence of growing “union” in society around him’. 14 Ibid., pp. 13, 59, 162–6, 318, provides material for another book on this and closely related lacunae in subsequent socialist thought. 15 Claeys, Citizens and Saints, pp. 162–3. But see Claeys, Machinery, Money and the Millennium: From Moral Economy to Socialism, 1815–1860 (Princeton, 1987), pp. 117–25 and 146–7 for possible exceptions in this regard. 16 Claeys, Citizens and Saints, p. 119. And p. 62 for how the recovery of ranges of meanings emerged and evolved as the main subject of this book. 17 For this new movement, see Rob Hopkins, The Transition Handbook: From Oil Dependency to Local Resilience (Dartington, 2008). 18 Royden Harrison, The Life and Times of Sidney and Beatrice Webb, 1858–1905: The Formative Years (London, 2000), p. 218. 19 Claeys, Citizens and Saints, pp. 1–105 should be essential reading for every socialist now. It lays the foundations for a social and intellectual history of socialisms from the 1820s to the 2020s. 20 J. Baernreither, English Associations of Working Men (London and New York, 1889). This was an English edition of the first of a projected two-volume work, revised and enlarged by the author from his German edition published in Tübingen in 1886. 21 Ibid., pp. 3–24. 22 For example, B. L. Kirkman Gray, Social Politics (London, 1908). 23 See Beatrice Webb’s diaries and her own interweaving of extracts from them in her masterpiece, My Apprenticeship (London, 1926). And L. T. Hobhouse, The Labour Movement, 2nd edn (London, 1898); Democracy and Reaction (London, 1901); and ‘The career of Fabianism’, The Nation, 30 March 1907. Harrison, Life and Times, and Stefan Collini, Liberalism and Sociology (Cambridge, 1979) are the key secondary texts. 24 (London, 1948), p. 324. 25 He wrote a foreword to the report. â•‡8 â•‡9

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27 28 29 30

31 32

33

34

A localist, civil-society, even co-operative and mutual, strand in Blunkett’s thinking, has always coexisted with top-down, directive ways of acting in government, local as well as national. See his Politics and Progress: Renewing Democracy and Civil Society (London, 2001) and his Introduction to The Learning Age: A Renaissance for a New Britain (London, 1998). Claeys, Citizens and Saints, p. 54. NMW, 24 May 1845, quoted in ibid., p. 55. Ibid., p. 54. Don Paterson, Orpheus: A Version of Rilke’s Die Sonette an Orpheus (London, 2006), p. 66. Quoted in Claeys, Citizens and Saints, p. 54. In Self-Help by the People: The History of the Rochdale Pioneers, 1844–1892, 10th edn, revised and enlarged (London, 1907). I am thinking of figures like David Green, Ferdinand Mount, Peter Kellner, Frank Field, Philip Blond and – an interesting advocate of mutuality – Richard Sennett. For which see Eileen Yeo, ‘Robert Owen and Radical culture’, in Sidney Pollard and John Salt (eds), Robert Owen: Prophet of the Poor (London, 1971), pp. 84–114, and eadem, ‘Some practices and problems of Chartist democracy’, in James Epstein and Dorothy Thompson (eds), The Chartist Experience: Studies in Working-Class Radicalism and Culture (London, 1982), pp. 345–80. Nigel Todd of the NorthEast District of the Workers’ Educational Association is working on some actively Owenite co-operators he has discovered in 1870s Wallsend, with their own school, street lay-out, society, and so on.

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Select Bibliography

Place of publication is London unless otherwise specified. Date of publication is that of the latest edition. Details of more specialized publications on the themes covered by this volume may be found in the notes to each chapter.

Writings by Robert Owen Claeys, Gregory (ed.), Selected Works of Robert Owen (4 vols, 1993) Claeys, Gregory (ed.), Owenite Socialism: Pamphlets and Correspondence (10 vols, 2005) Owen, Robert, A New View of Society and Other Writings by Robert Owen, ed. Gregory Claeys (1991)

Biographical Studies Claeys, Gregory, ‘Owen, Robert (1771–1858)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004) Cole, G. D. H., The Life of Robert Owen (1965) Donnachie, Ian, Robert Owen: Social Visionary (Edinburgh, 2005) Podmore, Frank, Robert Owen: A Biography (1906) Williams, Chris, ‘Robert Owen: socialist visionary’, Llafur: the Journal of Welsh People’s History, 10, 2 (2009)

02 Biblio_INDEX_ RobertOwen_3_10_2011.indd 259

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Selected Bibliography

Collections of Essays Bickle, Richard and Molly Scott Cato (eds), New Views of Society: Robert Owen for the 21st Century (Glasgow, 2009) Butt, John (ed.), Robert Owen, Prince of Cotton Spinners: A Symposium (Newton Abbot, 1971) Pollard, Sidney and John Salt (eds), Robert Owen, Prophet of the Poor: Essays in Honour of the Two Hundredth Anniversary of His Birth (1971) Tsuzuki, Chushichi (ed.), Robert Owen and the World of Co-operation (Tokyo, 1992) Tsuzuki, Chushichi, Naobumi Hijikata and Akira Kurimoto (eds), The Emergence of Global Citizenship: Utopian Ideas, Co-operative Movements and the Third Sector (Tokyo, 2005)

Monographs on Aspects of Owen and his Times Claeys, Gregory, Machinery, Money and the Millennium: From Moral Economy to Socialism, 1815–1860 (Princeton, 1987) Claeys, Gregory, Citizens and Saints: Politics and Anti-Politics in Early British Socialism (Cambridge, 1989) Donnachie, Ian and George Hewitt, Historic New Lanark: The Dale and Owen Industrial Community since 1785 (Edinburgh, 1999) Garnett, R. G., Co-operation and the Owenite Socialist Communities in Britain, 1825–45 (Manchester, 1972) Harrison, J. F. C., Robert Owen and the Owenites in Britain and America: The Quest for the New Moral World (New York, 1969) Royle, Edward, Robert Owen and the Commencement of the Millennium: A Study of the Harmony Community (Manchester, 1998) Taylor, Anne,Visions of Harmony: A Study in Nineteenth Century Millenarianism (Oxford, 1987) Taylor, Barbara, Eve and the New Jerusalem: Socialism and Feminism in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1983) Thompson, Noel, The People’s Science: The Popular Political Economy of Exploitation and Crisis, 1816–34 (Cambridge, 1984) Thompson, Noel, The Real Rights of Man: Political Economies for the Working Class, 1775–1850 (London, 1998)

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Index

Aberdeen, George Hamilton-Gordon, 4th earl of, 146 Abergeirw, Merionethshire, 225 Act for the Preservation of the Health and Morals of Apprentices (1802), 131 Adams, John Quincy, 14 Aix-la-Chapelle, 23, 137 Albion Phalanx of Associated Emigrants, 207 Allen, William, 22, 59, 130 Allsop, Thomas, 129, 143, 145 Althorp, John Charles Spencer, Viscount, 136 Anti-Persecution Union, 200 Aristotle, 81, 176 Arkwright, Richard, 56 Association for the Relief of the Manufacturing and Labouring Poor, 133 Association of All Classes of All Nations (AACAN), 17, 241, 243–5 Attlee, Clement, 233 Attwood, Thomas, 137, 143 Bangor, 230 Bank Top Mill, 57 Barmby, John Goodwyn, 200 Bax, Ernest Belfort, 49 Beaumaris, 138


Bell, Andrew, 72, 97 Bellamy, Edward, 43–4 Looking Backward, 43 Bellers, John, 137 Bentham, Jeremy, 22, 59, 130 Berlin, Isaiah, 3 Bevan, Aneurin, 233 Beveridge, William, 249 Voluntary Action, 249 Bingley, Yorkshire, 208 Birmingham, 20, 143 labour exchange, 119 petitions, 144–5 Birmingham Political Union, 143 Birmingham, Social United Interest Colonization Society, 205–6 birth control, 25, 49–50 Bissell, Maria, 211 Black Dwarf, 134 Blackstone, William, 245 Blackwood, Monmouthshire, 225 Blair, Tony, 47, 239, 250 Blake, William, 92 Blatchford, Robert, 49 Blunkett, David, 251 Bogle, Adam, 131–2 Bolivar, Simon, 209–10 Bourne, William Sturges, 133–5, 138 Bradford, 208 Bray, John Francis, 169 Bristol, 144–5

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Index

British and Foreign Philanthropic Society, 139 British Association for Promoting Cooperative Knowledge, 160, 198, 209 British Guyana, 210 Brooks, Thomas, 202 Brougham, Henry, 1st Baron, 136, 141, 145–7 Brown, Gordon, 47, 51 Browning, Marjorie, 86 Brunel, Isambard Kingdom, 201 Buccleuch, Charles Montagu-Scott, 4th Duke of, 136–7 Buchanan, James, 76, 78, 84–5, 87 Buckingham, James Silk, 142 Bunyan, John, Pilgrim’s Progress, 221 Buonarroti, Philippe, 169 Burgh, James, 137, 165 Political Disquisitions, 165 Butt, John, 84, 130 Caledonian Mercury, 133–4, 137 Campbell, Alexander, 99–101, 142 Campbell, Robert Nutter, 137 Canning, George, 139 Canterbury, Charles Manners-Sutton, archbishop of, 24, 135 Caracas, 202 Carlile, Richard, 198 Carmarthen, 227 Carmarthenshire, 219 Carnegie, Andrew, 88 Carpenter, William, 241 Cartwright, John, 165 Take Your Choice, 165 Catholic emancipation, 141 Ceiriog Memorial Institute, 232 Charter, 241 Chartism, 68, 144–7, 170, 200–1, 205–6, 208, 240, 243–4, 247, 255 Chartist land plan, 208–9

Chisholme, Gilbert, 138 Christian Socialism, 92 Cincinnati, 99, 100, 101, 142, 206 City of London Tavern, 33, 134, 141 Claeys, Gregory, cited, 166, 205, 222, 243, 253 Citizens and Saints, 241, 245–7 Machinery, Money and the Millennium, 246 Clarendon, George Villiers, 4th earl of, 146 Clark, Jonathan, 91 Clive, Henry, 135 Cloncurry, Valentine Browne Lawless, 2nd Baron, 139 Cobbett, William, 135, 157–8, 162 Coke, Thomas, 135, 139 Cole, G. D. H., 222, 246 Cole, Margaret, 219, 222 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 107, 132 Combe, Abram, 26 Combination Acts, 162 Commons select committee on mendacity, 133 communism, fall of, 33 Community of Equality, 18 Co-operative Congress, 205 Co-operative Emigration Society, 207 Co-operative Group, 240 Co-operative Magazine, 117 Co-operative movement, 159, 232, 240 Co-operative Review, 232 Co-operative Union, 230 Co-operative Wholesale Society, 240 Corinthians, Paul’s letter to the, 180 Crisis, 143 Crosland, Anthony, 113, 125–6 The Future of Socialism, 113 Crossman, Richard, 113, 126 Curwen, John Christian, 133–4 Cymro, Y, 232 262


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Index

Dafydd ap Gwilym, 231 Dale, Caroline, 21, 56 Dale, David, 14–15, 19–22, 25, 27, 56, 74–5, 130 Darwin, Charles, 41, 44, 50, 92 Davenport, Allen, 205 Davenport, Edward Davies, 141 Davies, Alfred T., 232 Davies, D. J., 233 Davies, David, 229, 232 Davies, R. E., 230 de Crespigny, Sir William, 135, 138 Defoe, Daniel, Robinson Crusoe, 221 Democratic Co-operative Society for Emigrating to the Western States of North America, 207 Derby Mercury, 133 Derby ‘turn-out’ (1834), 163 Derby, Edward Stanley, 14th earl of, 147 Derbyshire, 132 Derfel, R. J., 232 Description of an Architectural Model for a community, 122 Dictionary of Welsh Biography, 233 Diderot, Denis, 94 Diggers, 68, 165 Dolgellau, Merionethshire, 225, 226 Donnachie, Ian, cited, 73, 83, 219–20, 222 Donne, James, 224 Drinkwater, Peter, 20, 57 Dublin, 25, 139 Duncan, James Elmslie, 206, 209 Duncan, Revd Henry, 14 Duncombe, Thomas Slingsby, 146, 147 Duncuft, John, 147 Dundas Vale, Glasgow, 83 Durkheim, Emile, 88, 245 Earl, James, 61 Economist, 138, 140

Edinburgh, 130 Edinburgh Review, 136 Education Act (1870), 87 Edward Augustus, Duke of Kent, 129, 135 Edwards, Edward, 230 Edwards, Sir Owen M., 230 Ellis, Tom, 230–1 ‘The Memory of the Kymric Dead’, 230 Engels, Friedrich, 3, 18, 34, 37, 40, 45, 48 and Manchester, 247 and the Rational Society, 169 and violent revolution, 248 Socialism, Utopian and Scientific, 35 view of class conflict, 243 view of Owen, 35 English Associations of Working Men, 249 Enquirer, 118 Equality Society, 207 Equality (community), Spring Lake, Wisconsin, 207 Equitable Labour Exchange, 142, 199 Erthig (community), Port of Spain, 203, 211 Etzler, Johannes, 197, 201–2, 204, 206, 209 Paradise within the Reach of All Men, 206 Examiner, 132 Fabian Essays, 117 Fabian Socialism, 48, 125 Fabian Society, 39, 45, 88 Factory Act (1833), 163 factory commissions, 16 Falla, William, 17 Famous Welshmen, 233 Faner, Y, 229 Faulks, Keith, 88–9 Fellowship of the New Life, 45 263


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Index

Fielden, John, 144 Finch, John, 245 Finlay, Kirkman, 133 Flax and Cotton Act, 131 Fleming, George, 204 flexible specialization, 114–15 Flower, George, 26 Fordism, 114, 115 Foster, Joseph, 59, 130 Fourier, Charles, 33 Fox, Joseph, 59, 130 Frankfurt School, 125 Frazer, James, 92 Freemasonry, 21 Freemasons’ Hall, 135 Freud, Sigmund, 88 Froebel, Friedrich, 86 Frost, John, 145 Garn Lwyd, Carmarthenshire, 227–8 Gatrell, Vic, 130 Geddes, Patrick, 51 General election (1812), 136 General election (1818), 137 General election (1820), 129, 137 General election (December 1832), 199 General election (1841), 145 General election (1847), 129 Geneva, 232 George and Vulture (tavern), 134 George IV, king of Britain and Ireland, 142 Gibbs, Michael, 59, 130 Glasgow, 15, 20, 131, 137–8 dinner in honour of Joseph Lancaster, 80 Drygate school, 82 Dundas Vale, 83 Educational Society, 82 elites in, 14, 21 Infant School Instructor, 86 Infant School Society, 87 Glasgow Herald, 59

Glasier, J. Bruce, 47 Goderich, F. J. Robinson, 1st Viscount, 140 Godwin, William, 27, 81, 92, 94, 126, 130 and ‘adventitious wants’, 118 Owen’s relationship with, 94, 156 Good Samaritan, story of, 178 Goulburn, Henry, 140 Grand National Consolidated Trade Union (GNCTU), 144, 159, 167–8 Grant, Robert, 142 Gray, John, 44, 161, 163 Gray’s Inn Road Institution, 143 Green, David, 227 Green, John, 207 Griffiths, James, 233 Griscom, John, 16, 61 Guild Socialism, 37 Halifax, 208 Hall, Benjamin, 146 Hall, Charles, 158–9 Effects of Civilization on the People in European States, 158 Halls of Science, 208 Ham Common, Surrey, 120, 123, 201 Hamilton, Archibald James, 26, 136, 139 Hampden Club, 135 Hansard, Luke, 201 Hardie, J. Keir, 40, 49 view of Owen, 38, 232 Harding, Chester, 26 Harrison, J. F. C., 34, 197, 233 Robert Owen and the Owenites in Britain and America, 197 Harvey, Daniel Whittle, 136, 146 Hay, Adam, 137 Hazell, William, 232 Hazlitt, William, 3, 83 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 107

264


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Index

Helvetius, Claude Adrien, 94 Herald of Co-operation, 227 Herald of Redemption, 227 Hetherington, Henry, 142, 162, 170, 200, 241 Hibernian Philanthropic Society, 139–40 Hill, James, 200 Hirst, Paul, 114 History Workshop, 91 Hobhouse, L. T., 249 Hobson, John A., 36 Hodgskin, Thomas, 158, 201 Labour Defended Against the Claims of Capital, 158 Hole, James, 227 Holyoake, George Jacob, 200, 203–4, 224, 234, 252 Home Colonization Office, 145 Horton, Robert John Wilmot, 142 House of Trades, 167 Howard, Ebenezer, 244 Garden Cities of Tomorrow, 244 Tomorrow, a Peaceful Path to Social Reform, 244 Huddersfield, 207–8 Hudson’s radical coffee house, Covent Garden, 207 Hull Packet, 133 Hume, David, 94 Hunt, Henry, 134–5, 138, 141 Hunt, Thomas, 207 Huxley, Thomas Henry, 87 Hyndman, H. M., 39, 49 Hywel Dda, 231 Illinois, 206, 207 Independent Labour Party, 39, 40, 47 Institution of the Intelligent and WellDisposed … , 245 International Labour Office, 232 Ireland, 13, 25, 26, 139, 140–1, 144, 146–7

Irish Coercion Act, 163 Irish Insurrection Act, 139 Ironside, Isaac, 205 John Street Institute, Tottenham Court Road, 41, 146, 207 John, Sir William Goscombe, 232 Jones, Griffith, of Llanddowror, 231 Jones, Lloyd, 131, 146 Jones, Thomas, 234 Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 28 Kant, Immanuel, 94, 175, 191 Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, 191 Keighley, Yorkshire, 208 Kelly, William, 21 Kennington Common, 147 Kensal Green Cemetery, London, 87 Kossuth, Lajos, 49 Labour Exchanges, 17, 211 Labour Leader, 37 Lambeth, 207 Lanark county meeting (1821), 138 Lanark Twist Company, 21, 131 Lanarkshire by-election (1827), 140 Lanarkshire petition (1821), 138 Lancaster, Joseph, 14, 16, 72, 76, 80 Lauderdale, James Maitland, 8th Earl of, 132 Lazarus, story of, 179 Leeds, 208, 228 Co-operative Society, 228 Redemption Society, 227–8, 245 Leeds Mercury, 133 Leicester, 37 Lenin, Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov, 35, 253 What is to be done?, 253 Levellers, 165 Lewis, Thomas Frankland, 138 Linlithgow Burghs, 129, 136–7 265


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Index

Linlithgow by-election (1819), 137 Liverpool, 245 Liverpool Rational School Society, 245 Liverpool, Robert Banks Jenkinson, 2nd earl of, 14, 81, 132, 134, 136, 139 Llanelli, 227 Llanidloes, Montgomeryshire, 200, 221 Lloyd George, David, 231 Llywelyn ap Gruffydd, 231 Lockhart, William, 138 London, 41, 87, 132, 141, 199–200, 205, 207–9 Atheistical Society, 200 Co-operative Society, 206 Co-operative Trading Association, 198, 206 Mechanics Institute, 201 radicalism, 92 London Dispatch, 144 London Tavern, 132, 137, 141 London Working Men’s Association, 200 Longmans’, 137 Lords’ select committee on poverty, 133 Lovett, William, 160, 198 Luke’s gospel, 178–80 Lushington, Stephen, 135 MacDonald, J. Ramsay, 40–1, 48, 50–1, 232 The Socialist Movement, 39 view of Owen, 38–9 Macgreggor, John, 146 Maclure, William, 26 Malthus, Thomas Robert, 23 Malthusianism, 50, 136, 142 Manchester, 15, 130, 206–7, 247 Board of Health, 15, 20 Co-operators, 230 intellectual elite, 20, 93–4

labour exchange, 119 Literary and Philosophical Society, 20, 93–4, 131 Owenites, 229 petition (1839), 144 press, 145 St Peter’s Fields, 68 Manea Fen, Cambridgeshire, 207 Manners-Sutton, Charles, politician, 133 Mannheim, Karl, 88 Marcuse, Herbert, 125 Marx, Karl, 3, 4, 18, 34, 36–7, 40–1, 45, 50, 88, 187–9, 232, 240–1 Capital, 3, 4, 188 Grundrisse, 187 and nationalism, 48–9 Theses on Feuerbach, 186 view of utopian socialism, 35 Marx, Karl, and Engels, Friedrich, The German Ideology, 45 Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich, Manifesto of the Communist Party, 34–5, 241 Marxism Today, 115 Marylebone, 146 Marylebone, constituency, 129 Master and Servant Act, 162 Mathews, John, 114 Matthew’s gospel, 182–3 Maxwell, John, 136, 138, 142 Maxwell, William, 137 Mayhew, Thomas, 158 Maynooth, 24 Mazzini, Giuseppe, 49 McGuffog, James, 19 McLaren, David, 16 Mechanics’ Workshop, 56 Mee, Jon, 91 Melbourne, William Lamb, 2nd Viscount, 145 Melville, Robert Dundas, 2nd Viscount, 136, 138 266


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Index

Merionethshire, 207, 219, 225, 230 Merthyr Tydfil, 225, 234 Metropolitan Trades’ Union, 160 Michael Young Foundation, 239 Miliband, Ralph, 129 Mill, James, 83 Mill, John Stuart, 251 Milton, John, Paradise Lost, 221 Minter Morgan, John, Revolt of the Bees, 123 Moggridge, John Hodder, 225 Moncas, John, 225–8 Monks, John, 250 Monteith, Sir Henry, 131–2, 137–8 Montgomeryshire, 19, 198, 200, 219–20, 232 Montgomeryshire Boroughs parliamentary constituency, 199 Moore, Jane, 219, 222–3 More, Sir Thomas, 231 Morgan, John Minter, 123, 136, 142 Morning Chronicle, 133, 141 Morning Star, 200, 203, 206, 208, 209 Morris, William, 39, 45, 49, 68, 115, 117 News from Nowhere, 115 Morrison, Herbert, 233 Morrison, James, 163–4, 167, 169–70 Motherwell Scheme, 26, 139 Mudie, George, 140 Napoleonic Wars, 15, 74 National Charter Association, 146 National Reformer, 203 National Union of the Working Classes (NUWC), 160, 166 neo-Malthusianism, 49 New Companion to the Literature of Wales, 233 New Harmony, 18, 98–9, 166, 225 failure of, 23, 25–7, 98–9 Rapp, George, 17 schools, 23

New Harmony Gazette, 99 New Labour, 36, 116, 124, 239, 248, 250, 253–4 New Lanark, 13–16, 19–27, 55–69, 71–9, 81, 96–8, 101, 136, 232, 234 Bug-Hunters, 59 example of, 83–4, 86, 88–9, 130, 132, 138, 157, 232, 242–3 Institution for the Formation of Character, 55–6, 59–60, 63, 65, 75, 79, 86 New Lanark Trust, 55, 65–6, 69 nursery school, 84, 86 Rules and Regulations for the Inhabitants, 58 visitors to, 22, 75, 130, 139 workers at, 164, 167 New Moral World, 64, 103, 144–5, 204–5, 207, 226, 251 New York, 145, 146 New York Times, 203 Newport rising, 145 Newport, Sir John, 140 Newtown, Montgomeryshire, 1, 19, 33, 198, 224 response to Owen, 229–30, 232–4 public library, 230 schooling, 72 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 107 Normanby, Constantine Henry Phipps, Marquess of, 145 Northern Star, 145, 158, 203 Nottingham, 207 O’Brien, Bronterre, 143, 162–6, 168–70, 201, 203 O’Connell, Daniel, 146 O’Connor, Feargus, 145 Oastler, Richard, 144, 206 Marcus, 206 Oliver, W. H., 155, 167 Orbiston, 18, 23, 26–7, 139, 166 267


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Index

The Book of the New Moral World, 104–8 Catechism of the New Moral World, 104–5 ‘A Declaration of Mental Independence’, 99 A Development of the Principles and Plans on which to Establish Self Supporting Home Colonies, 77 Letter on the Relief of the Poor, 179 The Life of Robert Owen, 18, 42, 74, 93, 129, 137 New Existence of Man upon the Earth, 242 A New Manifesto of Robert Owen in reply to the Bishop of Exeter, 145 The New Religion, 101–3 A New State of Society, 98, 134 A New View of Society, 14–16, 22–3, 27–8, 63, 77, 79–84, 95–8, 130–1, 180, 183 Observations on the Cotton Trade and the Late Duties on the Importation of Cotton Wool, 131 Observations on the Effects of the Manufacturing System, 131 Outline for a Rational System of Society, 141–2, 229 Plan to Improve the Condition of the Lower Classes, 135 Proposals for a Change of System in the British Empire, 120 Report to the County of Lanark, 17, 51, 143 Statement Regarding the New Lanark Establishment, 14, 22, 130

Oregon, 145 Orwell, George, 48 The Lion and the Unicorn, 48 Oswestry, 224 Grammar School, 224 Owain Glyndwˆr, 231 Owen, Robert

life: birth, 33 childhood, 19, 93, 177–8 and the Welsh language, 19, 221 apprenticeships, 19 in Newtown, 177–8, 219–22 in Manchester, 19–20, 57, 73, 93–4, 131, 164, 221–2 in London, 130, 142, 146 marriage, 21, 56 on marriage, women and gender issues, 25 visit to Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle, 23 visit to Ireland (1822–3), 24 clerical connections, 24 and the United States, 25–6 and community, 44–7 and nationalism, 48–9 as ‘Social Father’, 18, 27, 129 death, 1, 33, 224 burial, 1, 225 biographies, 37, 131 publications by Owen: Address (1817), 180 Address (1833), 180, 184, 185 Address on Poor Relief, 180 Address to the Agriculturalists, Mechanics, and Manufacturers of Great Britain and Ireland, 140 Address to the Electors of Great Britain and Ireland, 145 Address to the Inhabitants of New Lanark, 63, 69, 179–81

Owen, Robert (senior), 220 Owen, Robert Dale, 15, 76–9, 139, 224 An Outline of the System of Education at New Lanark, 77 Paine, Thomas, 198 268


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Index

Palace Yard meetings (1817, 1818), 135 Pant Glas, Merionethshire, 207, 225–8 Pare, William, 143, 145–6 Parnell, Charles Stewart, 49 Parthenium, St Martin’s Lane, 208 Paterson, Don, 252 Peel, Sir Robert, 1st Baronet, 131–2, 137–8 Peel, Sir Robert, 2nd Baronet, 145 Pennsylvanian Co-operative Emigration Society, 206 Penry, John, 231 Pestalozzi, Johann Heinrich, 16, 86 Peterloo massacre, 135 Philanthropist, 133 Philips, George, 133 Phillpotts, Henry, bishop of Exeter, 144–5 Piaget, Jean, 88, 184, 189–90, 192–3 Pioneer, 158, 163, 169 Piore, Michael, 114 Place, Francis, 27, 83, 92, 206 Plato, 231 Podmore, Frank, 37, 45 Political Examiner, 134 Pollard, Sidney, 228 Pontarddulais, 227 Poor Law Amendment Act (1834), 163 Poor Law Commission, Report, 161 Poor Man’s Guardian, 142, 158, 160, 162–4, 166, 169–70, 241 Port of Spain, 201, 202, 203 Port of Spain Gazette, 211 Porthmadog, Merionethshire, 226 Portman, Edward Berkeley, 142 post-Fordism, 113, 114, 115, 124 Potters’ Joint Stock Emigration Society, 211 Powell, Geoffrey, cited, 92–3, 219, 221

Powell, Thomas, 197–212 ‘My Native Land Goodnight’, 205 Priestman, Martin, 91 Pringle, John, 137–8 Private Finance Initiatives, 116 Private Public Partnerships, 116 Queenwood, Hampshire, 23, 198, 205, 211, 226–7, 244 failure of, 145, 204, 207–8 Quintilian, Marcus Fabius Quintilianus, 84 Ralahine, 166 Rapp, George, 17 Rational Society, 144, 169, 197, 200, 204–7, 225, 240, 245 Report of the factory commissioners (1833), 132 Report of the Co-operative Commission, 250 Revolutions of 1848, 129 Ricardo, David, 136, 140 Riddell, Sir John Buchanan, 136–7 Robertson, J. C., 206 Robertson, John M., 37 Robertson, Joseph Clinton, 201 Roch, Walter F., 38, 231–2 Rochdale Pioneers, 252 Rockefeller, John D., 88 Roper, Lyndal, 91 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 85, 169 Social Contract, 169 Rowntree, Joseph, 28 Royle, Edward, 34, 205 Ruskin College, 250 Ruskin, John, 117, 251 Sabel, Charles, 114 Saint-Simon, Henri de, 33 Salamons, David, 147 Samuel, Raphael, 91 269


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Index

Sargant, W. L., Robert Owen and His Social Philosophy, 42 Saville, John, 162 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 107 Schor, Juliet, 125 Scots Gaelic, 19, 58 Scott, Hugh, 137 Select committee on the employment of the poor in Ireland, 140 Select Vestries Act, 135 Serres, Olive, 142 Sevenoaks, 147 Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 7th Earl of, 15 Shaw, George Bernard, 48, 50 Sidmouth, Henry Addington, 1st Viscount, 14 Sirhowy valley, Monmouthshire, 225 Six Acts (1820), 162 Skinner, Burrhus Frederic, 88 slavery, 15, 28, 143 Smiles, Samuel, 251 Smith, Adam, 81, 130, 191 Wealth of Nations, 191 Smith, J. E., 167 Smith, John, 135, 136 Smith, William Hawkes, 243 Social Community Company, 206 Social Democratic Federation, 39 Social United Interest Colonization Society, 205, 206 Socialist League, 39 Society of United Friends, 225 South Africa, 87 Soviet Union, 126 spade husbandry, 17, 138, 206 Spencer, Herbert, 92 Spinoza, Baruch, 94 spiritualism, 92, 108–9 Spread Eagle Inn, Hanging Ditch, 142 Spring Rice, Thomas, 140 Spurr, James, 225, 226

Staffordshire Potters’ Joint Stock Emigration Society, 207 Stamford, 19, 220 Sterne, Laurence, 178 Stollmeyer, Conrad, 201–4, 209, 211 Stow, David, 82, 86 Stuart, Sir Dudley Coutts, 146 Sully, Charles, 207 Swindells, Robert, 227 Tawney, R. H., 117, 244 Taylorism, 114 Thatcher, Margaret, 46–7, 51 Thickens, William, 73 Thimbleby, John, 122 Monadelphia, 122 Thomas, Brinley, 221–4, 229, 233 Thompson, E. P., 162, 185 Thompson, Noel, cited, 161 Times, 133–4, 141–3 Todmorden, 208 Tolpuddle Martyrs, 144, 163 Torrens, Robert, 134, 136 Totnes, 247 Trades’ Newspaper, 206 Trawsfynydd, Merionethshire, 225 Tremenheere, Hugh Seymour, 156, 157 Tribune and Home and Foreign Colonization Journal, 207 Trinidad, 198, 201–4, 209–11 Trinidadian, 203 Trinidad Spectator, 211 Tropical Emigration Society, 197–212 Tsuzuki, Chuschichi, 129 Trades Union Congress, 250 UNESCO, 55, 67 United Kingdom Co-operative Council, 250 University College (London), 142 Utilitarian Co-operative Emigration Association, 207 270


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Index

utopian socialism, 33–6, 40–1, 50 Utopian Studies Society, 67 Vansittart, Nicholas, 14, 136 Vaughan, Sir Robert, 226 Venezuela, 198, 200–3, 206, 209–10 Victoria, Queen of Britain and Ireland, 145 Villages of Unity and Mutual Cooperation, 17–18 Voltaire, François-Marie Arouet, 94 Waithman, Thomas, 134, 136 Wales (magazine), 231 Walker, Charles, 64 Walker, Henry, 64 Walker, John, 22, 59, 64, 130, 140 Wallace, Alfred Russel, 41–4, 46, 49–50 My Life, 41–3 views of New Lanark, 41–2 Wallas, Graham, 33, 39 Washington, George, 210 Watford, 208 Watson, James, 198, 203 Webb, Beatrice, 50, 247, 249 Webb, Sidney, 39, 50, 247, 249 Webb, Sidney and Beatrice, History of Trade Unionism, 247 Webb, Sidney and Beatrice, Industrial Democracy, 247 Weber, Max, 244 Weekly Political Register, 162 Weil, Simone, 189

Wellingborough, 208 Wellington, Arthur Wellesley, 1st duke of, 141 Wells, H. G., 45–7, 50 ‘A Woman’s Day in Utopia’, 46 Modern Utopia, A, 47 Welsh League of Nations Union, 232 Welsh Nation, 233 Welshpool, Montgomeryshire, 199, 220 Wheatsheaf, 232 Whitbread, Samuel, 97 Whitwell, Catherine, 25 Whitwell, Stedman, 25 Wilberforce, William, 136 William IV, king of Britain and Ireland, 142 Williams, Anne, 220 Williams, Gwyn A., 221 Williams, Richard, Montgomeryshire Worthies, 230 Wilson, Richard, 231 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 188 Wolverhampton, 145 Wordsworth, Dorothy, 61 Wordsworth, William, 61 Workers’ Education Association, 250 World Heritage Site, 67, 68 Wotton-under-Edge, 144 York, Frederick, Duke of, 133 Yorkshire, 198, 208, 227–8 Young, Molly, 76, 78, 84

271


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10/3/2011 7:48:54 PM

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