The village of New Lanark lies on the River Clyde, twenty miles southeast of Glasgow. A visitor, approaching from the north, would observe neat rows of uniform three and five storied gray stone buildings huddled together in the hilly bucolic Scottish countryside, but at first one would likely not discern the significance of the utopian proto-socialist factory community laid out before them. In many ways, Lanark was like the dozens of other mill towns that sprung up around the British isles in the years since Richard Arkwright first harnessed water to power spinning machines in the 1770s. This little industrial hamlet contained mills and factories, spinning and weaving the cotton thread which clothed Britain and constituted one of her principal exports to the rest of the world. There were tenements and houses for the approximately eighteen hundred workers and managers, a bell tower to bring the laborers to work in the morning, and send them home in the evening. However, Lanark was made peculiar by its unconventional manager and operator, the Welshman Robert Owen, who turned Lanark into a laboratory for his own revolutionary theories on business, community, and education.
If this visitor proceeded to peer inside the buildings of Lanark they might begin to see the nascent components of what Owen termed “the New Moral World.” Above each laborer’s station within the factory is a carved, painted block of wood – a “silent monitor” – whose painted faces would be turned according to the worker’s productivity, from black for deficient to white for excellence. Inside one room, uniformed schoolgirls practice a dance while an instructor looks on, under an immense map of Europe and large posters of exotic animals. Lining the walls are well-dressed patrician visitors, who have probably come to satisfy the curiosity aroused by the deluge of praise and attention lavished on Lanark by the press and important thinkers of the day. The Institute for the Formation of Character, formed in 1816, supervised the education of Lanark’s five hundred indigent child laborers. Housing, fuel, clothing and provisions were provided for the workers at low rates, and an atmosphere of communal good and religious tolerance was impressed. Robert Owen was the architect and potentate behind this entire enterprise at Lanark, and his successes here would bring him international celebrity.
Robert Owen was born the sixth of his parents’ seven children on May 14th, 1771. He was born and brought up in the small market town of Newtown, Montgomeryshire, near the English border in the west of Wales. It was a comfortable, though modest background. His father, also named Robert Owen, was a saddler and ironmonger by trade, as well as the town’s postmaster. He was a precocious and clever youth, graduating at the age of seven to schoolmaster’s assistant. The young Owen developed an early passion for reading and devoured volumes from the libraries of the town clergyman, doctor, and lawyer, from Charles Rollin’s Ancient History to the adventure of Robinson Crusoe and Christian allegory of Pilgrim’s Progress. Owen wrote later that he believed every word in these books to be true, and would often read a volume per day.” It was around the age of eight or nine that Owen turned his keen mind toward the question of religion. Upon prompting from some Methodist friends of the Owen family, he began to read tracts on the religious thought of various peoples of the world. Owen was to write that the “study of these contending faiths, and their deadly hate of other, began to create doubts” in his mind as to the accuracy or preeminence of any set of beliefs.
Already restless with his rustic surroundings, Owen obtained permission to leave home upon his tenth birthday. Thus, in 1781, Owen made the journey by coach to London, where he stayed with his brother William for six weeks before securing employment with James McGuffog, a draper in Stamford, Lincolnshire. Owen found great pride in self-sufficiency, bragging, “from that period, ten years of age, [I] maintained myself without ever applying to my parents for any additional aid.”
Owen’s future father-in-law, Glasgow businessman and preacher David Dale, founded New Lanark in 1784. Dale selected the location due to the nearby waterfalls on the River Clyde, which would power the cotton mills he constructed on the site. New Lanark however, was remote, the roads were bad, and the area around it under-populated. Dale was forced to secure a new labor force, and transport and provide accommodations for them at New Lanark. This was achieved by procuring about 500 children from workhouses public charities, and by persuading families to move to the fledgling factory village. At this early juncture of the Industrial Revolution there was still a considerable aversion for factory labor among the general public, and the workers who arrived in New Lanark were of a less than savory nature. Owen later described them as, “destitute of friends, employment, and character.”
Owen first visited Lanark on June 15, 1798, at the age of twenty-seven. If his own version of the story is to be believed, Owen fell into an appraisal of Lanark while attempting to win the hand of Dale’s daughter, the nineteen-year-old Ann Caroline Dale. Whatever Owen’s original intentions were, he secured the purchase of the land, village, and mills of Lanark for himself and his partners, John Barton and John Atkinson, for sixty thousand pounds. Later that year, on September 30th, Owen was married to Ann Dale in Glasgow. On January 1, 1800, Owen took over as manager of the New Lanark Twist Company. He and Ann moved into one of the two large houses located in the center of the village, and Owen went about using his new role as a pulpit for some of his own theories on management and harmonious community. Owen was impressed with the spacious rooms and plentiful food afforded the child laborers at New Lanark, but found fault with Dale for having lived in Glasgow and not devoting himself fully to the well-being of his employees. Owen maintained that prior to his arrival the “population lived in idleness, in poverty, in almost every kind of crime [and] consequently, in debt, out of health, and in misery.” He was horrified to find as well that “the whole was under a strong sectarian influence, which gave a marked and decided preference to one set of religious opinions over all others.”
Owen’s first project was to provide for the education of the children at New Lanarck. Education was at the forefront of Owen’s theories for social betterment. In his own memoirs, Owen’s son Robert Dale wrote that the “New Lanark schools, and the cause of popular education generally, were the subjects which, at this period of my father’s life, chiefly engrossed his attention.” The village school taught the children at New Lanarck for five years, between the ages of five and ten, and without expense to their parents. The schools aimed to educate the children in the broad tenets of Christianity, with no specific doctrinal bent. Mrs. Thrall, a former pupil at the Owenite Lanark-modeled schools at New Harmony, recollected her time there and gives a vivid picture of the dreary monotony of the “coarse linen” uniforms, stringently enforced hours, suppers of “mush and milk again,” and being “marched together to the Community apothecary’s shop, where a dose that tasted like sulfur was impartially dealt out to each pupil.” Admittedly however, this inflexible educational regime would have been a marked improvement over the fourteen hours per day at the factory common for thousands of other British children.
Owen had developed the belief, popular at this time of the advent of the social sciences, that the character of human beings is determined by their environment experiences, and education during childhood. Owen found children to be naturally “without exception, passive and wonderfully contrived compounds.” Owen thought that the growing trend of child labor was creating members of society who were “dwarfs in body and mind,” and he became convinced that society’s ills could be cured if only children were educated before entering the labor pool, and taught intellectual curiosity and tolerance. In his autobiography, Owen applies this theory to himself. At one point, he bizarrely attributes his unique characteristics and any “favorable difference” he possessed, to have stemmed from an episode that occurred when he was around the age of five. Owen writes that once, in his rush to arrive first to school, he swallowed a scalding spoonful of flummery , which scorched his stomach and thereafter made the digestion of food decidedly difficult. By his account, this minor disability aroused in Owen “the habit of close observation and of continual reflection .”
Lanark became a spectacular success. Owen used the profits from the mills to finance new elements of his plans for the ideal society. The Institute for the Formation of Character taught singing and dancing to supplement the typical schoolwork of reading, writing and arithmetic. Owen instituted an autonomous jury system, neighborhood-based community representation, and even a fledgling social security system to provide for workers in injury and old age. Owen reduced his employees’ working day by an hour, and still earned enough profits to circumvent the persistent naysaying of his partners by buying them out in 1813. Some 20,000 visitors flocked to Lanark between 1815 and 1825 to see how Owen had so successfully paired altruism and humanitarian interests with profitability. In 1816, Owen declared that “the chief object” of his life would be to export the successes of Lanark to the world at large.
In an 1813 account of Owen’s early work at Lanark, he holds himself up as a savior to these pauper Scottish laborers. Owen held himself up as somewhere between missionary and messiah – declaring of his work at Lanark, “the population could not continue to resist a firm well-directed kindness, administering justice to all.” This likeness was carried on by many others at the time, at least to some extent as a direct result of Owen’s avid self-promotion. Owen made his first appearance as a speaker in 1812, at a dinner in Glasgow, and would eventually become best known for his many public speaking tours and engagements. In an 1824 tour of the United States he addressed a joint session of Congress in Washington, D.C., and in Cincinatti, engaged in an eight-day public debate on religion. His ideas held enough sway to gain Owen the ears of the American President, the Austrian minister Metternich, Prime Ministers and Members of Parliament. Owen’s success seems to have frozen his once vigorous and active mind. His son describes his reading habits’ atrophy, “he usually glanced over books, without mastering them; often dismissing them with some…curt remark…I never remember to have seen him occupied in taking notes from any book whatever.”
His reputation as an innovative thinker and successful manager began to be replaced however, with one for pomposity, garrulity, and a dictatorial approach in his little “new moral worlds.” Reports that Owen had himself castrated a boy who had transgressed Owen’s law against licentiousness, whether true or not, did nothing to help his public persona. The power and capacity of this sort of mass leadership seems to have gone to Owen’s head. From this point on, Owen had passed his apogee, and his fame and fortunes began to fall. Convinced of his own rectitude and philosophical infallibility, Owen continued to preach his increasingly extreme social and moral solutions. His long-held secularism turned subtly to anti-religious rants, alienating, and likely limiting, his audience. He continued to publish prolifically and held frequent speaking engagements, but he ceased to say anything new, and fewer and fewer people found what Owen had to offer interesting. His published work held such grandiloquent titles as “The Measures Which I have been Impressed from My Youth to Adopt Through Life to This Period, To Prepare the Population of the World to Change Their System of Falsehood, Ignorance, and Misery, for the System of Truth, Wisdom, and Happiness.”
Owen’s obituary, announcing his death in The Times on November 19, 1858 carries the air of a bright, but dirtied past. Owen perhaps was too similar to his signature wooden block, announcing workers’ progress: designed with the best intentions to be efficacious, but ultimately uncompromising and, above all, blockish. The legacy of Robert Owen is perhaps best reflected in these lines of verse from an 1834 edition of the Poor Man’s Guardian:
Robert Owen, wise and good,
Better known than understood;
Too often putting wisdom’s tools
In the very hands of fools.
Peter Bjorn and John, Living Thing (Almost Gold Recordings), 2 1/2 stars
