A beginning at New Lanark
In 1800 at the age of 29, Robert Owen took part-ownership and management of cotton mills at New Lanark near Glasgow. Shocked at the conditions of the workforce and their families, he resolved that something must be done, and that he would be the person to do it.
A product of the Enlightenment, Robert Owen believed that character was not inherited but rather moulded by cultural and physical environment. In this he followed Locke who argued that ideas are not innate, and Rousseau and William Godwin who argued that equality was a natural condition of man, and that inequality was caused not by nature but by society.
Owen placed great emphasis on education, and his major innovation at New Lanark was a school which he described as an ‘Institution for the Formation of Character.’ At the school’s opening ceremony he declared that ‘no obstacle whatsoever intervenes at this moment’ to create a healthy society freeof crime and poverty, ‘except ignorance. [1] Working class children (both girls and boys) were taught during the day and older children and adults in the evening; lessons included dancing, exercises, music and singing, and in summer excursions were made into the countryside.
The scheme attracted great interest, and at first Owen expected that his example would be enthusiastically taken up by others within the ruling classes. This was not to be.
Villages of co-operation
Owen’s thinking expanded in new directions in 1817. Alarmed by mass unemployment in the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars, and a rise in social unrest, the government was desperate for solutions. Owen was invited by the Archbishop of Canterbury and then by a Parliamentary Committee on the Administration of the Poor Laws to set out his ideas. The Committee published a diagram of Owen’s proposals inscribed ‘A view and plan of the Agricultural Villages of Unity and Mutual Co-operation’.
Owen proposed that society should be transformed into a series of communities, with an ideal population of 800-1,200. Each was to be self-supporting and their members would be engaged in various branches of manufacture and agriculture. Owen promoted spade rather than plough husbandry, to increase productivity and to maintain high levels of gainful employment. There should be enough land to supply the needs of the village, with a surplus to allow trade with other communities.
The villages would be located in the centre of farmland, and the layout would maximise the communal way of life. A parallelogram was preferred, with none of the traditional streets and alleys that he believed were damaging to health and a source of crime.
The cost was estimated at £96,000, raised either by private subscription, parochial charity or central funds. The poet laureate Southey attacked the scheme as irreligious, with some justification, for Owen announced that the communities should not be undermined by the ‘gross errors’ inherent in the ‘fundamental notions of every religion that has hitherto been taught to men.’
Initially the plans were received with suspicion by radicals, who detected a paternalistic tone. William Cobbett feared that the villages of co-operation would produce ‘parallelograms of paupers’, and an article in the Political Register warned that Owen’s plan would ‘cover the face of the country with workhouses, to rear up a community of slaves, and consequently to render the labouring part of the People absolutely dependent upon the men of property.’ [2]
In 1817 Thomas Wooler, editor of the Black Dwarf, claimed there was nothing new in the plan, and Hone in the Reformist’s Register pointed out the debt to Thomas Spence, calling it ‘The Spencean Plan doubly dipped’. Owen cheerfully agreed, and also acknowledged his debt to the seventeenth century Quaker John Bellers, reprinting Beller’s pamphlet in 1818.
In 1820 Owen expanded upon his ideas in Report to the County of Lanark, and this work exerted a profound influence. Owen’s debts to others do not diminish the force and importance of his proposals. His vision of a nation-wide federation of small self-governing communities, enabling people to feel a sense of mastery and responsibility for their fate, was immensely energizing to philanthropists, social reformers and working class radicals, and has ‘reverberated through the decades.’ [3]
New Harmony
Owen’s belief in the force of rational persuasion made him confident that capital to create the first communities would come from industrialists, landowners, parishes and counties, and groups of farmers, mechanics and tradesmen.
The immediate reaction of the establishment was disappointing. While Owen indeed found several influential supporters including the Duke of Kent, David Ricardo and Sir Robert Peel, he also encountered vehement opposition from others including Wilberforce and the Chancellor of the Exchequer. An attempt to establish a select committee to get the plan underway was heavily defeated by 141 votes to 17.
A centre of education in the west
In November 1824 Owen turned his sights towards America. For $135,000 he purchased an existing colony in Indiana capable of housing 800 people. New Harmony, as the colony was renamed, would become the model for a ‘New Moral World’.
Here, Owen adopted the ideas of Josiah Warren, an American anarchist who lived for a while at New Harmony and other Owenite communities, and who had set up the first time store.Labour was to be the new currency, and New Harmony produced its own banknotes representing hours of labour.
Owen was determined that New Harmony should exert an educative force not just on its own inhabitants but on society at large. The key was to attract scientists of the highest calibre and in this Owen was remarkably successful.
In 1826 William Maclure, a wealthy Scottish geologist and educationalist, sent out his private library, philosophical instruments, and collections of natural history. These were accompanied by a party of scientific associates, including the geologist Gerhard Troost and the naturalists Charles Lesueur and Thomas Say. They travelled together to New Harmony by keel-boat from Pittsburgh - a ‘boat-load of knowledge’.
Maclure’s aim was to make New Harmony the ‘centre of education in the west’. His enthusiasm had a deep impact on Owen’s sons, and one of them, David Dale Owen, became a prominent geologist. The young Abraham Lincoln saw the colonists pass up the river on their way to New Harmony and unsuccessfully begged his father to let him join them.
Early Owenite experiments in England
Owen’s ideas and activities in the United States stimulated a series of further landmark experiments. Some were ill-conceived and quickly vanished, but all contributed to a growing pool of skills and knowledge.
In Spa Fields in the 1820s Owen’s followers took steps to research and measure social impacts; at Orbiston in Scotland a substantial community was established; early attempts at co-operation in Devon were soon abandoned; a colony at Graveley near Brighton had more success; and still more was achieved at Ralahine in County Clare (where only lack of ownership of the land led to the downfall of a thriving community). At Manea Fen near Cambridge, a settlement which Owen discouraged, the character of the leader was its undoing; and at Pant Glas in North Wales high expectations came up against harsh business realities.
The movement was seething with ideas, not all of them practical. In 1834 a letter was published in Owen’s magazine the New Moral World proposing a ‘Floating Co-operative Community’ which was to be moored on the Thames, where it was thought the inhabitants would be safe from the extortions of retail traders, lodging-house keepers, and gin shops. In the same year it was reported that community coffee-houses existed in London.
Owen himself suggested that the government should purchase the new railways and the land by the side of them up to six miles broad so that communities could be established as the railways developed, thus capturing increased land value for public benefit. The suggestion was, unfortunately, not acted upon.
Women and socialism
In New Harmony, Owen had proposed a new role for women.With child-rearing, cooking and washing transferred to the community, women could play a role in factories and gardens, and take an equal share in communal tasks.Owen also took a reformist position on marriage, attacking impediments to divorce, and for this he was much condemned by the establishment.
Owen was not the first to combine the political and social emancipation of women with proposals for a society based on small communities.Mary Wollstonecraft in 1790 [4] and Thomas Spence in 1797 had sketched out just such a vision.But it was Owen and his followers who were to develop these ideas further and indeed attempt to put them into practice. Emma Martin believed that only Owenite socialism could remove the great evil of the ‘depraved and ignorant condition of women’ [5], and William Thompson saw in co-operative communities the means to achieve perfect equality between men and women:
This scheme of social happiness is the only one which will completely and for ever ensure the perfect equality and entire reciprocity of happiness between women and men. [6]
In practice, Owenite communities fell short of perfection; while women usually had voting rights within the communities, and benefited from education on an equal basis, the communities remained largely male-dominated, and the apportionment of labour often resulted in women working longer hours. [7]Nevertheless, Owenite socialism was far more open to the cause of women’s equality than the ‘Scientific Socialism’ that was to follow.
Co-operative trading
In 1827 Dr William King became convinced that a co-operative shop could provide the money to finance a community, and set one up in Brighton for this purpose. This was the beginning of the co-operative stores movement. [8] By 1830 it was reported that already 300 were operating across the country. A co-operative journal Common Sense described the purpose of a trading association:
The object of a Trading Association is briefly this: to furnish most of the articles of food in ordinary consumption to its members, and to accumulate a fund for the purpose of renting land for cultivation, and the formation thereon of a co-operative community. [9]
But often the stores became an end in themselves, and the original impulse, to provide finance for new Owenite communities, was lost, and many of the stores failed. As King wrote:
There are some societies that mistake the means for the end, and from the success attending trading at their store, regard buying and selling as their main object; forgetting that our motto is that labour is the source of wealth…trading is only the ladder. [10]
There were other problems too. In 1830 King observed that ‘the chief cause of failure’ that had overtaken some co-operative societies ‘was defect in account keeping’. [11] Successful trading was not sufficient to guarantee sustainable businesses:
Several of these stores were destroyed by success. The members for a time made money, but did not capitalise their profits, nor had they discovered the principle of dividing profits in proportion to purchases. The shareholders simply found success monotonous. Some betook themselves to other enterprises more adventurous. In some cases want of religious toleration broke up the society. Bad management ruined others. In possibly quite as many instances scoundrel managers extinguished the society. [12]
New life was imparted into this movement by the Rochdale pioneers, who invented a new form of business, whereby the customer became a partner in the rewards of mutual endeavour.
The wise bee
In 1826 John Minter Morgan, another follower of Robert Owen, published The Revolt of the Bees. Serialised in the Co-operative Magazine, it was much read by working men, and later by others such as the economist Harriet Martineau. It describes how society progresses though five revolutions, from ‘noble savagery’ to pastoral occupations, farming, industry and lastly a fifth revolution pioneered by the ‘wise bee’ Owen.
In 1827 Morgan published An Inquiry Respecting Private Property and the Authority and Perpetuity of the Apostolic Institution of a Community of Goods, which claimed that in primitive Christianity the function of a deacon was to be the custodian of ‘communal property’. In it he refers to Spenceans and Moravians as modern revivalists of these principles. In 1830 he tried to persuade the Bishop of London to establish communities, organised by class, based on these principles.The Bishop failed to act.
The first social enterprise trade fairs
On May Day 1832 Robert Owen and a group of followers opened ‘with some pomp’ the first National Equitable Labour Exchange in Charlotte Street, off Grays Inn Road, London.
The building was magnificent: it could accommodate nearly 12,000 standing and could seat 3,700 persons. This was to be the first of a series of ‘bazaars’, to enable working people to exchange among themselves articles they had made.
For currency labour notes were used. ‘The shoemaker brought his pair of shoes to the bazaar, with an invoice of the cost (calculated at sixpence per hour). The labour note, of so many hours' value, was given to the shoemaker, who could then, or at any other time, buy with them any other deposit in the bazaar—a hat, or teakettle, or a joint of meat, if he found what he wanted.’ [13]
The first day the deposits were 18,000 hours, and the exchanges 900 hours. At its height it was claimed that deposits equivalent to a monetary value of £10,000 a week were made. A Surrey branch was set up in Blackfriars Road, and a Birmingham branch in Coach Yard, Bull Street. The halls were in continual use; on Sundays lectures were given to propagate knowledge among the working classes.
A further opportunity for the social exchange of goods was presented by the Co-operative Congress in Liverpool in October 1832; delegates brought goods from across the country:
From Sheffield, cutlery and coffee post; from Leicester, stockings and lace; from Huddersfield, waistcoat pieces and shawls; from Rochdale, flannels.There were diapers from Barnsley, stuffs from Halifax, shoes and clogs from Kendal, and prints from Birkacre. [14]
However, the ‘bazaars’ soon found themselves operating within a difficult and indeed hostile commercial environment. Without textiles from factories and food from farms the Equitable Labour Exchanges could not become self-sufficient. Efforts were made to obtain supplies of bread, meat, provisions and coals, but food and raw materials remained largely outside the system. Also, the labour note system was not insulated from the pressures of the commercial world outside, cash was exchanged for labour notes, and the labour hour was linked to the standard commercial rate of 6d, with adjustments made for workers whose standard rate was higher. [15]
Moreover, the Exchanges became a dumping ground for unsaleable items. Local shopkeepers sent down worthless stock, exchanged it for labour notes, and carried away the pick of the saleable goods, with which they stocked their shops. [16] There were other problems too. The premises were leased, not owned, and when the owner of the Exchange at Grays Inn Road wanted it back he hired sixty four men to smash the place up. Within eighteen months the experiment was at an end.
Even so, the experiment was not entirely unsuccessful.When the Birmingham branch was wound up a surplus of about £8 was paid to the Birmingham General Hospital.
Tytherly Hall
Robert Owen was determined to establish his own model community in England, drawing on the wealth of experience that now existed. He had exhausted his own funds, so a National Community Friendly Society was formed and collections were made from socialist societies across the country. In 1839 two farms were purchased at Tytherly in Hampshire.
No expense was spared in erecting the finest buildings, with mahogany panels and Grecian columns. As George Jacob Holyoake, an early historian of the movement, said, ‘To the credit of the English communists they were no Barebones party. Had they succeeded in making a community, it had been a pleasant one. They were not afraid of art, and beauty had no terrors for them.’ [17]
With undaunted optimism, Tytherly Hall displayed the initials CM, standing for Commencement of the Millennium. The community started well, and communal eating was encouraged. There was a vegetarian table, ‘at which some twenty dined, and, to the credit of their simple diet be it said, theirs was the merriest table in the hall. At meal-times it resounded with laughter, and often others came and surrounded it to listen to the pleasantries which abounded there.’ [18]
But funds ran out, and debts to builders and tradesmen accumulated. Amid acrimony the creditors evicted the members of the community, and working people across the country who had contributed their small savings received nothing. It was a sad end to an ambitious venture.
Owen’s legacy
Altogether there were sixteen communities in America (in Indiana, Ohio, New York County, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and Wisconsin) and ten in Britain associated directly or indirectly with Owen.
The failures of many of the early community experiments were indeed a setback, but the seeds of mutual aid, co-operation, and enterprise were widely sown, and were to produce rich harvests in years to come.
Robert Owen was certainly not without weakness.He mistrusted the abilities of the working classes to manage any large scale enterprise themselves, and believed in the necessity of middle-class leadership in community experiments. [19] His tendency towards conservatism and elitism often threatened to hold back the popular development of the movement. [20]
But Owenism forged ahead in spite of Owen. He had laid the foundation of a form of ‘socialism’ based on harmonious self-sustaining communities, and though frequently overshadowed by dreams of top-down socialism and centralised state control, Owen’s vision has never been wholly extinguished.
Sources
W H G Armytage, Heavens Below: Utopian Experiments in England 1560-1960, 1961.
G D H Cole, Life of Robert Owen, 1930.
Dennis Hardy, Alternative Communities in Nineteenth Century England,1979.
JFC Harrison, Robert Owen and the Owenites in Britain and America: The Quest for the New Moral World, 1969.
George Jacob Holyoake, History of Co-operation 1875, rev 1905.
Robert Owen, Address to the Inhabitants of New Lanark, 181.
Frank Podmore, Life of Robert Owen,1906.
S Pollard (ed), Robert Owen , Prophet of the Poor, 1971.
[1] Robert Owen, Address to the Inhabitants of New Lanark, 1816.
[2] Sherwin’s Political Register, 20 September 1817.
[3] Armytage, Heaven’s Below, p 85.
[4] Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Men, 1790.
[5] Quoted in Barbara Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem: Socialism and feminism in the nineteenth century, 1983, p 150.
[6] Letter from William Thompson to Anna Wheeler, 1825, quoted in Barbara Taylor, p ix
[7] Barbara Taylor, pp 238-260.
[8] Although it was not the first co-operative store; one was set up by the Weavers' Society at Fenwick in Ayrshire as early as 1769.
[9] Common Sense, 11 December 1830.
[10] Quoted in R G Garnett, Co-operation and the Owenite Socialist Communities in Britain 1825-1845, 1972, p 52.
[11] Quoted in Holyoake, ch 7.
[12] Holyoake, ch 9.
[13] Holyoake, ch 8.
[14] E P Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, 1963, rev 1968, p 870.
[15] J F C Harrison, Robert Owen and the Owenites in Britain and America: The Quest for the New Moral World, 1969, p 206.
[16] Holyoake, ch 8.
[17] Holyoake, ch 9.
[18] Holyoake, ch 9.
[19] ‘The working classes never did direct any permanent successful operations’, New Moral World, 11 July 1839.
[20] See Barbara Taylor, pp 120-122.
