Noel Thompson is Professor of History and Pro Vice-Chancellor at Swansea University. Chris Williams is Professor of Welsh History and Director of the Research Institute for Arts and Humanities at Swansea University.

Robert Owen and his Legacy

By Noel Thompson, Chris Williams

University of Wales Press

Copyright © 2011 The Contributors
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7083-2442-4

Contents

List of Abbreviations,
List of Contributors,
Introduction Noel Thompson and Chris Williams,
1 Robert Owen: Reputations and Burning Issues Ian Donnachie,
2 Robert Owen and Some Later Socialists Gregory Claeys,
3 The Great Experiment: New Lanark from Robert Owen to World Heritage Site Lorna Davidson and Jim Arnold,
4 Robert Owen and Education Francis J. O’Hagan,
5 Robert Owen and Religion Robert A. Davis,
6 Owen and the Owenites: Consumer and Consumption in the New Moral World Noel Thompson,
7 Robert Owen as a British Politician and Parliamentarian Margaret Escott,
8 Robert Owen’s Unintended Legacy: Class Conflict Ben Maw,
9 Robert Owen and ‘The Greatest Discovery Ever Made By Man’ Geoffrey Powell,
10 Exporting the Owenite Utopia: Thomas Powell and the Tropical Emigration Society Malcolm Chase,
11 Robert Owen and Wales Chris Williams,
Afterword: Looking Forward: Cooperative Politics or Can Owen Still Help? Stephen Yeo,
Select Bibliography,

CHAPTER 1

Robert Owen: Reputations and Burning Issues

Ian Donnachie

Reputations

Robert Owen is an iconic figure in the annals of social reform and is widely celebrated in many parts of the globe where his ideas, transported from New Lanark, took root. In his time Owen was highly controversial, a situation partly of his own making. Thanks to a flood of speeches, pamphlets, books and other propaganda, allied to his numerous interventions in issues of the day, he was often victim to extreme responses from his audience. Indeed, after he went public and became a personality on the national and then international stages, he was endorsed or vilified in equal measure for nearly half a century until his death in 1858.

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

First, it can reasonably be claimed that Owen was most famous for New Lanark and, apart perhaps from his more dubious sobriquet, particularly in library catalogues, as the ‘Father of Socialism’ (to which we will come), or his association with infant schools, this was the greatest of his accomplishments. While there are major questions to be asked about what Owen actually achieved at New Lanark given that much was already in place from the regime of his father-in-law David Dale, there is no question that his twentyfive years there helped make him an international celebrity. He was director of one of the largest factories in the world and, more to the point in Scottish parlance, the laird of New Lanark. In fact, he was a great deal richer and more powerful than most lairds. Indeed, such was his fame within a few years of publishing A New View of Society (1813–16) that he was telling people anxious to contact him, including John Quincy Adams, the future President of the United States of America, that letters addressed simply to Mr Owen of Lanark, North Britain, would readily reach him. Such renown is no surprise given the apparent success of the workplace and community reforms Owen claimed