There was a man who had a noble dream

Robert Owen, 1771-1858
Robert Owen was born in Newtown, Montgomeryshire (The industrial community at New Lanark had been planned by Richard Arkwright and David Dale in 1783, to take advantage of the water power of the Falls of Clyde deep in the river valley below the burgh of Lanark, twenty-four miles upstream from of Glasgow. In 1800, there were four mills making New Lanark the largest cotton-spinning complex in Britain, and the population of the village (over 2000) was greater than that of Lanark itself. Dale was progressive both as a manufacturer and as an employer, being especially careful to safeguard the welfare of the children.

Owen's partners did not share his enthusiasm for education and welfare: the major expenditure on social buildings came only after the formation of his third partnership in 1813. His ideas were shaped by the Enlightenment, his contact with progressive ideas in Manchester as a member of the Literary and Philosophical Society, and his acquaintance with the ideas of the Scottish Enlightenment. Owen's general theory was that character is formed by the effects of the environment upon the individual. Hence, education was of central importance to the creation of rational and humane character, and the duty of the educator was to provide the wholesome environment, both mental and physical, in which the child could develop. Physical punishment was prohibited and child labor was restricted. Man, being naturally good, could grow and flourish when evil was removed. Education, as one historian has put it, was to the "the steam engine of his new moral world."

. The New Harmony community was not a success. By May 1827, there were ten different sub-communities on the estate, and a year later failure was apparent.

During his absence at New Harmony, the nature of Owen's support in England had begun to change. Working men were now listening to his message, democratic socialist ideas were being developed by men like William Thompson of Cork, and cooperative, labor exchange and trades union movements were becoming more popular. Owen became convinced that the world of competitive industrial capitalism had reached a stage of crisis and that the leaders of society would now turn to him in their hour of need. What Owen offered the working class Owenites was social salvation -- his creed was that of the secular millennium.

These views were expressed in his weekly periodical, The Crisis (1832-1834), and had a following particularly among the labor aristocrats of London who sought to exchange their products according to the labor theory of value at the Gray's Inn Road Labour Exchange, which Owen opened in 1832.

Breaking with these labor movements in 1834, Owen turned back to his plan for a community and founded a journal, The New Moral World (November, 1834) and an organization, the Association of All Classes of All Nations (May, 1835) to prepare public opinion for the millennium.

In the 1840s, Owen embarked on a new settlement at Queenwood Farm in Hampshire. There was insufficient capital and the community, projected to support 500 members, never attracted more than ninety communitarians. In 1841, Owen secured capital from a consortium of capitalist friends and built a luxurious mansion, Harmony Hall, to house a community "normal school" which would train Owenites in a correct communitarian environment. Owen quickly spent his funds and in July 1842 was removed from control. He resumed control in May 1843, but his concept of a "normal school" was not what many Owenites had hoped for, and in 1844 the annual Owenite Congress rebelled against his despotic control of community policy.

Owen moved on. His missions to Europe and North America never ceased and he retained a lively interest in current affairs, confidently expecting that governments would secure his services. In 1855 he called a series of public meetings to proclaim the millennium. A loyal nucleus of Owenites stood by his side, devoted to the man who, whatever else he had done, had given them a vision of a new moral world. In 1853 he became a spiritualist. On November 17, 1858 Owen died in the Bear Hotel, next door to the house in which he was born.

Owen's character was a paradox to his contemporaries. By temperament, he was conservative and authoritarian; by nature he was naive. He was convinced that man's character was made for him, rather than by him and that social change would only come from calm reasoning with the leaders of society. He never believed in the independent power of the working classes and he could never conceive that within capitalist society there might be more than one rationally agreed interest.

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