Early life and family Robert Owen was born in
Newtown, a small market town in
Montgomeryshire, Wales, on 14 May 1771, to Anne (Williams) and Robert Owen. His father was a
saddler,
ironmonger and local postmaster; his mother was the daughter of a Newtown farming family. Young Robert was the sixth of the family's seven children, two of whom died at a young age. His surviving siblings were William, Anne, John and Richard. Owen received little formal education, but he was an avid reader. He left school at the age of ten to be an apprentice
draper in
Stamford for four years. He also worked in London drapery shops in his teenage years. At about the age of 18, Owen moved to
Manchester, where he spent the next twelve years of his life, employed initially at Satterfield's Drapery in Saint Ann's Square. , Scotland. On a visit to Scotland, Owen met and fell in love with Ann (or Anne) Caroline Dale, daughter of
David Dale, a
Glasgow philanthropist and the proprietor of the large New Lanark Mills. After their marriage on 30 September 1799, the Owens set up a home in
New Lanark, but later moved to Braxfield House in
Lanark. Robert and Caroline Owen had eight children, the first of whom died in infancy. Their seven survivors were four sons and three daughters:
Robert Dale (1801–1877), William (1802–1842), Ann (or Anne) Caroline (1805–1831), Jane Dale (1805–1861),
David Dale (1807–1860),
Richard Dale (1809–1890) and Mary (1810–1832). Owen's four sons, Robert Dale, William, David Dale and Richard, and his daughter Jane Dale, followed their father to the United States, becoming US citizens and permanent residents in New Harmony, Indiana. Owen's wife Caroline and two of their daughters, Anne Caroline and Mary, remained in Britain, where they died in the 1830s.
Textile mills While in Manchester, Owen borrowed £100 from his brother William, to enter into a partnership to make
spinning mules, a new invention for spinning cotton threads, but exchanged his business shares within a few months for six spinning mules that he worked in rented factory space. In 1792, when Owen was about 21 years old, mill-owner
Peter Drinkwater made him manager of the
Piccadilly Mill at Manchester. However, after two years with Drinkwater, Owen voluntarily gave up his contract of partnership and left the company, and went into partnership with other entrepreneurs to establish and later manage the Chorlton Twist Mills in
Chorlton-on-Medlock. By the early 1790s, Owen's
entrepreneurial spirit and management skills and progressive moral views were emerging. In 1793, he was elected as a member of the
Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, In July 1799 Owen and his partners bought the
New Lanark mill from David Dale, and Owen became its manager in January 1800. Many of the workers were from the lowest social levels: theft, drunkenness and other vices were common and education and sanitation neglected. Most families lived in one room. More respectable people rejected the long hours and demoralising drudgery of the mills. Until a series of
Truck Acts (1831–1887) required employers to pay their employees in common currency, many operated a
truck system, paying workers wholly or in part with tokens that had no monetary value outside the mill owner's "truck shop", which charged high prices for shoddy goods. Unlike others, Owen's truck store offered goods at prices only slightly above their wholesale cost,
American communal living experiments , Owen's envisioned successor of
New Harmony.
Owenites fired bricks to build it, but it was never constructed. To test the viability of his ideas for self-sufficient working communities, Owen began experimenting with communal living in the
United States in 1825. Among the most famous efforts was the one set up at
New Harmony, Indiana. In January 1825 Owen used a portion of his funds to purchase an existing town of 180 buildings and several thousand acres of land along the Wabash River in
Indiana.
George Rapp's
Harmony Society, the religious group that owned the property and that had founded the communal village of Harmony (or Harmonie) on the site in 1814, decided in 1824 to relocate to
Pennsylvania. Owen renamed it New Harmony and made the village his preliminary model for a Utopian community. During Owen’s 1824 American tour, New York activist and columnists
Cornelius Blatchley shared with him Thomas Jefferson’s 1822 reply to Blatchley’s communitarian pamphlet, illustrating early transatlantic exchange between American and Owenite cooperative ideas. Owen sought support for his socialist vision among American thinkers, reformers, intellectuals and public statesmen. On 25 February and 7 March 1825, Owen gave addresses to the
House of Representatives in
Congress and to others in the US government, outlining his vision for the Utopian community at New Harmony, and his socialist beliefs. The audience for his ideas included three former
U.S. presidents –
John Adams,
Thomas Jefferson, and
James Madison – the outgoing US President
James Monroe, and the President-elect,
John Quincy Adams. His meetings were perhaps the first discussions of socialism in the Americas; they were certainly a big step towards discussion of it in the United States.
Owenism, among the first socialist ideologies active in the United States, can be seen as an instigator of the later socialist movement. Although Owen sought to build a "Village of Unity and Mutual Cooperation" south of the town, his grand plan was never fully realised and he returned to Britain to continue his work. During his long absences from New Harmony, Owen left the experiment under the day-to-day management of his sons, Robert Dale Owen and William Owen, and his business partner, Maclure. However, New Harmony proved to be an economic failure, lasting about two years, although it had attracted over a thousand residents by the end of its first year. The socialistic society was dissolved in 1827, but many of its scientists, educators, artists and other inhabitants, including Owen's four sons, Robert Dale, William, David Dale, and Richard Dale Owen, and his daughter Jane Dale Owen Fauntleroy, remained at New Harmony after the experiment ended. Owen's Utopian communities attracted a mix of people, many with the highest aims. They included vagrants, adventurers and other reform-minded enthusiasts. In the words of Owen's son David Dale Owen, they attracted "a heterogeneous collection of Radicals", "enthusiastic devotees to principle", and "honest
latitudinarians, and lazy theorists", with "a sprinkling of unprincipled sharpers thrown in".
Josiah Warren, a participant at New Harmony, asserted that it was doomed to failure for lack of
individual sovereignty and personal property. In describing the community, Warren explained: "We had a world in miniature – we had enacted the French revolution over again with despairing hearts instead of corpses as a result ... It appeared that it was nature's inherent law of diversity that had conquered us ... our 'united interests' were directly at war with the individualities of persons and circumstances and the instinct of self-preservation". Warren's observations on the reasons for the community's failure led to the development of
American individualist anarchism, of which he was its original theorist. Some historians have traced the demise of New Harmony to serial disagreements among its members. Social experiments also began in Scotland in 1825, when
Abram Combe, an Owenite, attempted a utopian experiment at
Orbiston, near Glasgow, but this failed after about two years. In the 1830s, additional experiments in socialistic co-operatives were made in
Ireland and Britain, the most important being at
Ralahine, established in 1831 in
County Clare, Ireland, and at
Tytherley, begun in 1839 in
Hampshire, England. The former proved a remarkable success for three-and-a-half years until the proprietor, having ruined himself by gambling, had to sell his interest. Tytherley, known as Harmony Hall or
Queenwood College, was designed by the architect Joseph Hansom. This also failed. Another social experiment,
Manea Colony in the
Isle of Ely, Cambridgeshire, launched in the late 1830s by William Hodson, likewise an Owenite, but it failed in a couple of years and Hodson emigrated to the United States. The Manea Colony site has been excavated by the Cambridge Archaeology Unit (CAU) based at the
University of Cambridge.
Return to Great Britain , 1845 Although Owen made further brief visits to the United States, London became his permanent home and the centre of his work in 1828. After extended friction with William Allen and some other business partners, Owen relinquished all connections with New Lanark. Having invested most of his fortune in the failed New Harmony communal experiment, Owen was no longer a wealthy capitalist. However, he remained the head of a vigorous propaganda effort to promote industrial equality, free education for children and adequate living conditions in factory towns, while delivering lectures in Europe and publishing a weekly newspaper to gain support for his ideas. a
time-based currency in which the exchange of goods was effected using labour notes; this system superseded the usual means of exchange and middlemen. The London exchange continued until 1833, with a Birmingham branch operating for just a few months until July 1833. Owen also became involved in trade unionism, briefly leading the
Grand National Consolidated Trade Union (GNCTU) before its collapse in 1834. Owen's
secular views also gained enough influence among the working classes to cause the
Westminster Review to comment in 1839 that his principles were the creed of many of them. Owen published his memoirs,
The Life of Robert Owen, in 1857, a year before his death. Although he had spent most of his life in England and Scotland, Owen returned to his native town of Newtown at the end of his life. He died there on 17 November 1858 and was buried there on 21 November. He died poor apart from an annual income drawn from a trust established by his sons in 1844. ==Philosophy and influence==