OWEN, ROBERT (1771-1858), British reformer and Socialist, was born at Newtown, Montgomeryshire, on May 14, 1771. His father had a small business in Newtown as saddler and ironmonger, and there young Owen received his school education, which terminated at the age of nine. After serving in a draper's shop for some years he settled in Manchester, where his success was rapid. When only 19 years of age he became manager of a cotton mill in which Soo people were employed, and by his ad ministrative intelligence and energy soon made it one of the best establishments of the kind in Great Britain. In this factory Owen used the first bags of American sea-island cotton ever imported into the country ; it was the first sea-island cotton from the Southern States. Owen also made improvements in the quality of the cotton spun; and indeed there is no reason to doubt that at this early age he was the first cotton-spinner in England, a posi tion entirely due to his own capacity and knowledge of the trade. On becoming manager and partner in the Chorlton Twist Corn pany at Manchester, Owen induced his partners to purchase the new Lanark mills, and of ter his marriage with Miss Dale, the daughter of the former proprietor, he settled there as manager and part-owner. Encouraged by his great success in Manchester, he had already formed the intention of conducting New Lanark on higher principles than the current commercial ones.
Connected with the mills were about 2,000 people, Soo of whom were children, brought, most of them, at the age of five or six from the poorhouses and charities of Edinburgh and Glasgow. The children especially had been well treated by Dale, but the general condition of the people was unsatisfactory. Crime and vice bred by demoralizing conditions were common ; education and sani tation were alike neglected ; and housing conditions were intol erable. It was this population which Owen set himself to elevate and ameliorate. He greatly improved their houses, and mainly by his personal influence trained them to habits of order, cleanliness and thrift. He opened a store, where the people could
buy goods of the soundest quality at little more than cost price; and the sale of drink was placed under the strictest supervision. His greatest success, however, was in the education of the young, to which he devoted special attention. The first infant school in Great Britain was started, or rather evolved, by James Buchanan, with Owen's approval and support, at the New Lanark mills, and though earlier experiments had been made abroad, the new cre ation probably owed nothing to them.
In all these plans Owen obtained success. Though at first regarded with suspicion as a stranger, he soon won the confidence of his people. The mills continued to be a commercial success, but some of Owen's schemes involved considerable expense, which was displeasing to his partners. Tired at last of the restrictions imposed on him by men who wished to conduct the business on the ordinary lines, Owen formed a new firm, who, content with 5% of return for their capital, were ready to give freer scope to his philanthropy (1813). In this firm Jeremy Bentham and the well-known Quaker, William Allen, were partners. In the same year Owen published A New View of Society, or Essays on the Principle of the Formation of the Human Character, in which he expounded the principles on which his system of educational philanthropy was based. From an early age he had lost all belief in the prevailing forms of religion, and had thought out a creed for himself, which he considered an entirely new and original dis covery. The chief points in this philosophy were that man's character is formed by circumstances over which he had no con trol and that he is not a proper subject either of praise or blame.
These convictions led Owen to the conclusion that the great secret in the right formation of man's character is to place him under the proper influences from his earliest years. The irre sponsibility of man and of the effect of early influences are the keynote of Owen's whole system of education and social ame lioration.